By the time the Nigerian office was closed, ACP had moved into the design of university buildings. The company was recommended as an architect for the University of Bristol, and Grice took over the management of the commission. The results included student residences at Goldney House, built in 1967 (and later renovated by Alec Français and Partners). The plan was based on facilities shared by groups of six students to avoid alienation through long corridors. He also helped build the Brigade of Guards depot at Pirbright, Surrey, and move the Royal Corps of Signals to Blandford camp, Dorset, where he had begun his career in the war army. He liked to swing a pickaxe against the cabin where he had lived. Due to state patronage in the 1950s, many AKP partners demonstrated their faith by building small Swedish-style brick houses on the infill sites of Hampstead or Highgate. Powers, a veteran of North London, was no exception. In 1949, he married Frances, the daughter-in-law of Sir Adrian Boult. Ten years later they moved with their children to a new house behind a wall on East Heath Road in Hampstead and then retired to a smaller modern house behind Grove Terrace on Highgate Road.

One of those periodic storms rustling the heights of north London, the battle for the defiant Spaniards Inn toll near Kenwood, drew Powers into the work of the Conservation Committee. Later, after his retirement, to his own surprise, he became chairman of the Victorian Society`s Subcommittee on Buildings. It was the time of the fiercest reaction against modernism, and he presided with courtesy and frequent confusion about so many violent diatribes against the entire race of modern architects. In the 1970s, economic gloom prompted many British practices to look for work in the Middle East. A slaughterhouse project in Khartoum was followed by proposals for hospitals for Saudi Arabia and, in 1975, a commission for a 1,250-bed hospital in Baghdad and a medical school. Neither was built, although the research and negotiations produced their own mind-boggling incidents, including an overland trip from Jordan when the airport was closed due to the war, and a special trip to collect £197,000 in fees, without which ACP would have collapsed. Grice appreciated the friends he had made in Iraq and worried about the impact of subsequent events there on them. Even more strikingly, he took over St. Paul`s Cathedral Choir School after the death of Leo de Syllas in 1964, and in addition to the St.

John`s Hive, Powers worked on the Wolfson Building at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Corpus Christi, Oxford. (This had little to do with ACP`s largest educational project, the impressive University of Essex.) was founded in 1939, the main partners were Kenneth Capon (1915-88), Anthony Cox (1915-93) and Michael Powers (1915-94). In the summer of 1939, a group of graduates of the Architectural Association founded a new type of practice in which hierarchy would be abolished and all members would be equal. The architectural cooperative was also engaged in the social program and aesthetic renewal of modern architecture. Do you want to bookmark your favorite articles and stories to read or link to later? Start your Independent Premium membership today. In his later years, deteriorating eyesight limited his activities, but he had a rich life that included travel, grandchildren and care for his housing estate in Highgate, north London. Survived by Sarah, his daughter Caroline and their son Timothy. Michael Anthony Robelou Powers, architect: born May 19, 1915 in New York; ∞ Frances Wilson (two sons; one daughter); d.

24 Aug. 1994 in London. Grice`s social life in Nigeria included membership in the Lagos Race Club, a yacht club. ACP owned a Hornet, a particularly unstable class of dinghies, which Grice held the capsizing record. In 1954, work in Britain became scarce, and Grice and his partner Leo de Syllas looked abroad and decided that Nigeria seemed to be the most promising country to develop. The ACP office in Lagos lasted 10 years, and Grice`s work there involved long absences of his wife and family in London. His open personality, sense of humor and lack of self-confidence made him popular with locals, and several Nigerian assistants came to work in the London office. Michael Grice, architect, born February 18, 1917; Died December 20, 2008 Powers` U.S.

citizenship accident prevented him from conscription and led to the valuable but bizarre and challenging work that allowed AKP partners to come together after the war. It was the huge Brynmawr rubber factory in South Wales. Thanks to Jordan, Powers and another colleague, Peter Cocke, found a battle slot at Enfield Cables, where he met Lord Forrester of Corstorphine, the company`s out-of-world president. Forrester had withstood the war well and planned to invest his considerable profits in a gesture to help the post-war Welsh valleys. The factory was imposing and elegant, with nine raw concrete domes above the main production area. .