Patrick Nuttgens

Who was Patrick Nuttgens?

Patrick John Nuttgens CBE was an English architect and academic.

Patrick Nuttgens was raised in Piggotts Hill, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. His father, stained-glass artist Jozef Edward Nuttgens, married twice, and Patrick was one of four children from the first marriage. His mother died when he was seven years old. Jozef remarried and had eight more children, the eldest of whom was named Joseph Ambrose and is also a stained glass designer, still living and working at Piggotts Hill.

One day, when Patrick was twelve and a student at Ratcliffe College, he walked off the rugby pitch with a terrible pain in his back and, within a day, was paralysed from the chest down with poliomyelitis. He was hospitalised for nearly two years while he recuperated.

He studied architecture and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University. He met Bridget Badenoch, an English Literature student at Edinburgh University; they married in 1954. In 1962, he became director of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies at the University of York, and subsequently became Professor of Architecture there. In 1969, he was appointed as the first director of Leeds Polytechnic.