George Grenfell-Baines, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetGeorge Grenfell-Baines
English architect and town planner
Date of Birth: 30-Apr-1908
Place of Birth: Preston, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: 09-May-2003
Profession: architect
Nationality: United Kingdom
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About George Grenfell-Baines
- Sir George Grenfell-Baines (born George Baines; 30 April 1908 – 9 May 2003) was an English architect and town planner.
- Born in Preston, his family’s humble circumstances forced him to start work at the age of fourteen.
- Both George and his younger brother, Richard (Dick), were prodigiously gifted mathematicians and draughtsmen.
- Grenfell-Baines left a secure, but limiting, job in the Lancashire County Architect's Office to work for the prestigious private firm of Bradshaw Gass & Hope in Bolton in 1930.
- During the 1930s, Grenfell-Baines became aware of Modernism, particularly the work of Le Corbusier and Gropius, through the architectural press and was determined to practise it himself.
- He studied at Manchester University for two years from 1934.
- It was at this time he adopted the name George Grenfell Baines at the suggestion of fellow student Gerald Hayforthwaite.
- Later this was hyphenated as Grenfell-Baines: Grenfell being his mother's maiden name.
- He was known to friends and colleagues as "GG". In 1935, he was awarded the Heywood prize for the design of reinforced concrete flats.
- The following year he was awarded the third prize in a competition for a new Rhodesian Parliament; the prize money, £250, was enough to enable him to start his own practice. Grenfell-Baines's work for the Air Ministry during World War II brought him to the attention of Anthony Chitty and the London Modernists.
- Although Grenfell-Baines always chose to be based in Preston, he cultivated friendships in national and international circles.
- In 1951, he was invited to design a pavilion for the Festival of Britain.
- Grenfell-Baines's post-war work included the New Towns of Newton Aycliffe (planned 1947) and Peterlee (planned 1948). An abiding interest for GG was multidisciplinary working.
- His highly successful firm BDP (Building Design Partnership) was the result of numerous experiments in management structure.
- In 1972, he became professor of Architecture at Sheffield University where he founded the Design Teaching Partnership.
- He officially retired in 1974 but continued working as a consultant into his final decade. He received an OBE in 1960 and was knighted in 1978. Grenfell-Baines was survived by his second wife, Milena Fleischmann, whom he married in 1954, their son and daughter, and the two daughters of his first marriage, to Dorothy Hodson.
- Milena was a Czech refugee of the Kindertransport. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/46) with George Grenfell-Baines in 2000 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.
Read more at Wikipedia