Jonathan Hill obituary

My friend Jonathan Hill, who has died aged 65 from cancer, was a design tutor and architectural historian at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, from the late 1980s.

There he helped to set up a new type of doctorate, an architectural design PhD, which he took himself, becoming its first graduate in 2000 and directing it for two decades.

In that role he became internationally renowned as a pioneer of design research in architecture – a fusion of thinking, reading, designing, drawing and writing that he traced back five centuries to Leon Battista Alberti’s classic architectural treatise De Re Aedificatoria. He also wrote a number of books, including Weather Architecture (2012) and The Architecture of Ruins (2019), both of which delivered subtle ruminations on how architecture, landscape and history are intertwined.

Born in Maidstone, Kent, to George Hill, an architect, and Margaret Wadsworth, Jonathan attended Wellington school in Somerset before going to the Birmingham School of Architecture, the Architectural Association in London and later the Bartlett for part-time postgraduate studies.

After gaining his professional qualifications, he worked for several years as an architect with John Outram Associates, including on the Isle of Dogs pumping station.

But like many ambitious young architects, Jonathan was also doing part-time teaching work in design studio units – at the Architectural Association and at Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University) – and it was that work which led to his appointment as a lecturer at the Bartlett in 1989. He became a pillar of that institution, rising to be professor of architecture and visual theory, and was a universally popular figure, known for his intelligence, generosity to students and colleagues, and his softly probing questions that made you think hard about what you had just said.

As well as a London flat, Jonathan had a cottage next to the Holkham estate in Norfolk, where he was happiest tending his garden alongside his wife, Izabela Wieczorek, also an architect, whom he had met when giving a lecture at the architectural school in Aarhus, Denmark, where she was teaching. They married in 2022 after his illness first appeared.

In their lovely garden, Jonathan dreamed of building a writing tower from which to survey the rolling landscape and see as far as the sea.

He is survived by Izabela and by his brother Christopher.