LONDON — British architect Will Alsop, whose exuberant buildings enliven cities on both sides of the Atlantic, has died, his company said Sunday. He was 70.<\/p>\n
Marcos Rosello, a co-founder with Alsop of the London-based architecture practice aLL Design, said Alsop died Saturday after a short illness.<\/p>\n
Born in Northampton in central England in 1947, Alsop studied at the Architectural Association in London. He cited 20th-century modernists Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and 18th-century British neo-Classicist John Soane among his influences. But Alsop’s work had a playful style all its own.<\/p>\n
“Architects are the only profession that actually deal in joy and delight — all the others deal in doom and gloom,” Alsop told The Observer newspaper in 2007.<\/p>\n
Alsop’s buildings include the green, copper-clad Peckham Library in London, which won the Stirling Prize for architecture; London’s futuristic North Greenwich Underground station; and the Sharp Centre at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, a black-and-white box poised rakishly on multicolored stilts.<\/p>\n
Alsop also completed several residential projects, other transit stations and a striking government building in Marseille, France that is nicknamed the Big Blue.<\/p>\n
The finances of his various practices were sometimes precarious, and many of Alsop’s more ambitious schemes were never realized — including plans to transform post-industrial Barnsley in northern England into a modernist version of a Tuscan hill town.<\/p>\n
Detractors likened The Public, an Alsop-designed arts centre in the central England town of West Bromwich, to a big black cow. It came to be seen as an expensive white elephant and closed after five years in 2013, to be converted into a college.<\/p>\n
His practice, aLL Design, has offices in London; Doha, Qatar; and Chongqing, China, where Alsop had several ambitious projects in the works.<\/p>\n
Rosello said Alsop’s design ethos was “essentially to ‘make life better.”‘<\/p>\n
“It is a comfort to know that due to the nature of Will’s work and character, he will continue to inspire and bring great joy,” he said.<\/p>\n
Alsop is survived by his wife Sheila, a daughter and two sons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON — British architect Will Alsop, whose exuberant buildings enliven cities on both sides of the Atlantic, has died, his company said Sunday. He was 70. Marcos Rosello, a co-founder with Alsop of the London-based architecture practice aLL Design, said Alsop died Saturday after a short illness. Born in Northampton in central England in 1947, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9250"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9252,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9250\/revisions\/9252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}