My grandfather, Richard Hughes, who has died aged 93, was a modernist architect who designed hundreds of high-profile buildings in East Africa, where he lived for most of his life.
From 1956 until his retirement in 1986, his Nairobi practice completed 275 buildings in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan and Mauritius. Universities, hospitals, television stations, schools, churches, office blocks, private homes, airport terminals: Richard carefully designed each with the conviction that every citizen deserved the best design, shaped by their social and cultural needs and the local environment. He believed in design not as luxury but as a powerful and relevant force for improving people’s lives.
Born in London to Dick Hughes, a land surveyor, and Olive (nee Curtis), Richard moved at an early age to Palestine and then Tanganyika (now Tanzania) with his family, before settling in Nairobi in 1939, at which point Kenya was still a British territory.
During the second world war he attended Hilton college in South Africa and then served briefly in the Kenyan regiment before moving to London to study at the Architectural Association from 1947 to 1953. After two years working for a small architectural firm in Connecticut in the US, he returned to Kenya in 1955 to work for the Nairobi-based architects Blackburn and Norburn, and the following year set up his own practice.
Among his early projects was an Anglican church in the coastal town of Kilifi, where the congregation are cooled by winds blowing in from the Indian Ocean through slats in coral rag walls. At Hospital Hill in Nairobi, the first multiracial school in Kenya, he designed colourful geometric shared worktables that ensure the children are angled to face each other. And at the ICEA office building in the same city he allowed employees to look out over the capital from their tower block through dark windows that filtered the equatorial sun.
Principled and brave, Richard championed causes that were considered, in expatriate circles, eccentric at best: education for all, affordable housing, multiracialism, the environment, Islamic architecture.
His optimism and resolve fuelled some remarkable victories – he attended the Salima convention in 1956, which brought together political activists of different races to discuss a vision of pan-East African independence, and he helped set up the Lamu Society, which successfully lobbied for the conservation of the ancient Swahili island town of Lamu, later designated a Unesco world heritage site.
In 1975 he was involved in the opening in Kenya of the Environment Liaison Centre, which has become an international NGO focused on climate change.
Ever youthful in outlook, he was an early user of computer-aided design, invested with gusto in modern art, sailed dinghies into his 80s, and loved gadgets.
Richard married Anne Hill in Nairobi in 1951. She died in 2006. He is survived by his second wife, Kavya (nee Strout), whom he married in 2009, his children from his first marriage, Bridget, Penelope and Mervyn, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
