Spence, Michael Robin
1938 – 2017
A nephew of the architect of Coventry Cathedral, Sir Basil Spence HRSA, Michael Robin Spence studied for the degrees of MA and DipArch at Cambridge. He was elected ARIBA in 1969. He set up in business with Robin G M Webster OBE RSA (b.1939), also a Cambridge graduate, in Camden, London as Spence and Webster after the pair were placed first in the Westminster Parliamentary Offices Competition in 1972. This was a RIBA organized competition for designs for the proposed New Parliamentary Offices on the corner site of Victoria Embankment and Bridge Street. A raft of issues outwith their control saw the project cancelled in July 1975 [Webster in his obituary for Spence gives 1976]. The concept was revived in 1992 when Michael Hopkins and Partners were commissioned to design the present Portcullis House which finally opened in 2001. The partnership appeared to have been formed as a result of their success in the Westminster Competition and the pair continued to enter major competitions. These included those for the Northampton County Offices, the new Australian Parliamentary Building at Canberra, and the Paris Opera. By 1981 they had a branch office in Glasgow. In 1983-84 they added a ward block to Ross Hall Hospital on Crookston Road, Glasgow. The practice was also responsible for a housing scheme in central Milton Keynes, the psychology department at the University of Warwick, and for two steel-framed courtyard houses in Belsize Park Gardens, London, designed for their own use. These developed from Spence's earlier venture in this medium with Hunstanton House in the Norfolk village of Old Hunstanton, which he designed in 1971, and another in Cambridge. The common inspiration for these still radical builds can be traced to Spence's time after Cambridge when he worked in the USA for the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, where he was greatly influenced by the architect and designer Myron Goldsmith and the structural engineer Fazlur Khan. From 1992 Spence practised as Robin Spence Architects latterly from Shoreham-on-Sea where he had settled with his second wife. vide; http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/building_full.php?id=232569 vide; https://livesretold.co.uk/robin-spence vide; https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c65dd81af46834afd07e40a/t/60a52f2e37e8a82d340afca8/1621438261068/lives+retold+spence+robin.pdf vide; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/18/robin-spence-obituary
