Obituary: Patrick Nuttgens

Patrick Nuttgens, who has died aged 74, was an architect and educator, raconteur and pundit, whose flow of conversation enchanted anyone who came within his orbit. In the 1960s, he played a crucial part in the formation of the new University of York, before becoming the first director of Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University). At least two of his books - The Story Of Architecture (1983) and Understanding Modern Architecture (1988) - have had a lasting impact on the way we view our environment. He did much to bring about the current enthusiasm for modern buildings and design.

Patrick had a remarkable career by any standards, still more so for a man disabled, first by polio, and then by multiple sclerosis. From 1985, he used a wheelchair all the time. But always pithy and lacking in self-pity, he could communicate the experience of disablement with a rare ebullience and wit. "I may be a man of many parts," he said, "but some don't work as well as they once did."

The key to this inner strength was his unusual upbringing at Piggotts Hill, near High Wycombe, in a closeknit, argumentative, beauty-loving, Catholic enclave in the Chiltern Hills, where he was one of the 12 children of the stained-glass artist Joseph Nuttgens.

Their nearest neighbour was the sculptor Eric Gill, and, as a boy, Patrick served the daily mass in the Gill chapel - though it did not dawn on him for several years that the reason the resident priest was so unwilling to get out of bed was because he was suffering from a dreadful hangover. Patrick's sharp awareness of the spirit and the flesh - as well as his feeling for the processes of craftsmanship - went back to those years at Gill's house, known as Pigotts.

His mother died of kidney failure when Patrick was seven, and in his first, homesick term at Grace Dieu Manor school, outside Leicester. The trauma never left him. When he was 12, and by then at the Catholic boarding school, Ratcliffe College, a second disaster struck. As captain of the junior XV, he walked off the rugby pitch with a terrible pain in his back and, within a day, was paralysed from the chest down.

He spent the next two years in hospital with poliomyelitis, leaving in 1944 with a caliper on one leg and his torso in plaster. He was always to wear a back brace or surgical belt. On returning to school, since games were now impossible, he decided to excel in scholarship. He adored taking exams, and won every class prize at the end of that first year. He became a star of the debating society, competing with his contemporary, Norman St John Stevas (now Lord St John of Fawsley); in the school elections, Patrick supported Labour, but lost to Norman's Conservatives.

Patrick was already set on becoming a "great" architect - "I think now that it was really because of my love for old buildings, rather than a compulsive need to design new ones," he later wrote. His father had shown him Britain's great cathedrals, taken him on tours of Cotswold country buildings, and introduced him to the early 20th-century Lutyens houses that became one of his great enthusiasms. The television documentary Edwin Lutyens: Last Architect Of The Age Of Humanism (1981) was one of the best things he ever did.

He studied architecture and painting on a joint course at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University (1948-53), beginning his incestuously close relationship with the city he described as "a quite extraordinary, utterly dominating, arrogant and sometimes sinister place". There, too, he met Biddy (Bridget) Badenoch, a doctor's daughter and student of English Literature. Patrick took literature classes so that he could sit beside her, and their marriage, in 1954, was the start of a wonderfully happy, lifelong intellectual and writing partnership.

His interest in the living conditions of ordinary people was stimulated by the authoritarian Robert Matthew, who arrived as professor of architecture at Edinburgh College of Art in his final year, and suggested a research subject that suited Patrick ideally. This was the vernacular architecture of the north-east lowlands, where his most rewarding discoveries emerged from a group of fishing villages north of Aberdeen; he eventually obtained his PhD in 1959.

When Matthew set up the architecture department at Edinburgh University, he appointed Patrick as his chief administrator, having diagnosed his talent as a course planner and teacher, as much as an architectural practitioner.

But just as his career was moving into orbit, he had another setback. Acute depression, and a threatened nervous breakdown, left him with tunnel vision. He contemplated suicide. His recovery showed extraordinary resilience. In 1962, he began what he described as "the most exciting and totally absorbing experience I have ever had". He moved south, with Biddy and their, by then, four children, to become director of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies (till 1968), and then professor of architecture (1968-69) at the new York University.

Patrick loved being in at the beginning. He was deeply involved in the detailed planning of that ideal place of learning on the outskirts of the city - interdisciplinary structures, built around a central lake, serene with ducks and swans; covered walkways encouraging intellectual interchange; the ever-open drinks cupboard in the staff common room helping to induce the buzz and hum of conversation on the idea of the university.

He was now evolving radical methods of teaching too. At the institute, he had devised short courses for architects and planners, builders and engineers. These were professional, technical and specific, reflecting Patrick's deep-rooted belief in hands-on practice and professional collaboration. At York, he opened out the channels of communication between the university and the architectural masterpiece of York itself, teaching himself the detail of the city by walking round and round the walls.

In the mid-1960s, he entered vociferously into the controversies over what he saw as the ruination of the historic city by crassly designed, faceless office blocks. And, indeed, it was at least partly due to his tireless lobbying that, before the decade ended, York was being seen as a centre for intelligent conservation.

Patrick was the product of two traditions: education for its own sake and, through his craftsman father, education for a purpose, via practical experiment. The possibilities of merging these two traditions thrilled him when, in 1969, he was appointed as the first director of Leeds Polytechnic: "Doing, making and organising are fundamental activities, and they are what a polytechnic is all about," he said.

He liked the wide embrace of an institution that combined technology, commerce, art and teacher training, and intended to make Leeds poly the best teaching institute in Europe, recreating some of the values and activities that had once made Britain the workshop of the world.

Typically, one of his first actions was to landscape the bleak, city-centre site, creating grassy mounds which the students called Mount Nuttgens. He also imbued those depressing buildings with his own inspired informality; progress down the corridors with the director on his electric bike could be excruciatingly slow, as he stopped to chat with every member of staff, porter, student, cleaner he met. His interest was not remotely phoney, but arose from a real human curiosity.

But Patrick's years at Leeds were not easy. When confronted with student sit-ins in his office, his reaction was to go home and write a book. There was also bitter local opposition to the performance art developed among the fine art students. A Violence In Society evening, in which a student shot a budgerigar with an air pistol, caused especial outrage. "I've never seen one like that before," said Patrick's small son, spotting a 10-foot plastic penis in a student exhibition. "Nor will you again," replied his dad.

Relations with the Leeds local authority, always delicate, had worsened by 1979, when the police were called in - without notifying Patrick - to investigate charges of corruption over building contracts (claims that were eventually dropped). Hardest for him to bear, however, was the sense of erosion, in the Thatcherite years, of the polytechnic principles he so passionately espoused. His health deteriorated with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and, in 1986, he resigned.

But Patrick now seemed busier and even more productive than before, writing, broadcasting and travelling. His quick brain and breadth of knowledge made him a quiz-show genius. His best books on architecture date from the 1980s, and, in 1989, he wrote and introduced a memorable television history of British housing, The Home Front. His watercolour drawings, almost always showing buildings in a landscape, began to emanate from as far afield as Australia, Nova Scotia, Kuala Lumpur and China.

Patrick's convivial wisdom was greatly in demand, and he sat on an enormous number of committees, including the Royal Fine Art Commission (1983-90) and the board of the Theatre Royal, York (1990-96). He collected honorary doctorates from the Open University, Sheffield University and Heriot-Watt, and was made an honorary professor at York in 1986. It is difficult to think of anyone whose life has been more totally fulfilled.

He is survived by Biddy, their six sons and three daughters.

· Patrick John Nuttgens, architect and academic, born March 2 1930; died March 15 2004