It is with great sadness that the Faculty has learnt of the death of Robin Middleton, at the age of 94. Robin was the Faculty Librarian and a University Lecturer from 1972 until 1987. The post of Librarian at the time was the only joint appointment in the Faculty, shared between the Departments of Architecture and History of Art. As an architect and architectural historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was perfectly suited to the role. Under his guidance, the library acquired an extraordinary collection of early architectural books. It was later renamed the Middleton Library in his honour.
Robin Middleton was born in 1931 in South Africa and trained as an architect, before moving to Britain in his twenties. He did a PhD at Cambridge on Viollet-le-Duc supervised by Nikolaus Pevsner who was at the time Slade Professor and a Fellow of St John’s. After a spell as technical editor of Architectural Design, he became the Head of General Studies at the Architectural Association and took up the lectureship in Cambridge. In 1987 he left for New York, for a position at Columbia where he remained for the rest of his life. In New York, his home was a two-storey converted industrial building in East Village in which he created one of the world’s finest private collections of 19th and 20th century architectural books. Extraordinarily erudite and with a cutting wit, he will be remembered as an inspiring teacher and for his numerous important books and articles and on the Beaux Arts and nineteenth-century French architecture.
