Isi Metzstein 1928-2012

Widely considered one of Britain's most significant post-war architects, Isi Metzstein has left a remarkable built legacy, and was an important formal and informal teacher, mentor and critic to several generations of architects working in Scotland and further afield.

Isi Israel Metzstein and his twin sister, Jenny, were born in Berlin in 1928. Their parents, Efraim and Rachel Metzstein, Jews from Poland, had eloped Germany in the early 1920s. Efraim died in 1933, leaving Rachel to rais five children during the Nazi reign, in which anti-Semitism became enshrined in law, building up to the events of the Holocaust.

Isi made it to Britain as part of the Kindertranspor scheme, in which Jewish children were evacuated from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Initially he lived with a family in Hardgate, before being placed in a hostel with other refugee childre. Usully, by the end of the war, the Metzstein family was reunited, his mother and sibling having also reached safety.

In 1945, not long after leaving Hyndland School in Glasgow, Isi decided he wanted to become an architect, and managed to get apprenticed to Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner at Gillespie, Kidd & Coia (GCK). Isi would work there for the rest of his professional life. As part of his apprenticeship, he enrolled in architecture evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met Andy MacMillan, who would become his lifelong collaborator.

Isi secured Andy a job at GKC in 1954, and their breakthrough building came in 1957; St Paul's, Glenrothes, although modest in size, was a radical departure in ecclesiastical architecture, doing a way with all the usual trappings of neo-gothic church design. From this moment, the two architects, still in their twenties, assumed control of the firm's design output. A series of striking modernist churches followed, including St Brides, East Kilbride (1963) and St Patrick's, Kilsyth (1964).

Their masterwork of the period was undoubtedly St Peter's, Cardross (1966), a Catholic Seminary. It was a dramatic reinterpretation of a quasi-monastic building type, spatially brilliant and strongly spirituality.

Isi and Andy also built a series of important university buildings, including the Lawns Halls of Residence at Hull University (1968), the library and other additions to Wadham College, Oxford (1971-77), and Robinson College, Cambridge (1980).

The college was their last major work, and a culmination of Isi and Andy's architectural explorations. The building is a synthesis of a stunningly diverse range of inspirations, including the classic Oxbridge College, Glasgow and medieval urbanism, and modernist abstraction.

Throughout the 1970s and onwards, as commissions dwindled, teaching took up more and more of Isi's time. Having taught at the Glasgow School of Art from the late 1960s, he became Professor of Architecture at Edinburgh University in 1984. He also taught at the Architectural Association in London, and lectured throughout the UK.

Isi served on the Royal Fine Art Commission for Scotland, and was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Along with Andy he was awarded the Royal Scottish Academy Gold Medal for Architecture (1975) and the RIAS Life time Achievement Award (2008).

In 1967 he married Danielle Kahn, also an immigrant to Scotland of Central European Jewish extraction. He is Survived by Dany, his three children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his grandson, Eli. Isi was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1978 and became a Royal Scottish Academician in 1990.

RSA Obituary by Saul Metzstein, April 2012, transcribed from the RSA Annual Exhibition Catalogue