Robin Spence, Born 1938
architect
The architect Robin Spence (1938 - 2017) was the nephew of the architect Basil Spence. He was educated at Bedford School and briefly followed his father’s footsteps in the RAF before leaving for art college and then studying architecture at the University of Cambridge. After graduating he travelled in the USA, working for a while at Skidmore Owings and Merrill in Chicago. Then came fame, accompanied eventually by disappointment. In 1971, with Robin Webster, he entered and won the international architectural competition for the New Parliamentary Building in Westminster – as important a competition in its day as the roughly contemporaneous Pompidou Centre competition in Paris. Their design proposed a large covered public space in which debates could be relayed, with offices for MPs arranged in galleries around it, but although it passed two separate votes in the House of Commons, it was quietly dropped by the government in 1976. He continued to practise with Robin Webster, their projects including a housing scheme in Central Milton Keynes, Ross Hall Hospital in Glasgow, and a pair of steel-framed courtyard houses in Belsize Park Gardens. Robin Spence had a great zest for life, and was an accomplished tango dancer.
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