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Menu Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon BUCHANAN, Peter Born: 1942 10 16 Died: 2023 08 23 Architect Born in Zomba, Nyasaland (Malawi since 1964), Peter was the eldest of the three children of Laurence Buchanan, a colonial service educationist and school inspector, and Barbara (nee Prodgers), who ran the family home set high on the Zomba Plateau in the Shire Highlands. Peter formed a deep affection for this stunning landscape of lakes, ferns, pines and waterfalls, of eagles, baboons, lizards, giant butterflies – Buchanan Sr was a keen lepidopterist – and Nile crocodiles lurking in the Shire River. He attended the local school before boarding at the Eagle prep school in the Bvumba mountains near Umtali (Mutare), in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and then Falcon college, Bulawayo, in southern Matabeleland. Both schools offered what Buchanan's sister Yvonne described as "terrific freedom". After studying science at university in Johannesburg, Buchanan taught the subject for a year before turning to architecture. Graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1968, he worked for two distinguished South African architects, Gabriel "Gawie" Fagan and Revel Fox. Fagan was a pioneering "green" designer of new, environmentally aware houses and a restorer of old Cape Dutch buildings. Fox was a glamorous, subtle modernist. (Extracted from the obituary by Jonathan Glancey published in The Guardian, 14 Sep 2023.) Peter BUCHANAN was the Sophia Gray Laureate in 2003.