Andy MacMillan, who has died aged 85, was half of one of the most remarkable and creative partnerships in modern British architecture. With his lifelong friend and colleague Isi Metzstein, in the 1950s he effectively took over from Jack Coia the Glasgow practice of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and began to produce a series of Roman Catholic churches which were strikingly innovative in both plan and form. In these buildings, and in their masterpiece, St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Metzstein and MacMillan gave a distinctive poetry to the European modernist tradition, combining admiration for the achievement of Le Corbusier with a wide and idiosyncratic knowledge of history.
They also worked outside Scotland, at the University of Hull, and Wadham College, Oxford, and were the architects of the new Robinson College, Cambridge, but their work was rooted in the shape and history of Glasgow. Gordon Benson, designer of the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, has written that "their best work, the most distinguished architecture in Scotland since Mackintosh, is measurable against anything produced in Europe in the same period".
Continue reading...