Ahrends Burton Koralek – ABK Architects
post updated 30 + 17 June 2026
Peter Ahrends of ABK Dies
Peter Ahrends, who has died at the age of 93, was a founding partner of the influential architectural practice Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), established in 1961 alongside Richard Burton and Paul Koralek. The three architects first met as students at the Architectural Association in London in 1951 and went on to share a professional partnership spanning more than five decades, underpinned by a lifelong friendship and an unusually collaborative approach to design in which all three partners remained actively involved in the creative process.
Peter Ahrends was born in Berlin on 30 April 1933, the son of an architect father and a mother whose work was closely connected to the Bauhaus traditions of weaving and design. In 1937, his family fled Nazi Germany for South Africa, an experience that would inform a lifelong sensitivity to questions of injustice, displacement and exclusion. At the age of 18, he left South Africa to study architecture at the Architectural Association in London, where he encountered the ideas and collaborators that would shape his professional life.
Roscommon County Council Civic Offices, Connacht, Ireland, by ABK:
photograph : Christian Richters
In 1961, Ahrends joined fellow AA contemporaries Richard Burton and Paul Koralek to establish Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK), a practice that would become one of the most respected architectural offices of the post-war era. Over the following decades, ABK produced an exceptional body of work that included the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin, the British Embassy in Moscow, and a wide range of educational, civic and commercial projects distinguished by their intellectual discipline, material craftsmanship and deeply humane approach to architecture.
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ABK developed a remarkably diverse body of work encompassing university buildings, public libraries, housing, retail projects and industrial architecture. Early momentum for the practice came through the design of a gallery on Bond Street for the art dealer John Kasmin, later celebrated by Forbes as “London’s swingingest 60s art gallery”, and through winning the competition for the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin.
John Wheatley College, Glasgow, Scotland, by ABK:
photo © Keith Hunter
Completed in 1967, the library became one of the defining works of post-war British and Irish architecture. Described by one critic as “sitting like a mooring stone at the edge of Trinity’s green, its surfaces pale and pitted, its geometry lucid as a theorem”, the building employed concrete and Wicklow granite to create an architecture of striking clarity and permanence. Boldly modern in expression, it was conceived to hold its own against the surrounding neoclassical context rather than defer to it. In 2025, the building was renamed the Eavan Boland Library in honour of the acclaimed Irish poet, adding a new cultural chapter to one of ABK’s most celebrated works.
Among ABK’s most notable contributions to higher education were the buildings for Chichester Theological College, a robust Brutalist composition of brick and concrete, and the business school for Oxford University, later known as Templeton College, developed incrementally over seven phases between 1967 and 1990. The practice’s serpentine extension to Keble College, completed in 1980, offered a sophisticated contemporary interpretation of William Butterfield’s richly polychromatic Victorian architecture, demonstrating ABK’s ability to engage confidently with historic contexts while maintaining a distinctly modern architectural language.
Kilmallock Civic Building, County Limerick, Ireland, by ABK:
photog : Christian Richters
The architecture practice’s inventiveness, however, extended well beyond academia. Its portfolio encompassed housing in Basildon, Essex, an Arcadian factory complex for the engine manufacturer Cummins in Lanarkshire, and an elegantly conceived warehouse development for Habitat. The latter combined vivid green façades — reportedly inspired by the colour of Terence Conran’s Porsche — with playful landscape interventions and climbing structures designed by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi, reflecting the practice’s willingness to blur the boundaries between architecture, industry, art and everyday life.
Peter was Professor of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
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ABK: Contemporary Architecture Practice London: British design office news.
post updated 8 March 2026
ABK Building News
6 Sep 2017
Ballymun Boilerhouse Rediscovery Centre, Dublin, Ireland
photograph : Paul Tierney
Ballymun Boilerhouse Rediscovery Centre Building by ABK
The project gives a new life to Ballymun’s old Boiler House and creates a National Centre of Excellence in Education for Sustainable development. The building previously housed four 35 tonne boilers that provided district heating and hot water to the local public housing scheme realised in the 60’s and subsequently demolished.
18 Feb 2017
Richard Burton Obituary
Richard Burton Obituary by The Guardian
Richard St John Vladimir Burton, architect, born 3 November 1933; died 29 January 2017
Richard Burton, who has died aged 83, was a third of the architectural partnership of Ahrends, Burton & Koralek (ABK), alongside Peter Ahrends and Paul Koralek.
It is not particularly rare that three architects should meet as students and go on to practise together, but most unusual that all three should be involved in design and should remain lifelong friends.
The partnership survived controversy when its competition-winning extension to the National Gallery in London was dubbed a “monstrous carbuncle” by the Prince of Wales in 1984 and cancelled, and it became one of the few architecture practices founded in the early 1960s to span the gulf between the public and private sectors.
His last major project was a book about his own house, with James O Davies, which is suffused with love for his close-knit family and the craft of art and architecture.
He is survived by Mireille, by their children, Mark, David (known as Bim), Jonathan and Kate, and by eight grandchildren.
source: Richard Burton Obituary by Elain Harwood in full, dated 16 Feb 2017
13 Jul 2016
ABK – Key Projects
ABK Building News
Roscommon County Council Civic Offices, Connacht, Ireland
photograph : Christian Richters
Roscommon County Council Civic Offices Building by ABK – 13 Jul 2016
The proposed design seeks to work with the existing urban grain of the Town of Roscommon so as to create a coherent vision for the public realm. The project is composed of a series of interlocking volumes, overlaid on the historic remains of a C19th Gaol,
A Civic Precinct – Court Building, Local Area Office & Library, Kilmallock, Ireland
Date built: 2010
photograph : Christian Richters
Kilmallock Civic Building, Co. Limerick
The 1630m2 project for the town of Kilmallock proposes to reinvigorate the social and cultural life of the town, concentrating a series of key social functions to generate a new Civic Precinct – a District Court for the Department of Justice, a Local Area Office for the Local Authority, and a Branch Library together with public parking (40 spaces) for the village. The project value was €5 million Euro.
RIBA Prince Charles Lecture Boycott Letter – May 2009
Cork City Hall, Ireland
Date built: 2007
RIBA Awards 2007 : Cork City Council Civic Offices – RIBA European Award 2007
Riverside Building, Trinity Buoy Wharf, east London
Uses sea containers – mixed-use, sustainable £1.2m project
John Wheatley College, Glasgow, Scotland
Date built: 2008
photo © Keith Hunter
ABK Building : John Wheatley College – images + info
Key ABK Building – featured
Cummins Factory, Shotts, North Lanarkshire, Scotland
Date built: 1980
The Cummins Engine Factory building closed in 1997
Ahrends Burton Koralek – Projects
Hooke Park Workshop / school, Beaminster, Dorset, England
Date built: 1993
RIBA Awards 1993 Regional Award : Wessex
Docklands Light Railway, Beckton Extension, east London, UK
Date built: 1994
Dublin Dental Hospital + School, Trinity College, Eire
Dates built: 1994-98
Offaly County Council – new offices, Tullamore, Eire
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ABK : Offaly Civic Offices – RIBA Award 2003
More buildings by Ahrends Burton Koralek online soon
Location: London, south east England, UK
Ahrends Burton Koralek – Practice Information
ABK Architects studio based in London, England, UK
London Architects office
photograph : Christian Richters
Cummins Engine Factory, Yarm Road, Darlington, England, UK
Date built: 1964-65
Design: Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo
Building Grade II*
This is the first independent work of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo Architects, former associates of architect Eero Saarinen
The Cummins Engine Company was American owned.
London Architecture : news + key projects
ABK Architects – Background
Paul Koralek worked with Marcel Breuer in New York. He formed the architecture practice Ahrends Burton and Koralek in 1961. Paul Koralek graduated from the London AA in 1956.
photo : Christian Richters
Ahrends Burton Koralek were the architects of the National Gallery Extension Proposal infamously slated by Prince Charles as a ‘carbuncle’ back in the eighties. The studio lost the project – The National Gallery (off Trafalgar Square, London), went on to be designed by architects Venturi Rauch Brown:
Sainsbury Wing – National Gallery Extension, London, England
photo © Nick Weall
Sainsbury Wing – National Gallery Extension in London
English Buildings
Contemporary English Property Articles – recent architectural selection from e-architect below:
English Architecture – key architecture in England
Comments / photos for the ABK Architects page welcome
Website: Ahrends Burton Koralek Dublin, Ireland
