‘The brightest’ Yale classmate of Foster and Rogers; a modernist architect whose designs included Tate St Ives, teacher and active advocate for the profession
Eldred Evans was born in London, to artists Merlyn Evans and Phyllis Sullivan, but spent her childhood and much of her adolescence in South Africa, where the family emigrated in 1938.
She studied at the Architectural Association (AA) and joined the Yale Masters Class of 1961-62 – year of ‘the British invasion’. Among her contemporaries were Norman Foster and Richard and Su Rogers. The head of school was Paul Rudolph; other notable teachers were Serge Chermayeff, who offered an urbane counterpoint to the acerbic Rudolph, and Vincent Scully. Richard Rogers remembered Evans as a student of great maturity – ‘easily the brightest in the class’.
Always immaculately dressed, she had tremendous personal style. In her twenties she drove a vintage Rolls Royce, bought with competition prize money, which can be glimpsed in period photographs of Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building. She drew with great elegance and economy, always in ink, and later became an accomplished watercolourist.
In 1962, during her second term at Yale, she won the competition for Lincoln Civic Centre with her AA graduate thesis, which her tutor David Gray had encouraged her to submit. She returned to London and opened an office, initially with the architect Denis Gailey. Although the Lincoln scheme wasn’t built, it heralded the beginning of Evans’ independent practice.
Practice was combined with teaching at the AA and the Regent Street Polytechnic. Among her students at the polytechnic was Nick Mason, who announced one day that he was giving up architecture and taking his band Pink Floyd on tour, to which the response was, ‘You’re mad!’
In 1963, Evans was introduced to the Israeli architect, David Shalev (1934-2018), newly arrived in London, with whom she formed an immediate rapport. In 1964 they began working and then living together. Over six decades, Evans & Shalev entered 60 architecture and masterplanning competitions, winning 18 and gaining places in 20 more. Notable among their built works are Newport High School (1972), the Truro Courts of Justice (1988), Tate St Ives (1993), which they subsequently modified, and the Quincentenary Library (1995) and Student Residences (2000) for Jesus College, Cambridge.
Newport School was ahead of its time, more in tune conceptually with today’s academies than the template comprehensives of the period. Neglected by the local authority, it was needlessly demolished in 2008, despite a vigorous campaign by the Twentieth Century Society for its listing and adaptive reuse.
The rigorous brutalism of Newport and other early buildings shifted to a more sculptural language from the mid-1980s. Distinctive but elusive, this work is responsive to context but not quite vernacular, and ‘definitely not postmodern’ – Evans’ words. There are echoes of the Mediterranean modernism with which Shalev was familiar as a student in Haifa, though both architects insisted that they were doing what they always had – exploring structure, space and light to create appropriate form.
Throughout the 1980s, Evans was an RIBA external examiner in the UK, and until 1998 a member of the RIBA Visiting Board at various architectural schools. She was also a member of the RIBA Overseas Visiting Board and several RIBA committees, as well as the Arts Council Architectural Unit. She was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours, 1990, and is survived by her daughter, Elantha.
David Jenkins is an editor, publisher and founder of Circa Press