My father, Peter Thomson, who has died aged 88, was an architect with an eye for big ideas and beauty.
In the 1970s he formed Peter Thomson Associates, working on a substantial programme of residential projects in France that were based around factory-finished terrace houses built in the UK.
He then operated as a consultant architect between 1980 and 1987 for the Halpern Partnership, for whom he became involved in a number of schemes in New York, notably a 35-storey Lexington Avenue skyscraper on which he managed to get one straight line going from the ground floor to the very top of the building.
After finishing with Halpern, in the 90s he worked independently on various projects in London, including on parts of the redevelopment around St Paul’s, King’s Cross and Spitalfields.
Born in Hampstead, north London, he was the son of George, a Scottish journalist and author, and his wife, Else (nee Elefsen), who was Norwegian. He went to Charterhouse school in Surrey and then straight into training at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, qualifying in 1958.
With a Saint-Gobain architectural scholarship he was able to move to Paris to take up a post with a French-American firm alongside fellow architect Tony Herry. Together they designed a folding roof system that could be applied to the top of any building, and it was sold to a British timber engineering company.
In Paris he also met Marine Corre, an ambassador’s daughter, and whisked her away on his Lambretta. They married and moved to London in 1961.
There Peter was employed on the Hammersmith tube station site in west London for the architectural firm Covell Matthews, later teaming up again with Herry to design a house in Pakistan for the country’s president, Muhammad Ayub Khan.
Like most architects, the story of Peter’s career was not just about the ideas that got built, but about the ones that got away. A 1967 scheme for an 800-bedroom hotel on the site of the Gare D’Orsay railway station in Paris was given approval by SNCF but shelved at the last minute when the Ministry of Cultural Affairs deemed it a listed building.
In 1968 Peter focused on finding solutions to the overcrowding of British prisons through the Urban Prison Rebuilding project, and came up with a series of interlinked, inverted pyramids that would create more space. But the idea, he said, was “killed by the Home Office”.
Peter enjoyed all aspects of being an architect. Many of his anecdotes involved his experiences away from the site or the drawing board, including lavish dinners with clients or simple meals with builders in working men’s cafes. As a bon vivant, these were as important to Peter as the projects themselves.
His marriage to Marine ended in divorce in the early 80s. He is survived by their children, Alexis and me, and grandchildren, Nina, Beth, Tor and Alice.
