Robert Macleod

Revisionist biographer of Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Robert Kenneth Macleod, architect, historian and teacher: born Vancouver, British Columbia 5 April 1932; Assistant Director, Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies, York University 1967-69, Director 1969-74, Professor 1972-74; Head, School of Architecture, University of British Columbia 1974-79; Professor of Architecture, Bristol University 1979-82; Head, School of Architecture, Brighton Polytechnic (later Brighton University) 1984-91, Professor of Architecture 1984-95; married 1961 Marilyn Hughes (two daughters, one son); died Stanton Drew, Somerset 17 March 2003

Charles Rennie Mackintosh never crossed the Atlantic, but Canada looms unexpectedly large in the historiography of the famous Glasgow designer.

Thomas Howarth, who published his Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement in 1952, had been born in Lancashire but ended up in Toronto, surrounded by his lucrative collection of Mackintoshiana. And Robert Macleod, who published his revisionist biography of Mackintosh in 1968, exploding Howarth's thesis and putting the architect firmly and intelligently in context, was born in Vancouver but was – like his subject – of Highland descent. Perhaps that gave him sympathy as well as insight, for he presented Mackintosh as a brilliant, tragic human being rather than as a mythical misunderstood genius ahead of his time.

Macleod's biography, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which coincided with the centenary exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival and the V&A, emphasised that Mackintosh was not really a pioneer of modernism but rather an inspired and sensitive designer whose work was firmly rooted in contemporary developments in England. Perceptive and illuminating, and lucidly written, Macleod's book has hardly dated at all despite more recent research, yet his conclusion – that Mackintosh was "a last and remote efflorescence of a vital British tradition which reached back to Pugin. With his pursuit of the 'modern', his love of the old, and his obsessive individuality, he was one of the last and one of the greatest of the Victorians" – is not one which even today Glasgow wishes to hear.

Unfortunately, Bob Macleod had only one other book in him, but it is also a valuable one, which remains essential reading about Victorian and Edwardian architecture. Style and Society: architectural ideology in Britain, 1835-1914 was published in 1971.

Like Mackintosh and many of the great Victorians examined in the book, Macleod did not believe that architecture was an aesthetic activity that should be considered divorced from its social and political context. Unlike most British architectural historians, he was comfortable with theories and ideas – but, then, Macleod was an architect before he became an historian. That was certainly why he understood the physical reality of architecture and perhaps why he had such admiration for the hero of the book, the architect, writer and teacher W.R. Lethaby, who came to believe that the experience of the past could inform the search for a modern architecture through "rational building" rather than through an obsession with style.

Style and Society was based on the lectures Macleod gave at the Cambridge School of Architecture in the mid-1960s when he was working for Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis as job architect on the overweening Graduate Centre on the Cam. Those who heard him were deeply impressed, for Macleod not only pursued the unfashionable subject of Victorian architecture, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of its problems, but could speak without slides or notes, quoting long passages from relevant texts from memory.

This was an ability he attributed to his strict Presbyterian upbringing when he was made to learn long passages of scripture by heart. His Canadian parents were first-generation immigrants from the Isle of Lewis, which eventually became their son's spiritual home. When he first visited the island he found himself welcomed as "Bob Canada" and was thrilled when, much later, his elder daughter became regional archaeologist for the Western Isles and moved to the village from which his father had emigrated.

Macleod had trained at the University of British Columbia and then worked for John B. Parkin, architects, in Toronto. In 1961 he married Marilyn Hughes, to whom he paid the nice tribute in his Mackintosh book, "My wife has ensured that, if it is read, it has a better chance of being understood." The following year they set sail for Britain so that Bob could study architectural history and theory for a (never completed) PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art (his supervisor was John Summerson).

In 1966, he began teaching at Leeds Polytechnic; the following year he became Assistant Director of the (alas, now defunct) Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies at York University. In 1969 he succeeded Patrick Nuttgens as Director, and in 1972 was made professor at the age of 40. With his tolerance and historical sense, Macleod was very different from most committed modern architects of his time and generation, and it was under him that the Diploma in Conservation Studies was established at York.

Macleod was seduced back to his birthplace in 1974 to become head of his old school of architecture, but by then he and his wife had become too fond of England and they returned five years later when Macleod was given a personal chair at the school of architecture at Bristol University. In the event, this was not a happy appointment as the cuts in higher-education funding imposed by Margaret Thatcher's government soon led to the brutal closure of his department. Several years of unemployment followed before he secured his final academic position as head of the architecture school at Brighton Polytechnic (now University). Until he retired in 1995, his weekday residence was a sailing boat moored in Brighton Marina.

For all his belief in the importance of practical building, Macleod, like Lethaby, preferred teaching and writing to practice. He did, however, design two buildings, both for his family: a house in Vancouver when he ran the school there, and a house in the village of Ubley in Somerset ("Greycot") when he moved to Bristol. Macleod's son-in-law the architectural historian Frank Salmon has written that

he was a manly man, well-built and strong, who liked nothing better than to be putting up a wall or using the considerable carpentry skills he inherited from his father to make an A-frame cabin or simple fence with his shirt off.

He was also deeply serious, with a moral sense and strong Christian beliefs which informed his understanding of the social nature of architecture – which was why he had sympathy for Pugin as well as for Lethaby.

It is sad that he never wrote the book on Lethaby he was so well qualified to write, and very sad that, soon after his retirement, a series of strokes led to a slow and painful withdrawal from the world.

Gavin Stamp