CBE, MA, FRIBA
Robert Hogg Matthew was born 12 December 1906, the eldest surviving son of John Fraser Matthew, architect, and his wife, Annie Broadfoot Hogg. His father was the first apprentice of Robert Lorimer and worked in partnership with him from 1927. Robert Hogg was educated at the Edinburgh Institution and studied at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) under John Begg from 1924. During his studies, he toured frequently in Scotland, England, and Italy and won the RIBA Pugin Travelling Scholarship in January of 1929. He obtained his diploma in 1930 and joined his father's firm of Lorimer & Matthew as an assistant in the summer of that year. Matthew was admitted ARIBA in June 1931, his proposers being Begg, Sydney Houghton Miller and Charles Denny Carus-Wilson.
On Christmas day in 1931 Matthew married Lorna Pilcher, to whom he had been engaged for some time. Earlier that year, he had been appointed a part-time instructor at ECA and returned to his studies for a further two years with a postgraduate fellowship at the College. During the early 1930s, while his Lorimer & Matthew and college work brought him little income, Robert’s career hopes were pinned mostly on post-graduate research, and having won the Soane Medal and Cates Prize in 1932, he plunged into a multi-faceted research programme orientated towards the Modernist reformist agenda of research-driven housing and planning.
Although he continued to assist his father on a part-time basis, Robert’s full-time role with Lorimer & Matthew ended in July of 1934 when he won the Andrew Grant Bequest Fellowship (ECA), which paid for a further two years of postgraduate research on housing and planning. During this time, Matthew undertook a Geddes-style survey and redevelopment proposal for the St Leonards area in Edinburgh, which secured him the RIBA Alfred Bossom Travelling Studentship in 1936. By this time, he had also already embarked on a series of entries for public architectural competitions – mostly for municipal headquarters complexes – though none of them had come to fruition.
In May of 1936, Matthew was appointed assistant architect in the Department of Health for Scotland. The Matthews’ first child, (Robert) Aidan Matthew, was born shortly thereafter in July, and their daughter, Janet Frances Catriona Matthew, was born two years later in March of 1939. As a DHS architect, Matthew worked on housing projects at first and then began expanding the work of the architectural staff in the areas of hospital design and town planning. In 1937 he was the organiser of the Town Planning Exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy, which he used to advocate the need for Geddes-influenced planning in Edinburgh, and in 1938 he was an official government adviser to the town planning exhibition in the Scottish Pavilion at Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition. Matthew had also entered various competitions with friend Alan Reiach, and in December of 1938, they finally won the Ilkeston Baths competition; however, their design was never executed due to the outbreak of war.
During the war, Matthew’s DHS workload changed dramatically, with his main work between 1939 and 1943 being the design of base and auxiliary hospitals throughout Scotland for the Emergency Hospitals Service. He was also involved in the inspection of housing schemes to be finished off and conversions of schools for ARP and shelter use. From 1943, Matthew became engaged full-time in town and regional planning, being responsible for building up a research-based planning organisation within DHS. In 1943 Matthew was appointed Deputy Chief Architect with sole responsibility for planning, and between 1943 and 1946 he worked on researching and writing the Clyde Plan as deputy to consultant Patrick Abercrombie.
By the end of 1944, Matthew had been appointed Chief Architect at DHS, but occupied the post only briefly, as he was appointed architect to London County Council in May 1946 (LCC biographical volumes give his appointment as starting September 1946) and moved to London in November. Matthew came to the Council's service at the beginning of a period of great development in both constructional and planning work and particularly in the expansion of the school building programme. Although his first task was to repair existing war-damaged schools, under his direction the value of new school schemes rose from £600,000 in 1947-48 to £3.5 million in 1952-53. The changing pattern of the Council's social services brought new responsibilities, such as the design of the first comprehensive health centre in the country at Woodberry Down and the construction of homes for old people and family groups of children in several locations.
Matthew also succeeded in recovering the responsibility for housing design for his department at LCC, and he oversaw projects including the layout of Lansbury in London’s bombed East End as an exhibition for the Festival of Britain. In 1950, the introduction on a large scale of the principle of mixed development meant that he had the further responsibility of laying out wide areas of new housing to fit within the Development Plan of 1951, including, for example, the pioneering point-programme at Roehampton.
However, the outstanding achievement of Matthew's service with the Council is demonstrated in the Royal Festival Hall. For Matthew, the Festival Hall was an opportunity to invent and express a Modern monumentality to celebrate the new social conditions of the postwar age. By incorporating a mixture of Modern design with a traditional grand building type, he ensured that it would be one of the few large Modern Movement buildings to escape the vilifications of the 1970s and 1980s.
During his time at the LCC, Matthew was accorded a number of honours. For his work on the Festival Hall and other work in connection with the Festival of Britain, he was awarded the CBE in 1952. He also gained RIBA Distinction in Town Planning in 1949 and was elected to the RIBA Council in 1950. In 1949, he was appointed to the Committee of the Anglo-American Council of Productivity and in July was sent on an eight-week tour to the USA to investigate why the American industry were able to build faster and more efficiently than the British.
By mid-1951, Matthew had secured himself an unchallengeable position as one of the chief inspirers and brokers of ‘Modern Public Architecture’ in Britain. However, he had never intended to stay away from Edinburgh permanently, and while in London, had maintained an active interest in architectural, town planning and conservation issues in Scotland. By mid-1952, aware of the increasingly waning prestige of public architecture and a shift in focus towards private practice, Matthew had decided to return to Edinburgh as Professor of Architecture and establish his own practice. This decision coincided with the birth of the Matthews' third child, Jessie Ann Matthew, in June of 1952.
When Matthew moved to Edinburgh in 1953, most of his time was initially absorbed by his two posts – Professor of Architecture at Edinburgh University and head of the School of Architecture at ECA. This double-post, however, soon proved impractical, and Matthew found that the ECA degree course needed to be reformed and modernised. His solution was to separate the Edinburgh and ECA posts in 1955 and to focus on establishing a new Department of Architecture at Edinburgh, complete with a new BArch and research March degrees, beginning in 1956. He was elected ARIAS in 1956. In an effort to kick-start his research programme, Matthew managed to attract a £60,000 funding package from the Nuffield Foundation, Carnegie and the Department of Scientific Industrial Research to finance a Housing Research Unit, which was set up in 1959. As the department expanded, Matthew’s prestige soon attracted a stream of international-calibre visiting lecturers, including Nervie, Kahn, Pevsner, McGrath, Max Fry and Mumford.
In his private practice, Matthew started slowly, with a series of competitions and small jobs, some of which were inherited from his father’s practice. His practice soon took off, however, mushrooming into a large and highly-successful firm. Shortly after being admitted FRIBA in 1955, Matthew took Stirrat Johnson-Marshall into partnership in 1956, forming Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall (RMJM), with one office in Edinburgh and another in London. Although Stirrat was responsible for the London office, Matthew initially maintained a high degree of involvement in both locations, frequently taking the sleeper train from Edinburgh to London. Both offices attracted a prestigious range of mostly large, publicly-funded projects, both in the UK and abroad. The firm would become Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall & Partners in 1961.
Matthew’s strong grounding in Edinburgh Arts and Crafts and Geddesian principles of conservative surgery had a strong influence on his early private practice work, with many of his designs exhibiting a vernacular-inspired Modernism rooted strongly in the use of ‘Scottish’ materials, most notably stone (e.g. Turnhouse Airport). However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as his practice began to deal increasingly with commissions for large public building complexes, Matthew’s crusade for Scottish Modernism was somewhat sidelined in favour of urban renewal and large-scale developments often incorporating multi-storey design solutions (e.g. New Zealand House, Gorbals/Hutchesontown Area B). However, irrespective of style, Matthew’s work was always imbued with a humanistic sense of social values and a commitment to architecture as a public service.
From the early 1960s, Matthew decisively entered a new phase of life, which coincided with the award of a knighthood on 13 February 1962. Largely casting off day-to-day involvement in RMJM work in the UK and the Edinburgh University department (retiring from the Forbes Professorship and departmental headship in the summer of 1968), Matthew threw himself into a new, intense concentration on architectural ‘diplomatic’ tasks, as well as some completely new challenges, such as a commission to mastermind the re-planning of the devolved state of Northern Ireland. In addition to serving as President of the RIBA (1962-64), Matthew assumed an increasingly global role as an architectural statesman, serving as President of the International Union of Architects (IUA) from 1961 to 1965 (UK representative on the Executive Committee from November 1953 and Vice-President from 1957) and President of the Commonwealth Association of Architects from 1965 and 1969. In these capacities, he travelled extensively and dealt with issues including the need to counteract cold-war tendencies within architecture and decolonisation. From the 1960s, Matthew’s RMJM workload also began to re-orientate itself overseas, with projects including a large-scale master-planning project in Islamabad; the development of a large suburban area of Tripoli in Libya; a commission to design Coleraine University in Northern Ireland; and a multifaceted educational building and planning programme in Nigeria.
The breakdown of faith in Modernist ‘progress’ and mass building required Matthew to adapt his ideology from the late 1960s, promoting a more human and participatory approach to architecture, and becoming increasingly committed to the emerging conservation movement and Scottish nationalism. Despite his sometimes contradictory architectural approaches, Matthew had always been a proponent of conservation, especially in Edinburgh, having been active in a range of heritage organisations, such as the Historic Building Council for Scotland, the Saltire Society and the Royal fine Art Commission for Scotland. He also helped to set up the Scottish Civic Trust in 1965-7 and served as special ‘consultant adviser’ to the Secretary of State on conservation policy matters between 1970 and 1973. Matthew’s conservation efforts culminated in a condition survey of the entire New Town and a conference at the Assembly Rooms in June 1970 which led to the creation of the Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee. During the years from the late 1960s, Matthew also became involved with numerous building and environmental conservation initiatives abroad.
Matthew was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1970. In the 1970s, he had very little involvement with the firm, but remained active, undertaking consultancy work, judging architectural competitions and continuing to travel. Matthew never retired. He became ill with cancer while on business in France in December 1974 and died on 21 June 1975, survived by his wife and children.