Barrie Dewhurst Studied 1955-1956

Born in 1929 and educated at Plymouth Art School, Barrie Dewhurst was a Leverhume Scholar at the Architectural Association (AA) from 1951 to 1956. As part of his final year’s studies in 1955-56, he joined the AA Department of Tropical Architecture, graduating with an AA Diploma with Honours, an AA Silver Medal and an Honorary degree from the Société des Architectes Diplômés par le Gouvernement (SADG). His final thesis was a design for Luxor Museum, the drawings for which survive intact within The Blower Foundation’s archive.  He is noted in the AA Diploma Roll Book as having moved to Zambia in 1956-57, gaining experience with Clifford Duke and Partners at Lusaka, where he appears to have worked on the New Post Office, before moving to the US to complete an MA at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1959. The same year, he was placed first in the Sunday Times competition for an extension (unbuilt) to the National Gallery, London, winning £2500 in prize money. Around the same time, Dewhurst joined the Rome office of The Architects Collaborative (TAC), under founding partner Robert S. McMillan, where he worked on designs for the Federal Houses of Parliament, in Lagos and for a Teachers’ Training College in Kano, Northern Nigeria (c1962). New universities formed a significant part of McMillan’s portfolio and Dewhurst was involved in the drawing up of the master plans (and individual buildings) for the University of Baghdad campus (c1961), the University of Lagos, Pahlavi University (now Shiraz University), Iran, and a mosque for the University of East Africa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Other projects Dewhurst was to work on for McMillan (going under the various names of ‘McMillan, Griffis, Mileto’ and ‘Interplan’) were office buildings for the Jubilee Insurance Company, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the Industrial Promotion Services Office building, in Nairobi, Kenya(c1967). He also appears to have been responsible for a number of hotels including the Intercontinental Hotel, Tehran, Iran and the Hyatt Hotel, in Ocho Rios, Jamaica (1974). In November 1966 Dewhurst had left McMillan and was appointed as the inaugural Project Director of the Ian Buchan Fell Housing Research Centre, at the University of Sydney – a two-year appointment. In August the following year however, Dewhurst was badly injured in a car crash in Italy and resigned his post. By 1974 he was back in the UK and designing office buildings and factories for the British Sugar Corporation. He was also to establish a private practice in Farnham, Surrey.

 Sources

• Architectural Association Student Register 1945-1972, AA Archives
• Architectural Association Diploma Roll Book, 1924-1963, AA Archives
• Department of Tropical Architecture, student listing, Otto Koenigsberger Collection, Box OK27, AA Archives
• Architectural Association Members List, 1961, 1974
• ‘International Educational, Cultural and Related Activities for African Countries South of the Sahara’ United States. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. 1961, p271.
• U.S. Firm ‘U.S. Firm Radiates from Rome’. Progressive Architecture, October, 1964, pp239-242
• ‘Ian Buchan Fell Housing Research Centre’ University of Sydney. https://archives-search.sydney.edu.au/nodes/view/23206   retrieved 13/11/24