Richard MacCormac

Sir Richard Cornelius MacCormac CBE, PPRIBA, FRSA, RA (3 September 1938 – 26 July 2014), was a modernist English architect and the founder of MJP Architects.

Richard Cornelius MacCormac was born in Marylebone, London on 3 September 1938, the son of Dr. Henry MacCormac (1879 – 12 December 1950), CBE FRCP, a dermatologist of Ulster origin, and Marion Maude MacCormac (1906–1998; née Broomhall).

Through his paternal lineage, MacCormac was the great-grandson of Dr. Henry MacCormac, a prominent nineteenth-century physician in Northern Ireland who was the father of Sir William MacCormac, 1st Bt, KCB, KCVO, who served as a house physician and surgeon to Queen Victoria and honorary sergeant-surgeon to King Edward VII. The family was a well-known medical dynasty in the nineteenth century that originated from County Armagh and claims descent from Cornelius MacCormac, a high-ranking naval officer, and Colonel Joseph Hall, a wealthy distiller in County Armagh. Distant relatives also include a branch of the Easmon family of Sierra Leone, descended from Dr. John Farrell Easmon, the discoverer of Blackwater fever. ^{[citation needed]}

MacCormac was educated at Westminster School. After serving his national service in the Royal Navy, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied parts I and II of the Architecture and Fine Arts tripos, before proceeding to the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

MacCormac undertook a broad range of work, including social housing for the London Borough of Merton, before founding MacCormac Jamieson and Prichard in 1972. In 2011, he left MJP to set up a new practice in his own name.

After winning an open competition for the design of the University of Bristol Arts Faculty building, he made his name in the 1980s through the use of modernist design, particularly in university architecture. These included: the Sainsbury Building for Worcester College, Oxford (won the 1984 Civic Trust Award); The Ruskin - Library, Museum and Research Centre at the University of Lancaster (Independent on Sunday Building of the Year Award 1996, Royal Fine Art Commission/BSkyB Building of the Year University Winner 1998, Millennium Products status awarded by the Design Council 1999); Bowra Building at Wadham College, Oxford; Burrell's Fields at Trinity College, Cambridge (RIBA Regional Award 1997, Civic Trust Award 1997) and the Garden Quadrangle at St John's College, Oxford.

MacCormac's commercial clients included: Southwark tube station for the Jubilee Line Extension (Royal Fine Art Commission Trust/BSkyB Millennium Building of the Year Award 2000); the Wellcome Foundation Wing/Dana Centre at the Science Museum, London (Celebrating Construction Achievement Regnl Award for Greater London 2000); the Cable and Wireless training centre in Coventry (Royal Fine Art Commission/Sunday Times Building of the Year Award 1994) and a Tesco supermarket in Ludlow.

MacCormac designed the new Egton Wing of the BBC's Broadcasting House. But more than halfway through the project, the BBC asked for a redesign in light of its budget restrictions, and MacCormac refused, unwilling to sacrifice the quality of his design, and hence MJP was sacked from the project. In 1999, MacCormac designed a new home in Hampstead for Arsenal F.C. striker Thierry Henry, described as "one of the finest examples of modern architecture in the UK".