Sam Scorer

Life

He was brought up in Lincoln, one of five children. His father was a senior partner in a firm of solicitors, and later became clerk to Lindsey County Council. His mother was a lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste College, a teacher training college. He went to the independent Repton School in south Derbyshire, where he became Head Boy, and excelled at drawing.

He read Mechanical Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1941, and enjoyed painting as well. He was commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and met his wife in Canada, when training to be a Fleet Air Arm pilot. He served as a fighter pilot until 1945, but was invalided out of service, having crashed attempting to land on a moving aircraft carrier in the Baltic Sea.

Combining his interest in artwork and mechanical design, he decided to become an architect. He entered the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in the second year in 1946, and graduated in 1949.

He changed his name by statutory declaration to Sam.

He married Anna Humphrey in 1943 in Kingston, Ontario. They had a son and a daughter (who died in April 1986). He lived on Gibraltar Hill in Lincoln. He died in Lincoln County Hospital in March 2003, aged 80.

Away from architecture he was a motor racing enthusiast, attending many of Europe's grand prix circuits. He owned a succession of fast cars, such as a Lotus Elan and various Jaguars, all with his personalised number plate of EVL 1. He was a Sheriff of Lincoln in the 1970s. He was a member of the Reform Club and took an interest in Liberal politics.

Career

He worked for a year as assistant to George Grey Wornum. In 1950, he began work for Denis Clarke Hall (son of Edna Clarke Hall). With Clarke Hall he designed three schools in Lincolnshire in the 1950s:

From 1954, his consultancy firm, Denis Clarke Hall, Scorer and Bright and Partners was based on Lindum Terrace in Lincoln, Scorer was the Chairman of the RIBA East Midlands planning committee. He was the first Chairman of the East Midlands Group of The Victorian Society. In 2000 he founded The Gallery, now known as the Sam Scorer Gallery, in Lincoln.

Hyperbolic paraboloid structures

Thin shell concrete roofs were invented in Germany around the 1920s, as a means of achieving large spans with limited materials and at low cost. The strength of the roof lies in its shape, and the way it carries the loads by the forces exerted in the planes of the shell, rather than by the weight of their materials. The first shell roofs were simple barrel vaults. The earliest is Wythenshawe Bus Garage, Manchester, built 1939-42. After the Second World War, the form was taken further. One of the first engineers to specialise in concrete shell techniques in Britain was the German refugee of Hungarian origin, Dr K. Hajnal-Kónyi, who arrived in London in 1936, and who worked with Sam Scorer. Scorer became fascinated by the possibilities of shell roofs as a student, and designed a hyperbolic paraboloid roof in 1956 for a water tower in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Félix Candela in Mexico was experimenting with ‘anticlastic’ or shells with double curvatures of opposing convexity and concavity, from which the hyperbolic paraboloid emerged. The form was particularly appropriate for developing countries because of its simple materials and low cost. The rationing of steel in the post-war period in Britain also was reason for the popularity of these designs. The 'hyper', as it is sometimes known, enjoyed a brief fashion, seen in buildings such as the Commonwealth Institute of 1960-2 and also the Wrexham swimming baths of 1964. Examples of Scorer's Work are:

Architectural Work by Scorer

Literature

Architectural Writing