The Architects’ Co-Partnership originated as the Architects' Co-operative Partnership in July 1939 [the name changed to Architects' Co-Partnership in 1951]. It was formed as an architectural co-operative in the summer of 1939 by eleven architects - Kenneth Capon (1915-1988); Michael Cooke-Yarborough (1915-1995); Peter Cocke (1917-1985); Anthony Cox (1915-1993); Michael Grice (1917-2008); Leo de Syllas (1917-1964); Arthur Wyllie Nicol (1912-1940); Anthony Pott (1904-1963; Michael Powers (1915-1994); Greville Rhodes (1916-2010); and John Wheeler (1916-1945) - all of whom were diploma graduates of the Architectural Association School in London. They were also members of the MARS. Modern Architecture Research Group
Following the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939 the partnership was dissolved but was re-formed in 1946. Nicol had been killed during the war, and Wheeler died in September 1945 while on service with the Royal Air Force. Rhodes was one of the post-war team but left in 1947 to practice independently, and de Syllas re-joined in 1947. By the late 1940s there were eight members in the co-operative - Capon, Cooke-Yarborough, Cocke, Cox, Grice, de Syllas, Pott and Powers, however, not long after, Pott withdrew to go take up a post at the Ministry of Education and so there were seven members until 1964 when de Syllas was killed in an automobile accident in Tunisia.
Later partners of ACP included Philip Groves (1928-?); Hugh Durrant-Whyte (1931-?); John Jordan (1933-?); Roy Smith (1931-?); Kenneth Dalley (1942-?); Peter Nixon (1929-?); Sydney Peachment (1929-?); and Terence Snow (1931-?).
In 1971 ACP was restructured. The partners were thereafter known as directors. That year they also moved their main office from London to Hertfordshire. In 1983 they received the Queen's Award for Export Achievement.
In 2014, ACP filed for insolvency, a process that was concluded in 2018.
Work by the ACP was seldom attributed to individuals. Early works by the group included a rubber factory in Brynmawr, Monmouthshire, Wales (1945-51); Zones S.B.2 and S.B.2.A of the 1951 Festival of Britain South Bank Exhibition in London; alterations and additions to factories; a number of small private houses; schools for Hertfordshire County Council, Coventry City Council, Derbyshire County Council and Sheffield City Council. In 1950 ACP prepared a report on Hospital Planning for the St. Albans and Mid-Herts Hospital Board.
In 1954 Grice and de Syllas opened an ACP office in Lagos, Nigeria where over the next eight years they designed schools, office blocks and a hotel. They also designed a large housing development in Akosombo, Ghana. The Nigerian office closed in 1962.
By the late 1950s ACP had begun to work primarily in the education sector. Among projects by the co-operative were the Chemistry Department's Teaching and Research Building at Leicester University (1957); study-bedrooms for St. John's College, Oxford (1960); a masterplan and most of the buildings for the University of Essex in Colchester, Essex (from 1963); Dunelm House, Durham Students' Union, Durham University (1966); St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School in London (1967); and student residences at Goldney House, Bristol for the University of Bristol (1967); the hostel and auditorium [now the Greenwood Theatre] at Guy's Hospital in London (1969); the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London the 1960s and 1970s; Chemistry Laboratories at Imperial College, London (1970); School of Environmental Studies at University College, London (1974); Victoria Barracks in Windsor, Berkshire (1982); and the Department of Biotechnology at Imperial College, London (1984).
In the 1970s with the dearth of commissions in the UK, ACP turned to the Middle East for work. During the decade they designed an abattoir in Khartoum, Sudan; a hospital in Saudi Arabia; and a hospital and faculty of medicine in Baghdad, Iraq.
_____
See also:
Mills, Edward D.’Architects’ Co-Partnership’ in Contemporary Architects [Contains a list of works by ACP 1951-1984 pp. 41-42. See Bibliography below]
RIBApix! - over 360 images of buildings designed by ACP [See Links below]
UK Modern House - 27 buildings by ACP [See Links below]
British Listed Buildings - over 20 listed buildings by ACP [See Links below]
‘Architects’ Co-Partnership’. Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects vol. 74, 1967 pp. 229-238
Cox, Anthony. Architects Co-Partnership: the first 50 years. Potters Bar, Hertfordshire: Architects Co-Partnership, 1989
Cox, Anthony et al. The Brynmawr Rubber Factory’. AA Files no. 10, Autumn 1985 pp. 3-10 [An edited transcript of a seminar on the Brynmawr rubber factory in Brynmawr, Monmouthshire, Wales held at the Architectural Association in London in 1984. Includes contributions by Sir Ove Arup, Kenneth Capon, Sir Anthony Cox, Dan Lacey, Cyril Mardall, Michael Oowell and others. The factory was built between 1948 and 1953 to the design of the Architects’ Co-operative Partnership and its client James Forrester (1910-1960), later fifth Earl of Verulam]
Donat, John. ‘Dunelm House, Durham’. Architectural Review vol. 139, June 1966 pp. 451-461 [Dunelm House, Durham Students' Union, Durham University designed by ACP in 1966]
Factory at Brynmawr. London: Cement and Concrete Association, 1952
Harwood, Elain. Space Hope and Brutalism. English Architecture 1945-1975. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press in association with Historic England for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015
Mills, Edward D.’Architects’ Co-Partnership’ in Contemporary Architects. Edited by Ann Lee Morgan and Colin Naylor. London and Chicago, Illinois: St. James Press, 2nd edition 1987
Mills, Edward David. The New Architecture in Britain 1946-1953 London: The Standard Catalogue Co., 1953 [Discusses a rubber factory in Brynmawr, Monmouthshire, Wales designed by Architects’ Co-operative and built in 1945-51]
Perry, Victoria. Built for a Better Future: The Brynmawr Rubber Factory. Oxford: White Cockade Publishing, 1994
Powers, Alan. ‘Chapter 8. Architects’Co-Partnersip’ in in British Design: Tradition and Modernity after 1948, edited by Ghislaine Wood. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 113-126
Webb, Michael. Architecture in Britain Today. London: Country Life, 1969