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Reiach, Alan

(b London, 2 March 1910; d Edinburgh, 23 July 1992). Scottish architect and urban planner. He received his architectural education as an articled pupil in the partnership of Robert Lorimer and John Fraser Matthew (1875–1955), Edinburgh, and at the Edinburgh College of Art (1928–35), following which a scholarship enabled him to travel extensively in the USA and Europe. On his return he worked (1936–8) for Robert Atkinson and Partners in London, was assistant secretary (1940–44) to the Scottish Housing Advisory Committee of the Department of Health of the Scottish Office, and was then planning assistant (1944–6) for the Clyde Valley Planning Authority. He established his own practice in Edinburgh in 1949 and carried out a variety of projects, mainly in Scotland, a typical example being the church (1957) at Easthouses, Dalkeith, Lothian, where the main internal space is intended not only for worship but for the use of the people in the contemporaneously erected housing near by. The building, which is entirely characteristic of Reiach’s approach to architectural design, has a portal frame main structure and, except for the stone tower, is clad in rendered brickwork; the plan is elegant and economical of space in its arrangement and is clearly expressed in the overall form. In 1964 he joined with Eric Hall (b 1919) and Partners to form Reiach and Hall, the practice being responsible for a number of large schemes, including the Appleton Tower (1967) alongside George Square, Edinburgh. The building, for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Edinburgh University, comprises a seven-storey laboratory block, a four-storey lecture theatre block and a two-storey galleried concourse. The practice continued to work on a wide range of building types, producing buildings that are well organized and simply expressed, notable examples being those of 1975–7 for the British Steel Corporation at Imperial Works, Airdrie, Strathclyde.

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  Reproduced by kind permission of Macmillan Publishers Limited, publishers of The Grove Dictionary of Art.
  © Copyright 2000 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
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