Paffard Keatinge-Clay

Who is Paffard Keatinge-Clay?

Paffard Keatinge-Clay is an English-born architect in the modernist tradition who spent most of his professional life in the United States of America, before moving to southern Spain, where he has increasingly focussed 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, Erno Goldfinger, and Rafael Soriano. He has lived for many years near Mijas, in Spain, where he maintains an architect's office and has developed interests in "very pure large-scale sculpture".