Jeremy Melvin has died, aged 62. He was a former Director of the Architecture Foundation, where a legacy of nine exhibitions defined his brief six-month tenure.
Jeremy, his younger brother, and his late mother and father all studied and practised architecture. Indeed, only his sister, an artist, escaped the profession. Jeremy graduated from the Bartlett with a Masters in Architectural History. As a student, he had already decided that his talents lay in architectural history. Importantly, however, for his first degree, despite an invitation from his mentor, Professor David Dunster, to pursue an alternative ‘academic’ route, he committed himself to making architectural projects. In this way, he believed he could understand, if not always sympathise with, the challenges of practice.
While these early experiences shaped Jeremy’s reflections, they neither blurred his judgement nor blunted his critical insight. Jeremy was steeped not only in architecture but was also one of the few critics able to contextualise a project philosophically, politically and socially. He wrote the first book on F. R. S. Yorke with my father, David Allford, and after my father’s death, we spent a happy few months debating its final content.
Jeremy went on to hold several key roles as a teacher, writer and programme adviser to the Royal Academy, where he also co-curated the Richard Rogers exhibition. He published several other books and, working alongside his good friend and long-term collaborator Paul Finch, made a significant contribution to the development of the World Architecture Festival’s programme.
Jeremy was also a committed client of architecture. Before moving to Highpoint One, he became AHMM’s first client, commissioning us to refurbish his flat in Waterloo. A quarter of the modest budget was spent on a desk, the design of which reflected one characteristic of the man: the cloistered academic, labouring away while looking across the rooftops of south London. This was why Jeremy particularly enjoyed the project’s reference to Antonello da Messina’s painting St Jerome in His Study.
Jeremy was a one-off: a sybarite, an expert on the European aristocracy and an irascible architectural intellectual who always swam against the tide, often in a wake of his own making.
He will be sorely missed by his many friends and by the architectural community more widely. Our sympathies are with his wife, Lisa, and their twins, Naomi and Tomas.
Simon Allford is a founding partner of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and a former chair of the Architecture Foundation.