We are sad to announce that Professor Lionel March passed
away on the evening of 20 February.
Professor March was the Founding Director
of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies, which was the first research
centre in Architecture in the UK, and has since become the Martin Centre and
the research arm of the Department.After a distinguished career in the UK, Canada and the
United States Professor March retired as Emeritus Professor in Design and
Computation at the University of California and returned to the Fens.As a schoolboy, Lionel March’s mathematical
work had attracted the admiration of Alan Turing and, when he went up to
Magdalene College, Cambridge, it was to read mathematics. However, after one
year, he transferred to architecture. During this period he was designer for a
number of plays and operas, including two in London, at Sadler’s Wells.Some of his early work in serial art was the
subject of an Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition in 1962. He was the
designer both of the University’s Cambridge plan of 1962 and, working in the
studio of Leslie Martin, of the Whitehall plan of 1964. It was while working on
the latter that he hit on the court and pavilion theory, developed with Martin,
applied in practice by Richard MacCormac and rediscovered in 1999 by the Urban
Task Force.
March was a pioneer in connecting design with computation, and he
founded “Environment and Planning B” which has since become the top academic
journal in this field. Among his other interests was the work of Rudolph
Schindler (he lived in Schindler’s How House) and classical mathematics – which
he used to correct Wittkower’s interpretations fifty years earlier.
