Paffard Keatinge-Clay (5 February 1926 – 17 March 2023) was a British-born architect in the modernist tradition who spent most of his professional life in the United States, before moving to southern Spain, where he increasingly focused on sculpture.
Practicing architecture in San Francisco from 1960 until 1975, Paffard Keatinge-Clay left behind a legacy of architectural work in the Bay Area, some of which is realised, but for a large body only paper documentation exists. These buildings and projects are indices of a career marked in equal measure by synthesis and ambition and which is characterised by a series of apprenticeships with major architectural figures that were active between late 1940 and early 1960: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He also shared an association with a host of other notable designers including: Myron Goldsmith, Mies van der Rohe, Siegfried Giedion, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Ernő Goldfinger, and Raphael Soriano. He lived for many years near Mijas, in Spain, where he maintained an architect's office and developed interests in "very pure large-scale sculpture".
Early life
Paffard Keatinge-Clay was born on 5 February 1926. He grew up in the Wiltshire village of Teffont Evias, near Salisbury, in the south of England, where his father was rector, in a 16th-century house without electricity or indoor plumbing.
Keatinge-Clay received his education at Wellington College and at the Architectural Association in London, dual majoring in Architecture and Structural Engineering. He graduated in 1949. He began his professional career while in school at the London office of architect Ernő Goldfinger.
Architectural career
Keatinge-Clay worked for approximately one year in the studio of famed French architect Le Corbusier at 7 Rue de Sèvres in Paris, France in 1948. While there, his work focused primarily on the Unite d’Habitacion in Marseilles and on the plan for the town of Saint Die. Leaving Europe after having graduated, Keatinge-Clay travelled across America and apprenticed for a year at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin studios in both Madison and Scottsdale, Arizona. His time in the American west under the influence of Wright culminated in a year-long effort to make a Homestead claim on a piece of government property in the Arizona desert. Here, he built a pavilion in the desert – an elemental study of components that would later become the template for his own home – on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Corte Madera in Marin County.
Having left Arizona in the early 1950s, Keatinge-Clay moved to Chicago where he worked at the Chicago Offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on both the Inland Steel and Harris Bank and Trust Buildings with Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch. It was in Chicago that he was in contact socially and professionally with Mies van der Rohe through his father-in-law, Siegfried Gideon, and the architect/engineer Myron Goldsmith. He later transferred to their San Francisco office where he executed the Great Western Savings and Loan Building in Gardena, California. In 1961, he left the firm and began his own office.
Keatinge-Clay's own office in San Francisco was located at 680 Beach Street in what is now the Fisherman's Wharf area. Concurrently with starting up his own practice, he was teaching and lecturing in schools around the Bay Area including the University of California at Berkeley, and San Luis Obispo.
During the 14-year period from 1961 to 1975, Keatinge-Clay produced several buildings several of which remain today. The first was the previously mentioned 1965 home for himself. This was followed by a medical office building in the San Fernando Valley in 1966 and the 1968 addition to the San Francisco Art Institute, an art academy situated in the heart of the city's elite Russian Hill neighbourhood. Finally, in what would turn out to be both the most ambitious and professionally tumultuous project of his career, he was selected to design the Student Union building at San Francisco State University. Difficulties, both technical and legal, resulted in his eventual departure from the US to Canada, followed by an exodus through North Africa sometime in the late 1970s.
During the latter portion of his time in San Francisco, Keatinge-Clay was recognised abroad when he placed as an honoured finalist in two competitions in the UK, both in 1972. In what could be seen as a return to his homeland, the first of these proposals was his design in London for an administrative office addition to Parliament at Westminster. The second was for a new art museum in Glasgow, Scotland, for which he received an honourable mention.