ABK’s brutalist-style Berkeley Library building, at Trinity College Dublin, which was ‘designed to stand its ground in the face of neoclassical neighbours’. Photograph: Peter Forsberg/Alamy View image in fullscreen ABK’s brutalist-style Berkeley Library building, at Trinity College Dublin, which was ‘designed to stand its ground in the face of neoclassical neighbours’. Photograph: Peter Forsberg/Alamy Architecture Obituary Peter Ahrends obituary Architect with Ahrends, Burton and Koralek whose scheme for a National Gallery extension was criticised as a ‘carbuncle’
Prefer the Guardian on Google Peter Ahrends, who has died aged 93, was a founding partner in 1961 in the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), alongside Richard Burton and Paul Koralek . The trio first met as students in 1951, while studying at the Architectural Association in London, and went on to practise together for more than 50 years, remaining lifelong friends.
ABK’s workload extended from Oxford colleges to public libraries, housing, shops and industrial structures. Unusually, all three partners were involved in design. “Architecture should not be a question of whether or not we put Corinthian capitals on our facades,” they asserted. “It is about people and their lives; about making spaces that will have a living, dynamic and significant relationship with the life and activity they will contain.”
Early impetus was provided by a commission for a Bond Street gallery for the art dealer John Kasmin, hailed by Forbes magazine as “London’s swingingest 60s art gallery”, and a competition win for the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin. Completed in 1967, it was described by one critic as “sitting like a mooring stone at the edge of Trinity’s green, its surfaces pale and pitted, its geometry lucid as a theorem”. Made of concrete and Wicklow granite, it was strikingly and starkly modern, designed to stand its ground in the face of neoclassical neighbours. In 2025 it was renamed the Eavan Boland Library after the acclaimed Irish poet.
View image in fullscreen Ahrends was a third-generation architect, after his father, Steffen, and grandfather Bruno. Other notable buildings for higher education included Chichester Theological College, a punchy brutalist composition in brick and concrete, followed by a business school at Oxford University (which became Templeton College), constructed in seven phases between 1967 and 1990. A serpentine addition to Keble College (1980), also at Oxford, was a deft modern riff on William Butterfield’s polychromatic Victorian original, but ABK’s inventiveness was not confined to academia. There was housing in Basildon, Essex; an arcadian factory for Cummins, the engines manufacturer, in Lanarkshire; and a stylish warehouse complex for Habitat featuring bright green walls (the colour of Terence Conran’s Porsche) and play structures designed by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi .
Operating at a fruitful tangent to mainstream modernism, ABK’s oeuvre could not be typecast by a particular style. Each building was seen as an individual narrative with different and often unpredictable contributions from the three partners, a dynamic described by Paul Finch in the Architects’ Journal in 2002 as “one getting ready to sound the drum”, while another “ponders on the nature of the drum” and the third “wonders whether actually a trumpet may be more appropriate”.
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