philip pank 1933 - 1991

a passion for colour

PHILIP PANK: ARCHITECT

Ted Cullinan RA - December 2006

I did the fourth and fifth years of my training in architecture at the Architectural Association from 1954 to 1956. There I met Philip Pank and we immediately got on. Other students at that time were devoted followers of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, some producing virtual replicas of their work. But although, we too were influenced by others, Philip and I had our own eccentric muses. For Philip was an artist, a fine painter and drawer as well as a natural architect. He loved the way paintings and drawings are made and buildings are constructed and so do I. Before I knew him he had survived Wellington (the school to which his parents sent him from British India) by painting and drawing and collecting butterflies, thereby avoiding the Rugby field; no doubt a good thing for his school mates since Philip was very big, a virtual Jonah Lomu, and would doubtless have crushed them had he played.

The first place that Philip and I really worked together was in the ruins of the house extension to the Bell Tout Lighthouse which stands on a 100 metre cliff near Eastbourne. It was replaced by the Beachy Head Lighthouse down in the sea and was ruined because it was used for target practice during the Second World War. Weekend after weekend and during holidays he used to arrive across the downs in his growling motorbike and he and I dismantled the granite remains of the upper two floors of the house and built the ground floor with the retained pieces. We lowered bits of granite down a home made 30 metre long railway track with a 6 metre drop from the top to the bottom. We used the bigger bits to make a 2 metre high boundary wall and I can imagine no one with whom I had rather worked on this mammoth task than Philip Pank; patient, calm, humorous and intelligent.

After these youthful activities and his spell in Hong Kong, doing National Service, he and I both became practising architects; he with his one-man practice, me with one that was to grow later. In the 60's one-off houses were often either pseudo-vernacular or weak Mies steel and glass or more or less stylish modifications of Swedish Contemporary. Philip played a major part in understanding house making as a form of visibly constructed space and placemaking; and he was a master of the use of wood as a part of this compositional method. The influence of this way of designing, a developed version of the thoughts of the Cubists and their predecessors, has been important ever since.

Philip's true legacy is as a designer and builder, 
photographer, husband and father and especially as a painter. An energetic artist who hardly ever drew a line shorter then three inches long, he was my old friend who died, too early, in 1991.

‘My attitude to Philip's architecture was influenced by things like watching him draw on the beach in Corsica, chasing a rare butterfly, handling with tenderness an ancient Persian pot, or discussing art at his home amongst plants and trees that were everywhere, with no barriers between the indoors and ountdoors. In other words the human and natural pervades all his works’.

Phillip King, sculptor, 1991

“I was just fascinated by his knowledge of birds and plants; of Egyptian and Muslim art, and ancient and classical art generally; by his passionate love of colour; by his keen interest in the East and Africa. I think all of this was fully and strongly expressed in his wonderful paintings. He made a great many of them - and they are an organic and authentic part of his personality - the part which stays with us”.

Moscow artist Ivan Chuikov

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Click on small images to enlarge

Christine Roillet Oil on canvas 1981

Thames Windsor Crayon drawing 113 1983

View of Pallaja Beach, Corsica Crayon drawing 137 1983

River at Langeac, Auvergne Water colour 273 1980

Magliano in Tuscany Water colour 1985

Gammon Head Water colour 707 1984

Gorge D'Allier Watercolour 1980

Valley, Megeve, France Oil on canvas 1977

 Bois des Aecets, Grand Bornard, France

Oil on canvas 1986