Peter Buchanan, who has died aged 80, was an architect, critic, essayist and teacher. The touring exhibition Ten Shades of Green: Architecture and the Natural World that he curated in 2000 for the Architectural League of New York, and the book of the same name that followed, had a critical impact on thinking behind the design of contemporary sustainable buildings.
“The League’s goal with Ten Shades was straightforward,” Rosalie Genevro, its former executive director, wrote in her preface to the exhibition catalogue: “To show examples of work that combined environmental responsibility with formal ambition. Peter Buchanan accomplished that goal, beautifully. He also created something larger: a context for understanding those projects, and for evaluating all works of architecture and land planning, that embraces a range of concerns from technical efficiency to communal wellbeing to emotional resonance.”
Ten Shades of Green struck a chord with American architects and a wider public. Between 2000 and 2004 the exhibition toured galleries and museums across the US, with those who had seen it in New York asking if they could display it in their own cities and institutions.
For Buchanan, architecture was an “artificial interface with nature” and it was with this thought in mind that he explored the positives and negatives, and hopes for the future, of a discipline he believed needed a major rethink. Going for green, though, as he made clear in lectures, was not a race to join some hairshirt architectural world. Among the architects he championed in Ten Shades of Green were Norman Foster and Renzo Piano, responsible for some of the most technically sophisticated buildings of the past half-century.
What interested Buchanan was the way in which buildings such as Foster’s Commerzbank (1997), a silver machine skyscraper in Frankfurt, and Piano’s Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre (1998), in Nouméa, New Caledonia, influenced by indigenous Kanak design, make optimum use of natural ventilation and cooling, and of how such very different buildings in very different settings share the same concern for working with the ebb and flow of the natural world.
At the heart of Buchanan’s thinking – on intricate display in a series of essays, The Big Rethink, that he wrote for the Architectural Review (2011-12) – was his care for nature. True to the principles he taught, he touched the Earth remarkably lightly, save perhaps for the collection of about 40,000 books crammed into his studio flat in Hampstead, north London. The books form the core of the library of the London School of Architecture (LSA), founded in 2015 by Will Hunter, the former deputy editor of the Architectural Review.
For students, Buchanan was a benevolent and generous fount of knowledge, a tutor who could happily explain quantum mechanics and esoteric philosophies, and the latest and most abstruse architectural and environmental thought. But he could be a fierce critic, impatient especially with slow or obtuse professional minds. Those closer to him fared better. “I can’t remember the exact first contact,” Hunter said; he had invited Buchanan to be a member of the LSA’s teaching faculty in 2012, in the run-up to the school’s opening. “I think it was after I had written something, and he got in touch to let me know it wasn’t truly dismal – high praise indeed.”
Born in Zomba, Nyasaland (Malawi since 1964), Peter was the eldest of the three children of Laurence Buchanan, a colonial service educationist and school inspector, and Barbara (nee Prodgers), who ran the family home set high on the Zomba Plateau in the Shire Highlands. Peter formed a deep affection for this stunning landscape of lakes, ferns, pines and waterfalls, of eagles, baboons, lizards, giant butterflies – Buchanan Sr was a keen lepidopterist – and Nile crocodiles lurking in the Shire River.
He attended the local school before boarding at the Eagle prep school in the Bvumba mountains near Umtali (Mutare), in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and then Falcon college, Bulawayo, in southern Matabeleland. Both schools offered what Buchanan’s sister Yvonne described as “terrific freedom”. After studying science at university in Johannesburg, Buchanan taught the subject for a year before turning to architecture.
Graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1968, he worked for two distinguished South African architects, Gabriel “Gawie” Fagan and Revel Fox. Fagan was a pioneering “green” designer of new, environmentally aware houses and a restorer of old Cape Dutch buildings. Fox was a glamorous, subtle modernist.
After spells as an architect and urban planner in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, in 1979 Buchanan moved to London and joined the Architectural Press in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, where he became deputy editor of the Architectural Review. It was there that he honed his writing skills.
Leaving in 1992 to pursue a freelance life, he worked closely with Piano over several years, curating a travelling exhibition, and writing and editing the five-volume Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works (1993-2008).
Lung cancer blighted Buchanan’s last months. His friend Emilio Ambasz, the Argentinian-US architect and industrial designer, wrote him a note: “As you may recall, Le Corbusier used to say that Death is the horizontal of the Vertical. I see it more as the Horizon, always in front of us and increasingly elusive as an unwanted destination, until the moment when, without realising it, we get confused with it.”
Buchanan is survived by Yvonne and two nieces, Catherine and Robyn.
• Peter Laurence Alexander Cockburn Buchanan, architect, writer and educator, born 16 October 1942; died 23 August 2023
