Draft:Julian Keable

Julian Keable
Born	28 November 1929
Died	27 January 2022 (aged 92)
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Alma mater	The Architectural Association, London
Occupation	Architect
Years active	1955-2019
Spouse	Verena
Children	Georgiana, Crispin and Professor Rowland Keable
Parent(s)	Geoffrey and Gladys
Practice	UK, Europe & Africa

Julian Keable FRIBA (1929–2022) was a British architect also active in the development of passive solar design, solar energy and hydrogen in particular as well as earth building and other low carbon technologies. He was the director of UK Solar ISIS. He was also well known for his work pioneering Technical Standards for rammed earth structures in Africa.

Early life and education

Keable was the son of a radical communist couple, the Vicar Rev'd Geoffrey and Mrs Gladys Keable. With no family money, he won a scholarship first to St Christopher School, Letchworth, and then to the Architectural Association (AA) shortly after World War II. At St Christopher’s he was away from his heavily bombed home town of Canterbury, an only child who thrived with mixed company. The school was ‘progressive’ which meant queuing up to wash crockery with the teachers and electing an executive student council every year (which annulled all previous rules and wrote a new set). At the AA, he was one of a few school leavers studying mostly with de-mobbed servicemen who had their thoughts on radical Christianity or Communism shaped by what they experienced in the war. School and college were therefore hugely influential in a period of massive social change and informed his working life profoundly. He took a holiday in Israel planning to work on the kibbutz. Discovering they were desperate for architects, the head of the AA agreed to let him practice there for half a year. On his return to London, he shocked the family by living in sin with his girlfriend Verena, a school teacher - wanting to see if this partnership would work. After a few years trial, their small wedding was celebrated by a walk through London’s parks and lasted for 68 years. During that time he played gonggong with Desmond Te’s Gold Coast band, the start of a number of musical influences which also shaped his life. Desmond was one of the very few people at their wedding.

Career

Keable set up several busy practices in Islington Council's Planning Design Team with fellow AA students, Harley Sherlock, Alan Emerson, Harry Spencer, Mervyn Crosley and Malcolm Andrews. In 1957, he and Verena sold everything and travelled in a Land-Rover to Turkey and Iran.

In the early 1960s with Triad Architects he achieved a level of success commercially, including the commission to build the first purpose-built UK Hilton Hotel on Holland Park, a block from the family home. He was responsible for the design of Holmefield House on Kensal Road. At the end of the decade, he and the family moved a little further north to a big house near Ladbroke Grove where he began experimenting with energy, heat and power, following the oil shocks of the early 1970s and the growing realisation of the damage to lives and the environment caused by pollution and fossil fuels. He took an early interest in the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth. He put a wind turbine on the roof to generate 12v power, long before LED bulbs were invented.

This work continued with his new multi-disciplinary practice Helix Multi Professional Services, established by Keable to integrate architecture, engineering, M&E, surveying to better achieve thermally efficient buildings.

Research, development and other projects

The dynamic between architecture and energy was a rich theme in Keable's work: energy embedded in materials; energy in the use of buildings. He both researched and built for a wide range of approaches, both architectural and technical.

Heat pumps

In 1975 he installed a commercial air source heat pump in the roof of the family home in Ladbroke Grove. This heated two massive water reservoirs in the basement and then pumped warm water though night storage heaters adapted to carry pipes instead of wires and he wrote about it as a contributor in Gordon Rattray Taylor's anthology. He also wrote a paper in 1977 which examined the use of heat pumps for housing based on this experience and concluded that it was a viable way to end reliance on oil and gas for domestic heating. This pre-dated UK government policy by about 50 years.

Farm scale bio-digestors

Early projects with Helix Multi Professional Services saw the development of farm scale bio-digesters at Bore Place dairy farm in Kent for which he won prizes.

Rammed earth

In the late 1970s, Keable was asked for his opinion on building without cement for the new Tanzanian capital Dodoma. He referred back to Clough Williams-Ellis seminal work and discarded all but the Pisé, generally called rammed earth. This led to pilot projects in Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Malawi through the late 1970s until the early 1990s. Towards the end of that time he became the project manager of the Overseas Development Agency's project to codify rammed earth in an African context, which became 'Rammed Earth Structures: a Code of practice'. The Code of practice became a national Standard in Zimbabwe, then a Southern African Development Community Standard (SADCSTAN-standards harmonisation) and finally Keable's book was adopted as an African Regional Standard.

Double envelope housing

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Keable worked on different approaches to passive heating and cooling. Starting with the idea of a Trombe wall double envelopes developed the captured heat behind south facing glass of the Trombe and channelled it across the ceiling into a highly insulated back wall and down under the floor where it flowed back into the south facing wall. This produced a convection current of warm air which surrounded each level of occupation, buffering daytime heat into mass in walls, ceilings and floors. The Raymont House report is a detailed description with images, drawings, measured results which showed the effectiveness of the system long before Passivhaus.

Roofing

In the same period of the 1970s and 1980s Keable also sought to develop low cost and low energy roofing for Africa.

Hydrogen solar

Keable's final great interest was hydrogen: A technology which could split water into hydrogen and oxygen with direct solar energy came from the development of this novel technology which Keable championed and funded into a full blown start-up.

The Pyramids

In the mid 1980s, an old friend of Keable's, Peter Hodges, a master builder, died suddenly. His widow Margaret brought Keable a manuscript to see if it could be published. This became 'How the Pyramids Were Built'. After reading it in one sitting Keable advised that more work needed doing to fully de-bunk the old theories around ramps, arguing that block flow to achieve placement of 2.5m, 2500KG units over 20 years could only be achieved by humans using simple tools and simple physics which he and the book set out. It became another area for practical examination, to prove to himself Hodges's theory was as simple and applicable as it turned out to be. Sir Hugh Casson reviewed the book favourably, calling it a '...serious, well-researched and fascinating study...'

Legacy

An obituary was published in the AA's weekly newsletter. He was also a supporter of Earth Building UK & Ireland (EBUKI). Part of his archive has been made available to the wider public courtesy of the Blower Foundation, a UK based registered charitable trust dedicated to saving and making accessible online, a trove of architectural archives and records from the the last 150 years.

Bibliography

• "Rammed Earth Structures: A Code of Practice", Julian and Rowland Keable, Intermediate Technology Publications, 1996 (paperback, ISBN 1-85339-350-9).
• "How the Pyramids Were Built", Peter Hodges and Julian Keable, Element Books, 1989 (paperback, ISBN 1-85230-127-9)
• "An Architect in Islington", Harley Sherlock, The Islington Society, 2006 (paperback, ISBN 978-0954149024)
• "Helix Raymont Passive Solar Project" (for the Directorate-General for Energy Commision of the European Communities) 1981

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 1929 births
• 21st-century English architects
• Alumni of the Architectural Association School of Architecture
• Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects