It is with the greatest sadness that the AA has learnt of the death of Paul Oliver MBE, who has passed away at the age of 90.
Paul Oliver was an architectural historian and world renowned expert on blues music who wrote some of the most authoritative histories of the genre. Paul’s time at the AA is recorded here by Patrick Wakely (AADipl 1963), who worked alongside him:
Paul Oliver was appointed to the staff of the AA in 1960, initially to teach drawing, principally to first year students, in succession to Bernard Myers. However, his role rapidly expanded to the teaching of the history and theory of the modern movement in architecture, eventually assuming responsibility for all ‘History of Architecture’ teaching at the AA.
He consistently set the different periods and ‘styles’ of architecture in the social and cultural context in which they were initiated and developed – an approach that differed from the more traditional classification of historical periods based on structural and building technology, and the aesthetic expressions that developed from them.
Paul organised and ran irregular events on specific themes of the history and theory of architecture that ranged from half-day seminars to two- or three-day workshops for which he engaged many different characters and personalities, among them Kenneth Frampton, Joseph Rykwert, Peter Rayner Banham, Arthur Korn, Robert Maxwell and Dennis Sharp. These events attracted much interest outside the school and were frequently attended on an ad hoc basis by practicing architects, academics and writers from different parts of the world.
To formalise this, in 1971, Paul launched the AA Graduate School, in part modelled on the AA Department of Tropical Studies that ran six-month Certificate courses for professionals and selected final-year students. He continued to develop his study of traditional indigenous building – vernacular architecture – that supplemented and complemented his teaching on history and theory.
At the same time, Paul continued to develop his appreciation and understanding of the blues and Afro-American musicians, which had preoccupied him since before he joined the AA staff. He would host jazz and blues evenings at the school, selecting favourites from a vast collection of 12" 74 rpm records. These gatherings were invariably prefaced with a consistently erudite and interesting lecture on the music and the musicians, illustrated by two-screen simultaneous slides of the characters and events. The rest of such an evening was devoted to the music itself.
In 1964, John Lloyd, with whom Paul had worked in the First Year at the AA and who had subsequently been seconded as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana, under an agreement of collaboration and mutual support with the AA, invited him as a visiting lecturer for nine months to teach in the Faculty. Paul, working with his Ghanaian students, used this experience to develop his knowledge and understanding of traditional vernacular architecture in different regions of Ghana, ultimately leading to his edited books ‘Shelter and Society’ (1969) and ‘Shelter in Africa’ (1971).
In 1973 he left the AA and was appointed Head of the Department of Art and Design at Dartington College of Arts near Totnes, Devon, from where he moved to the Department of Architecture at Oxford Polytechnic (later Oxford Brookes University).
Meanwhile, the AA Graduate School continued to flourish and grow, so that by 2017, the year of Paul Oliver’s death, it conducted a programme of 11 distinct Masters Degree courses and a comprehensive PhD Programme.
Paul Hereford Oliver, historian of architecture and the blues, born 25 May 1927; died 15 August 2017.
Read more about Paul’s life and work at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/aug/31/paul-oliver-obituary.
The presentation of images shown at Paul Oliver's memorial on Saturday 26 May 2018 can be viewed here