Sir Terry Farrell, one of the UK’s leading architects, has died at the age of 87.
Farrells, the architecture practice he founded, announced his death “with deep sadness”, saying: “Terry was frequently called a maverick, radical and a non-conformist which he relished.”
His typical building style was post-modernist, exuberant and playful, with his famous commissions including London’s MI6 building and the headquarters for ITV’s 1980s breakfast show TV-am, with giant breakfast eggcups perched on the roof.
Farrells added that the architect’s “enduring commitment to urbanism has helped shape government policy on key built environment issues”.
Sir Terry was born in 1938, and like many architects of his generation, he was blown away by the modernist buildings of America he encountered when he travelled to the US on a scholarship in the 1960s.
In 1965, he went into practice with Nicholas Grimshaw, who became another international architecture superstar, and who died earlier this month.
To begin with, the pair’s practice focused on sleek, stripped-down buildings with little or no ornament, in which a structure’s function was meant to dictate its form.
One of their first designs was an aluminium-clad block of flats in north London. Built for a housing association, it was known to taxi drivers as the sardine can, and both architects and their families took flats there.
But while Grimshaw remained true to the hi-tech minimalist creed, Farrell increasingly felt pulled in a different direction. In 1980 they parted and Farrell established his own practice.
His breakthrough came in 1982 with the headquarters for TV-am in a repurposed canalside warehouse in north London’s Camden.
It was colourful and over-the-top, full of witty references to the architecture of the past, like a pastiche of a Japanese temple, a Mesopotamian ziggurat (temple tower) and a massive cartoon cutout keystone, suspended in a skeletal arch of brightly coloured tubular steel over the entrance.
But what caught the popular imagination were the giant breakfast eggcups on the roof overlooking the canal.
Sir Terry later described the project as a “tremendous release”, and the Royal Academy called it a “pop building, through its sheer abundance of metaphor”.
Striking
But arguably his most famous building was the MI6 headquarters next to Vauxhall Bridge in London, which has featured in several James Bond films.
Completed in 1994, Farrell later claimed that when the building was being designed he was told only that it was for a government client.
He guessed (wrongly) that it might be for the Department of the Environment, which is why this towering edifice of mirrored green glass and Italian marble, part-1930s Art Deco factory, part-Aztec temple, has conical fir trees half way up the facade.
He gained a reputation for making big buildings fun, adding Lego-like decorative touches to developments like the Edinburgh International Conference Centre and Embankment Place above Charing Cross Station in London.
“The modernism that was around before the 1980s was very grey, restrictive, utilitarian and quite doctrinaire really,” Farrell said.
“For me personally the split from Grimshaw was an opportunity to completely start again. I saw it as a great release to establish a new identity any way I saw fit.”
He was also keen on innovation and environmental awareness, including the £4.6m Farrell Centre, which opened in Newcastle in 2023.
It held an exhibition showing how we might soon be able to grow buildings from fungus, and other innovative ways to reduce cities’ environmental impact.
Partly funded by Sir Terry, the exhibition showed four architecture studios offering visions for making buildings more sustainable.
They included a structure grown from mycelium, the root network of fungus.
Outside London, Sir Terry also built Hull’s striking aquarium, The Deep, jutting out over the Humber like a strangely angular boat; and the eclectic collection of buildings known as The Centre for Life in Newcastle.
He also developed a substantial practice overseas, especially in China, where he designed buildings that managed to be both gargantuan and frisky.
One of the earliest was the Peak Tower in Hong Kong in 1997, an upturned crescent perched atop four concrete legs (since glassed in to provide additional space). It’s reminiscent of a cooking wok or the upswept eaves of a Chinese temple.
His Beijing South and Guangzhou South railway stations are among the largest in the world, and the KK100 tower in Shenzhen was the tallest building designed by a British architect.
Not all of his work was quite so exuberant.
A new building in London for the Home Office was unusually restrained. He was also adept at marrying modern elements with historic buildings, as at London’s Royal Institution and Newcastle’s Great North Museum.
Much of his work referenced architectural styles of the past.
Although his own buildings sometimes faced a backlash from critics who thought post-modernism belonged firmly in the 1980s, he maintained that the modernists had been wrong to throw away the history books.
