Mary Medd

Hertfordshire schools architect

Mary Crowley, architect: born Bradford, Yorkshire 4 August 1907; married 1949 David Medd; died Knebworth, Hertfordshire 6 June 2005.

The architect Mary Medd was a pivotal member of a team of architects and educators brought together by the inspirational Stirrat Johnson-Marshall at the end of the Second World War to ease the acute shortage of schools in Hertfordshire.

As a baby boom loomed in the county's overspill estates and New Towns, a programme of prefabricated schools was rapidly engineered that were light, bright and, for the first time, centred on the needs of the small child. In a period of austerity, this enthusiastic team offered a new architecture that rethought everything - from classroom plans to sinks and coat-pegs - through from first principles. Prefabrication was widely seen as a solution to shortages of building materials and labour, but it was only in the Hertfordshire schools that its benefits were realised.

Mary Crowley, as she then was, joined the team from Hertfordshire Education Department, having built a string of kitchens to supply school meals during the war. She was always happiest working in close collaboration with educationists; she would spend many hours with teachers, watching them work and helping them clarify their thoughts on how buildings could be designed to help them.

Education was in her background. Her father, Dr Ralph Crowley, was Medical Superintendent in Bradford (where Mary was born in 1907) before joining the Board of Education and moving his family south to Welwyn Garden City. Hers was a liberal, Quaker upbringing in what was in the 1920s a young, idealistic community.

From 1927 to 1932 Crowley studied at the Architectural Association, and secured travel scholarships to Scandinavia, Italy and Germany. The fruit of the first of these, which instilled an abiding love of Danish design, can be seen in a remarkable trio of houses she built at Tewin, outside Welwyn, for members of her family in 1936. They are among the first modern houses in England to reject the purist's flat roofs and exposed brick in favour of monopitched roofs and brick - a more rational, Scandinavian response to the exigencies of northern weather.

She went on to work with Ernö Goldfinger on a prefabricated timber nursery for the manufacturers Boulton and Paul, in 1937, which never went into production. She also assisted the housing reformer Elizabeth Denby and her architect collaborator E. Maxwell Fry, and John Brandon-Jones.

Mary's husband David Medd remembers first meeting her when she was working for Goldfinger. But it was only when he too joined Hertfordshire County Council's burgeoning Architect's Department early in 1946 that romance blossomed. They married in 1949, by which time they had designed a string of primary schools, launching the Hertfordshire programme in 1947 at Cheshunt - she designed the infants' school, he the juniors' with Bruce Martin - and had followed Johnson-Marshall to the Ministry of Education.

There, Mary and David Medd formed the core of a Research and Development team that worked with county councils designing prototypes that fulfilled new needs in education: a secondary modern school at Wokingham that emphasised crafts and horticultural work; a junior school at Amersham that refined the benefits of the new architecture, but in traditional brick; and, in 1967-69, the very first purpose-built middle school for nine- to 14-year-olds, in Bradford. If these buildings are now taken for granted, it is because they spawned copies by local authorities all over Britain. Cheshunt and Wokingham are now listed buildings.

Above all, perhaps, Mary Medd's quiet, careful analysis and modesty could be seen in the little rural school at Finmere, Oxfordshire, built in 1959-60 for just £10,000. Working with Edith Moorhouse, the county's Assistant Education Officer for primary education, and the Headmistress, Olive Bates, Medd created a sequence of spaces that could be divided by sliding partitions and which included a library, workshop and rest area. Here was begun the idea of breaking down the classroom into smaller units where children could work on group projects according to age, ability and interest. It informed a fundamental change in educational thinking that lasted some 20 years.

Medd retired from the Ministry of Education in the 1960s. She worked abroad extensively after that, advising on school design in Columbia, Pakistan, Venezuela, Botswana, El Salvador and Ethiopia, furnishing many of the schools from English sources.

Elain Harwood