Richard Gibson and I turn up unannounced at a primary school in Hamnavoe, Shetland – a light, airy, steel-framed structure of repeating shallow-pitched roofs designed by him more than 40 years ago. We are enthusiastically welcomed by the headteacher, Helen Robertson, who is delighted by the generous, sociable area he formed between the classrooms. Each also opens on to a semicircular external enclosure which, along with a series of little porches, provides shelter from the north Atlantic weather. It is the creation of an architect for whom his profession “is not about designing icons but making a framework for people to live their lives”.
Gibson, now aged 89, has for decades kept the ideals of public architecture alive. In the 1960s he worked for the London Borough of Camden, then a leader in the design of social housing, feeling like others of his generation that such work was the best possible use of his skills. When that idea fell away elsewhere, discouraged by Margaret Thatcher’s suppression of council-built homes, he kept at it.
In the northernmost British Isles he created thoughtful, well-made places for people to live. His projects respond to Shetland’s windy climate and steep landscapes, and to its hardy, constructive, communal spirit. Some form sheltered enclaves with sturdy masonry, others are timber structures that light up the landscape with their strong colours. Now, when the need for genuinely affordable homes is pressing, and the quality of their design is a crucial question, Gibson shows how it can be done.
His early life was steeped in the aspirations of the modern movement in architecture. He was inspired as a teenager by the hope and bravura of the 1951 Festival of Britain, for which his father, Alexander, designed the Regatta restaurant. He studied at the Architectural Association in the same year as the charismatic Richard Rogers. “We clubbed together to help Richard with his drawings,” recalls Gibson. “He was always a rotten draughtsman.”
In 1959 he married Victoria, designer and daughter of the artist Peggy Angus and of JM Richards, who for 34 years edited the Architectural Review. Gibson designed a house for himself and his family in Murray Mews, Camden, one of several in an area that was then a hotbed of young architects creating domestic-scaled demonstrations of their ideas, including Team 4 and Georgie Wolton. Ted Cullinan, a pioneer of sustainable modern architecture, built his home in nearby Camden Mews with his own labour. “I was inspired by seeing him working in the mud,” says Gibson, who has since done a spot of hands-on construction himself.
Gibson joined the newly formed London borough of Camden at a time when it was starting a programme of council housing that is now celebrated for the way that fine young architects were trusted to apply their best ideas and skills to the design of places to live. He encouraged Neave Brown, who had studied with him at the Architectural Association and would become the best known of the Camden architects, to join him there.
For Gibson, though, the Camden housing department wasn’t quite the creative idyll it is sometimes made out to be. He found the office politics difficult, especially when working with another borough, Haringey, on the design of a project called Highgate New Town. One year, driving back from a family holiday on the beautiful Hebridean island of Barra, “we asked ourselves: ‘Why on earth are we doing this?’” In 1969, a colleague placed a job advert on Richard’s desk, for a deputy county architect in Shetland. After a hiatus in which the council tried to hire someone else, the Gibsons packed themselves and their belongings into a van and headed north. They have stayed there ever since.
Gibson worked for three years for the council before setting up his own practice, sustained in its unprofitable early years by income from Victoria’s successful knitwear business, with the couple and their six children living in a two-bedroom flat in Shetland’s main town, Lerwick. In due course the work came, and from then until his retirement in 2016 he designed projects that helped shape the modern identity of the islands – schools, museums, civic pavilions – as well as homes and conversions for private clients. His practice continues, under the name of née gibson, and is now run by his former co-director, Adrian Wishart.
Above all, Gibson designed housing, much of it commissioned in a long relationship with the Hjaltland Housing Association, meeting needs generated by the influx of labour driven by North Sea oil. As Neave Brown did in Camden, Gibson turned against the modernist idea of housing people in large estates of tower blocks, in favour of high-density but low-rise developments. “The relationship between a family and public space,” such things as the view from a kitchen into a street outside, is, says Gibson, a vital part of designing housing.
Projects such as John Jamieson Closs, completed in 1984, a compressed and varied composition of courts and lanes, of projections and recessions and angles and curves, put his thinking into practice. It grows out of a network of narrow lanes that rises steeply from Lerwick waterfront. Here and in many of his other works, he takes pleasure in the changes of level that come with almost every site on the hilly islands, shaping them into intimate and protected shared spaces, sometimes with the help of handsome rough stone walls.
Most of Gibson’s earlier Shetland projects are made with concrete blocks covered with the gritty grey/beige and sometimes dour render known as harling. Eventually, he persuaded his clients to try something else, as the island’s beaches were being “denuded” of pebbles to help make these materials. Instead, he designed timber-framed and timber-clad projects such as the Gremista development of 48 homes, finished in 1999, each house painted with one colour from a russet-red-mulberry-blackcurrant palette. Grödians, a housing development completed by Gibson and his practice in 2011, adds sky blue to the range. It’s a simple enough device, but it brings a charge of painterly energy to a land where the buildings, sea and sky are mostly grey and the hills mostly green.
Gibson’s projects are not exactly like anything Shetland has seen before, but they belong to their place. He comes from a generation of modernists whose excitement about the new is tempered by respect for the past: his portfolio includes restorations of historic buildings, and he fought to preserve and convert painted waterfront sheds that are the most obvious inspirations for his colourful housing. His buildings learn from the forms of the already-there, without copying them. They capture a quality of most Shetland building, which is one of modest resilience next to powerful natural forces.
His designs care about the ways that buildings are constructed, which could be considered both a modernist and a traditional virtue, which is helped by a love of making. Gibson and his family have an off-grid holiday home, Clubbs, built by them over decades out of the wreck of an old cottage. He and Victoria now live in a high waterside house in Lerwick, its interior remade within an 18th-century stone shell. From the ceiling of its workshop hangs a nearly complete boat, built by Gibson for fun.
So the spirit of 1960s Camden lives on in the far north, and if the hundreds of thousands of new homes promised by Angela Rayner are as humane and considered as Gibson’s, we will collectively be doing very well indeed. His designs also, in their sane combinations of new and old, offer a way out of the tedious antagonism that has arisen between “trads” – people who want to build in historic styles – and everyone else. If new housing gets the essentials right, it doesn’t matter much what the style is.
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