Born in Rotherham in 1937, Kate Macintosh moved to Edinburgh from Cheshire at the age of 10 and studied at the city’s College of Art. On graduation, she travelled and worked in Scandinavia before joining the office of Denys Lasdun in 1964 as a member of the design team of the National Theatre. The following year she joined the Architect’s Department of the London Borough of Southwark, where she designed the Dawson Heights estate in Dulwich. In 1968 Macintosh moved to the London Borough of Lambeth, where she designed 269 Leigham Court Road, a sheltered housing development for the elderly. Her subsequent work in the public sector included sheltered housing, schools and buildings for the fire service commissioned by the counties of East Sussex and Hampshire. Later she joined her life-partner, George Finch, in private practice, winning a RIBA award, in 2005, for the design of an adventure playground in Weston, Southampton. 269 Leigham Court Road was awarded Grade II listed status in 2015 and subsequently renamed Macintosh Court in honour of its architect.
Macintosh is one of five architects features in Project Interrupted, a crowd-funded book which examines domestic architecture at the end of the post-war housing boom and today. A protracted house-building slump spanning between the 1980s and 2010s has precipitated a severe housing crisis and depleted the quality and variety of British housing architecture. However, now a generation of architects are again building characterful and innovative dwellings in the UK and in Europe.
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