Ralph Erskine, CBRE, RFS, ARIBA (February 24, 1914 – March 16, 2005) was an architect and planner who lived and worked in Sweden for most of his life.
Erskine was born in 1914, in Monliaws, Northumberland, but spent his childhood in Mill Hill in the London Borough of Barnet (North London). His parents were socialists, adherents of the Fabian Society, which promoted the idea of the evolution of Britain into a socialist state.
His Scottish father w...
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Ralph Erskine, CBRE, RFS, ARIBA (February 24, 1914 – March 16, 2005) was an architect and planner who lived and worked in Sweden for most of his life.
Erskine was born in 1914, in Monliaws, Northumberland, but spent his childhood in Mill Hill in the London Borough of Barnet (North London). His parents were socialists, adherents of the Fabian Society, which promoted the idea of the evolution of Britain into a socialist state.
His Scottish father was a Presbyterian minister but his parents nonetheless sent him to the Quaker school at Friends School Saffron Walden (1925-1931), probably because of their socialist beliefs. There, he became committed to the Quaker ideals, which laid the foundation for his views on society, man's place in it, and on architecture.
During the 1930s, Erskine studied architecture for five years at the Regent Street Polytechnic, London under the direction of Thornton White. At the time, White’s curriculum required the study of classical architecture before...
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