Colin Boyne; Editor of 'The Architects' Journal'

[Hyfler/Rosner]

The Independent
11 October 2006
Elain Harwood

Donald Arthur Colin Aydon Boyne, architectural journalist:
born Farway, Devon 15 February 1921; Editor, The Architects'
Journal 1949-70; Chairman of the Editorial Board, The
Architects' Journal and The Architectural Review 1970-74;
CBE 1977; married 1947 Rosemary Pater (two sons, one
daughter); died Wells, Somerset 27 September 2006.

Colin Boyne stood for architecture as a service, not an art
form, and his editorship of The Architects' Journal from
1949 to 1974 reflected this. He was the most influential
architectural journalist of the post-war period, and
continued to encourage younger writers in his retirement.

Though trained as an architect, Boyne never practised. Born
in Devon, near Honiton, he was brought up by his mother and
a spinster aunt, who determined that Boynes had to be
farmers or military men, not architects. When the Second
World War came, Colin joined the Indian Army - as being far
from his mother. When he was badly wounded in Burma and
invalided out, he was awarded a scholarship to the
Architectural Association in London, in 1943, although
standing over a drawing board aggravated the constant pain
that he endured for the rest of his life.

So he turned to journalism, after his young wife, Rosemary,
spotted an advertisement for an editorial assistant at the
Architectural Press. Originally rejected for the job by the
editor, Jim Richards, he was contacted two months later, the
first appointment having been a disaster. Boyne proved an
outstanding success, rising in two years to become Editor of
The Architects' Journal, leaving Richards to concentrate on
his first love, The Architectural Review.

In the 1930s and 1940s there were only two serious
architectural magazines, both managed by the charismatic
Hubert de Cronin Hastings. The monthly Architectural Review
was glamorous and glossy, with articles from John Betjeman,
John Piper, Gordon Cullen and Nikolaus Pevsner that mixed
modernism with an appreciation of Britain's past.

Boyne took the weekly Architects' Journal from being its
poor relation and made it essential reading for the
profession: campaigning, perceptive and presenting the
latest technical information. It pioneered the promotion of
cost analysis in case studies written by outside experts,
and re-inspected buildings after a few years to see if they
had met their brief. Design guides, begun in 1961, boosted
sales by a third in that year alone. By 1970, when Boyne
became chairman of the editorial board of both magazines,
the AJ was supporting the AR.

Boyne had a commitment to modern architecture, but above all
to architecture as a service for the public good. He never
wavered from this social commitment, which dominated
architecture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he
regretted the subsequent return of what he termed
"conspicuous display". Instead, he encouraged public-sector
architects, whose work was hitherto published anonymously
and generally disregarded by the profession.

One of Boyne's first campaigns was to return responsibility
for London council housing to the Architect's Department
after it had been passed to the London County Council's
Valuer - responsible for the acres of nondescript housing
flung up in suburbs like Borehamwood and Harold Hill in the
1940s. He succeeded handsomely in 1949, but remembered with
embarrassment over 50 years later that the Valuer, Cyril
Walker, had tears in his eyes when they met to hear the
council's decision.

Boyne was not only tough and astute: his sense of justice
was tempered with humility and warmth. His friends in the
profession were the public-sector architects he championed,
the designers of housing and schools, and he did much to
promote the revival of interest in the classic Hertfordshire
prefabricated schools of the late 1940s when he brought
together these architects and the historian Andrew Saint to
assemble a biography of the architect he most admired,
Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, designer of the now-threatened
Commonwealth Institute.

Physically tough despite his disability, in 1959 Boyne took
on management of a 40-acre wood in Kent, where he and
Rosemary built themselves a house. They sought an easier
life in Wells in the early 1990s, but Boyne soon became
chairman of the Planning Committee of the local Civic
Society and of the local branch of the Council for the
Preservation of Rural England. He was greatly distressed by
the sale of the Architectural Press, first to UTP and then
Robert Maxwell, but the tributes paid by his fellow
architects when he finally retired in 1984 cannot be
bettered. As Hugh Morris wrote then,

behind the dry, quizzical, abrupt, sometimes paramilitary
manner and the conservative dark

suit hides the 100 per cent, unreconstructed, inveterate,
unrepentant hair-shirted radical . . . that's about the
highest praise I can think of.