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Eden Tatton Brown F/Mc Married: 1904 Pauline Stewart-Jones F/Mc | ||||||||
| William Eden Tatton Brown [CFT #3618] Born: 1910-Oct-13 Died: 1997 |
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| b Lewes, Sussex OBITUARY Daily Telegraph 26th February 1997 William Tatton Brown, the architect who has died aged 86, was influential both as an early proponent of Modernism and as a leading figure in the welfare state architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. A warm-hearted and eccentric man, Tatton Brown was from 1948 to 1959 Deputy County Architect for Hertfordshire county council. It was a time of extraordinary building activity, and Tatton Brown had responsibility for schools. He moved with his family to Hertfordshire, where he tried his hand at farming, with more enthusiasm than ability. His somewhat impractical mind once led to the minor injury of one of their pigs: with great care, he sewed up the wound with matching pink thread and brought it indoors to nurse it back to health. As the first Chief Architect to the Ministry of Health and its successor, the Department of Health and Social Security, from 1959 to 1971 Tatton Brown was in charge of the design of all large-scale hospitals. With more than 120 architects working under him, he never lost sight of the social issues which informed his architecture. He initiated research into hospital design that reduced construction costs, sometimes by up to a half, while maintaining standards. Tatton Brown later felt that architects had been mistaken in their promotion of small 4-6 bed hospital wards: during a stay in a long, communal Nightingale ward in St Thomas' hospital, he discovered several advantages in the traditional layout, which he pointed out on a BBC programme. His views, though corroborated by research by the Medical Architectural Research Unit, were largely ignored, and hospitals continued to be designed with small wards. William Eden Tatton Brown was born on Oct 13th 1910, at Lewes, Sussex, the son of the head of the Egyptian Customs Services. He was educated at Wellington and King's College, Cambridge. He enjoyed his university days enormously; after one rowing dinner he and one of his many friends climbed into the huge iron cup of the statuary vase outside Senate House by the east end of King's Chapel, popping up to say"boo" to passers-by. After graduating, Tatton Brown worked in Paris with the Modernist Andre Lurcat, whose Marxism he embraced, despite his fundamental patriotism and sense of duty and tradition. After completing his stidies at the Architectural Association, Tatton Brown found work as chief design assitant at Tecton, the architectural practice founded by the Russian emigre Berthold Lubetkin, where he met his future wife, Aileen Sparrow. Among his roles at Tecton was that of job architect for the innovative Highpoint flats in Highgate. In 1938 he set up practice with Lionel Brett, later Lord Esher, maintaining an active role in the Modernist movement with the Congres International d'Architecture Moderne and the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group. During the Second World War, Tatton Brown served as a sapper in India and Burma, and on demobilisation was sponsored by the Army to join a town planning course at the Architectural Association. This led to a post as a regional planning officer at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, where he remained for two years before moving to Hertfordshire county council. Tatton Brown retired officially in 1971, but continued to work in the field of hospital design and wrote with Paul James, 'Hospitals: Design and Development' (1985). He lectured at hospital conferences in Finland (1966), Holland(1967), Australia(1967) and Dusseldorf(1969), and contributed to the technical and national press. With his wife Aileen, whose practical and determined character complemented his somewhat flighty enthusiasms, Tatton Brown designed his own house and two houses in Spain, which combined 1930s Modernism with the Spanish vernacular style. William Tatton Brown had enormous joie de vivre and enjoyed painting and travel. His generosity and interest in people were manifested in a fondness for entertaining. The Tatton Browns had two sons and two daughters. |
1: 1937 Nicholas (Nick) Adam Tatton Brownc W/C 2: 1940 Sylvia Claire Tatton Brownc H/C 3: 1943 Joe Tatton-Brownc W/C 4: 1950 Geraldine Louise Tatton Brownc | |||||||
| 4 Children | ||||||||
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