Sall, who died suddenly in the Belsize Park area of London earlier this month, lectured extensively on art and architecture and exhibited works both nationally and internationally including at several Venice Biennales.
Steve Smith, Urban Narrative director and former LSA colleague, described Sall as ‘a maverick innovator’ and ‘a campaigning hero from another time fighting alone to change the world’, adding that ‘every encounter with him was energising, enlightening and inspiring’.
After a stint in the army and after leaving South Africa, he began his architecture studies in the UK at the University of Greenwich in 1985 – working during this time at Andrews Downie & Partners – before moving on to take his Part 2 at the University of Westminster in 1989. He would return to teach at both schools.
He went on to complete a Fine Arts degree at the Chelsea School of Art & Design, finishing the course in 1994. It was there that he met his first wife, artist Emma Somerset Davis.
The pair were among the co-founders of mould-breaking art and architecture collaborative FAT that aimed to challenge the ‘orthodoxy of Modernist good taste’.
Early projects included the Anti-Oedipal House (1993), which separated children and parents, and two years later at the 1995 Venice Biennale FAT distributed business card-sized art from vending machines. Other art-led experiments by the Postmodern and pop-culture influenced group included the Red Dot campaign at the Royal Academy and his Bus Stop Art action.
Source:Clive Sall
‘Red Dot’ Royal Academy 1995
After leaving FAT in 1998 he founded Big Open Box, worked for two years at Burrell Chaudhuri Architects (2001-2002) and set up Sall, Cullinan and Buck Architects (2005).
Between 1998 and 2014 he was a senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art, becoming the acting head of its architecture department (2009-2011). It was there that he met his second wife Sara, whom he later married in 2006.
He was still teaching the MA final year at the RCA and had taught too at the Bartlett UCL, the Architectural Association and Chelsea School of Art and Design.
In 2014-2015 he helped Will Hunter in setting up the LSA, an ‘experimental Part 2-only’ school, becoming the director of the second years on the course.
At the same time he continued to run Clive Sall Architecture – which he founded in 2009 – and the linked construction company Built Ltd, which allowed him to ‘deliver a design-led turnkey service [for clients] from concept to completion’. He joined forces with Iain Carson in 2018 to form CarsonSall.
Former editor of The Architects’ Journal Isabel Allen described Sall’s relationship with architecture as ‘entirely his own: visceral, intuitive, intense’.
She said: ‘There are countless tales of Clive’s complexities and contradictions; of the elusive, quixotic intelligence that left colleagues and collaborators energised, enchanted, enraged but never bored. Of unorthodox teaching and anarchic practice. Of high-jinx and hellraising. But perhaps not enough of his ferocious loyalty to family and friends.
‘There was no better person to have on your side.’
His wife Sara Sall said: ‘He wasn’t like everyone else; he was extra-special. He taught me how to look at the whole world and the world of architecture in a different light. He was my strength and the light of our children’s life. He would sit and draw for hours in the kitchen in the evenings, and was so very talented, intelligent, and so very dedicated to his work.
‘He was generous and gentle and kind and that rare kind of person who puts others first. He always put us first and we love him so much.’
He is survived by his four children, Amelia, Hana, Adam and Joseph.
Clive Sall’s diploma thesis project
Tributes
Emma Somerset Davis
I met Clive at Chelsea Art School in 1990. I immediately fell in love with this young, working-class Jewish man, his unique creative energy and his passion for the politics of spatial art, in the works of Fluxus, Beuys, the Venturis, Foucault and Deleuze. He related his vision for a new interdisciplinary critical spatial practice, that would make interventions challenging hegemonic power systems, he was looking for an artist to work with, and I joined him in co-founding FAT. Clive and I worked alongside each other for 10 years co-making and co-curating all the FAT interdisciplinary projects until 2000.
These included Outpost, Adsite, Roadworks, Red Dot, Picnic, Anti-Oedipal House, and all the other spatial artworks and architectures until 2000.
Clive had a brilliant intellectually creative mind, as architect and artist, both highly conceptual and deeply poetic. Clive was always a progressive left-wing thinker, ardently anti-violence, anti-colonialist, and committed to education and teaching. He was also a feminist, gifting me my first Elizabeth Grosz book. His unique consideration of affect, of the body encountering hierarchies of power, through material making in space, place and time, was the driving force for the early FAT projects. It was this innovative thinking through relational spatial theory, his regard for otherness and respect for difference, that endured throughout FAT’s interdisciplinary spatial relational, new materialist and performative work.
He was ardently anti-violence, anti-colonialist, and committed to education
We married and shared immense joy at the birth of our beloved daughter Amelia in 1996, who joined my daughter Leilah, his cherished step-daughter. Clive and I remained great friends throughout his life. Just before his death we had begun to work together on archiving the FAT works we co-made, and had been collaborating on another art project. During this time Clive was full of life, passion and excitement for a future with all of his children and his grandchild. He was a deeply compassionate and empathetic man, and strived against adversity and inequality throughout his life, with his signature affirmative joy and dignity. He was the kindest, gentlest most generous man. We will forever miss him.
Malcolm McGregor, director at Pringle Richards Sharratt Architects
I first met Clive in 1986 when I arrived in Johannesburg from London. His warmth and energy were clear to see in those first heady hot summer weeks. He would turn up in his car and take me on incredible trips showing me the contradictory images of beauty that coexisted in juxtaposition with the human distress that was Apartheid South Africa. This constant desire to search out, capture, record moments was there to the end. In one of our last trips to the Knoydart peninsular in Scotland last spring I still have this amazing memory of him standing on the stern of the boat back to Mallaig filming the turbulent sea and landscape with his phone laughing out loud as waves poured over him.
After he moved to London in the early 1990s his incredible ability to deal with adversity was apparent in how he confronted having to retake his Part 1 architectural qualification. Rather than see this as a setback he presented it as a life-changing opportunity. With limited funds he had to work but found a part-time course that allowed him within three years to qualify. In many ways setting his preach-what-you-teach manner that helped him be part of the team that established the LSA.
His Part 2 was completed at Westminster finishing in Kevin Rhowbotham’s unit. One of the protagonists that also helped him set up FAT after he also completed a postgraduate art course at Chelsea. The FAT years were his most productive period and I know he was in the process, just before he died, of compiling a compendium to record the most inspirational moments like the Royal Academy Red Dot Campaign.
Clive sought to socialise and challenge established perceptions related to Art regarding its worth, value and accessibility. During the Red Dot campaign at the Royal Academy Clive and his team placed red dots on all the works of art (the dot was used to notify works already sold). By doing this it asked people to look at all art not just pieces that were sold. Just after this was the Bus Stop Art action that allowed Art to be made accessible to us all in every day spaces and helped ensure TfL’s commitment to providing public art.
He was a man of constant contradictions
Memorably, as recorded in Wikipedia, was the Business Card campaign at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Clive managed to obtain some of the UK’s great artists along with many friends, colleagues and even primary school children to create small cards. At the Biennale people collected them from vending machines across the event without knowing whether it was maybe a Tracey Emin or a nine-year-old’s from Hackney. The artist was only revealed by obtaining a visiting card album from the FAT stand at the event.
He was a man of constant contradictions. Somebody I knew I could always rely at any moment in my life but then also someone who did things that were constantly unbelievable. He would at times seem to open up his inner most secrets but then remain closed to facts that I knew were real, such as his period of military service in Mozambique or legal battles closer to home.
He had a remarkable thirst and love of living life to the full. He would always want to understand and help everybody around him. Often to the detriment of himself. It was this quality that I believe made him a special presence for so many of his students as an unforgettable educator. There was a gritty reality, an absurdity, to his language but one that always could strike a note in all our hearts that would sometimes challenge our beliefs.
He made the world a better place and will be sorely missed.
Sara Islam Sall, Clive’s second wife
Clive and I met at the RCA in 2001. We have been married since January 2006.
He was a family man. Some of you will know our story. He wasn’t like everyone else he was extra special. He taught me how to look at the whole world and the world of architecture in a different light. He was my strength and the light of our children’s life. He would sit and draw for hours in the kitchen in the evenings, and was so very talented, intelligent, and so very dedicated to his work. He was generous and gentle and kind and that rare kind of person who puts others first. He always put us first and we love him so much.
Clive Sall with Sara Sall
Paul Davies, historian and Reputations contributor to The Architectural Review
Like most people, Clive walked in to my life out of the blue. Unlike most people, I never found out where he’d come from. When I met his father (at his wedding to Sara) it felt like I was meeting an actor.
It never struck me that he had any possessions, or cared for those he might have. He could be smartly dressed, sure, but that was about it. This didn’t seem to trouble him.
I found that he could love, but not in a way that those conventionally loved would recognise. This made him enigmatic. In fact, it was Clive’s capacity to cause so much disturbance that sustained my calling him a friend (fairly constantly from 1987 to last Wednesday).
To say Clive lacked moral compass would imply that he knew what such a thing was. If he did, he ignored it. When you are young, this can be attractive, in the sense that he stood out as a bit more radical, a bit more true to life’s rebel cause, than everybody else.
How Clive got on in life was a mystery. When I discovered, living in Bethnal Green, that he was in charge of his own architectural office just around the corner (and quite a big one at that, although it was hidden from prying eyes by a huge and very solid looking gate) it took me a while to be sure that, yes, this was indeed him.
You see Clive was always here and there, never still. He didn’t fancy any kind of quiet life; cultivating himself primarily upon ambition. For what I was never quite sure, but he was kind, in that way that made you think he’d give you anything if you were to join forces. The cost? Well …
I don’t think I ever saw him eat. To say he was intelligent would be an underestimate, but I never saw him with a book either, nor talk about one. Whatever learnedness he had was immediate and to hand, like a flaming match. If he watched films he must have done so almost miraculously, and to see him actually visiting the art he talked so energetically and earnestly about would almost be a disappointment. You see, somehow, Clive didn’t seem to need to do things to be things. He was the epitome of Be-Am-Do.
And it turned out you could do a lot with such an intelligence; so un-reliant on things, but so penetrating and insistent in ‘being’ (or perhaps, becoming). Once more in Las Vegas, Clive lost his wallet. For most people this is the equivalent of a near-death experience, but Clive just gave out one of his insouciant shrugs. It was unimportant.
I don’t know how he became second in command to Nigel Coates at the RCA, or how he became a Unit Master at the AA, or how he became design director at the LSA, I know none of these things. And there was something so compelling at his rise that nobody else did either. This was a man whose life was lived only at a radius of five meters from wherever he was at the time. Without even a thought to politics, he was the master of audacity that made the rest of us rather pale. ‘C’mon heh’, ‘Absolutely’ (with that thick South African twang) were the constant rejoinders to everything.
He played Mephistopheles at our wedding in Las Vegas (2000), in a lame (perhaps more winceyette) jumpsuit and Elvis sunglasses. His performance overall is rendered as ‘magic’ by all those who can remember. When we reached LA for our Honeymoon and pulled up outside the Venice Beach House, Clive was waving out of an upstairs window. Never one to miss an opportunity, he had improvised a new company; FAT International (having been kicked out of FAT) and was presenting it at Sci-ARC and did so still wearing that same (now rather tired) jumpsuit. For some reason he had no change of clothes, no luggage at all.
As to the work, well there’s also none of it; for Clive was so without prejudice as regards to ‘standing’ within the architectural world that even his final Diploma project (where I was the proud teacher) defied all convention. It was the most stupid proposal imaginable for an art gallery, and we did it, he did it, because he believed in the fact that almost everything else was more stupid. It was produced, instead, with exceptional aplomb, and brought around, or to a head, issues of ‘surface’ over ‘content’. You won’t find him championed anywhere, but as a force, he is right there in our histories.
Clive was always in trouble. It became almost my job not to criticise Clive in life, sometimes to defend him. He was too mesmeric; he was something else. To say he was bad would be to assume he understood the word. He fell to earth, he’s gone. Bless you Clive: in whatever creed you have chosen next.
Kim Colin, a partner at Industrial Facility and a former tutor at the RCA
I am thankful that Nigel Coates had the gumption to put together two of the most unlikely people – Clive and me – to teach architecture design studios (ADS) together at the RCA. I had just moved to London from Los Angeles and I first met Clive at the Southbank, where he blurted out a rapid-fire history of the place while we walked. I thought Wow, this guy is quick. Meaning smart and fast. He displayed on that day a synthetic and astute intellect where everything historically and in pop culture was fair game; he made something beautiful of the senseless. I felt at home. I could chime in from experience across the world and we had good chemistry. Always.
We began to develop an experiment together for ADS2: What if architecture could harness the mechanisms of brands to regain lost cultural power? We learned from (outrageous) Las Vegas how space held us captive. The work was both critical and celebratory. Clive was the most inspiring and dedicated teacher, with fearless energy to say what needed to be said, to ask and to push everyone to be their creative best. He had extremely high standards. We taught undergraduates together at the AA at the same time, and here I saw him lead younger, skills-hungry students to find their critical position. I told him he had to slow down – most 20-year-olds had no idea the references he made, the call-to-arms he was making. I let him run with it; he could not alter his pace. He laughed.
Clive was the kindest, most kindred spirit to me, in a new city, at that time. I am ever grateful to him for bringing London to life, for his boundless energy and understanding, for demonstrating the dedication and love it takes to be a great teacher, and for always having that special twinkle in his eye. I will remember him forever with love.
Isabel Allen, is the editor of Architecture Today and former editor of The Architects’ Journal
It’s odd paying tribute to a person who wouldn’t mind if nobody wrote anything at all. Clive couldn’t care less. Not at all. Not one jot. He wouldn’t read it anyway. He didn’t do social media. He didn’t read the mags. He wasn’t interested in awards or accolades or stylistic affiliations, or any of the other props that sustain and determine the tribal pecking order of the architectural milieu.
His relationship with architecture was entirely his own: visceral, intuitive, intense. He loved meandering through the city, ‘discovering’ architectural curiosities in his own time, and on his own terms. He was delighted to stumble across Amin Taha’s rough-hewn stone house in Clerkenwell, bewitched by its bold other-worldliness and entirely oblivious to the fact that it had been hotly contested at planning stage and widely debated in the architectural press.
His relationship with architecture was entirely his own: visceral, intuitive, intense
He simply didn’t have time for popular opinion. Figuratively or literally. At the time of his death, he was juggling various architectural projects whilst working on a conceptual art project that could loosely be characterised as a contemporary take on Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. Its aim was to explore the potential of artificial intelligence to mine images from our shared cultural memories and to harvest and process this data into works of art that captured the scale and horror of modern-day catastrophes. It’s impossible to imagine anybody other than Clive negotiating fees with a commercial client on his mobile, while contemplating an image of the refugee crisis in the style of Hieronymus Bosch.
There are countless tales of Clive’s complexities and contradictions; of the elusive, quixotic intelligence that left colleagues and collaborators energised, enchanted, enraged but never bored. Of unorthodox teaching and anarchic practice. Of high-jinx and hellraising. But perhaps not enough of his ferocious loyalty to family and friends.
Nights out were frequently interrupted, or cut short, so Clive could walk his colleague, the elderly academic Peter Buchanan, home to his flat in Belsize Park. When Clive got wind of the fact that Peter’s health was being impacted by poor living conditions, he and his great friend and LSA colleague Will Hunter staged an intervention, relocating Peter to Will’s flat while clearing and refurbishing their colleague’s living space. Clive carried out a comprehensive renovation, without charging a dime.
When Peter was admitted to hospital with cancer, Clive was a constant visitor, supplying food packages and The Guardian, chivvying friends and students to rally round, checking the visitor book to make sure those who had promised to visit had actually turned up, cajoling care home workers into taking special care of him, and reminding kitchen staff not to put salad cream on Peter’s food.
There was no better person to have on your side.
Clive Sall with Will Hunter
Will Hunter, founder of the London School of Architecture and a former tutor at the RCA
Over the past decade, Clive and I worked very closely and well together, first, teaching at the Royal College of Art, then establishing the London School of Architecture, speaking on the phone at least weekly, and sometimes much more. A short tribute is a poor vessel to carry all these memories.
First off, Clive’s contribution to the LSA was immense and unique. The school as an idea emerged at the time we were teaching together at the RCA, and he worked with me on it pretty much from the outset. He put in huge effort for free to get the school started, as part of a collective of contributors, and he stuck around to get the job done.
Conversations since his death with former colleagues and students have produced recurring themes. Many have noted the soft interior inside the harder shell. I think the ex-military strong-man routine was performed to entertain and was never meant to be taken at face value. To me he was the Jack Reacher of architectural education: strong, capable and with a street-smart sense of right and wrong.
Though energetic, charismatic and not shy, he was devoid of ego
He treated students as his peers and conversed with them as such; his rapid-fire delivery was meant to brighten the scene like fireworks. Mostly students understood this and reciprocated his bravura performance like a pantomime audience, warming to their participatory role. He burned bright to enlighten others rather than attract attention to himself; he took a dim view of those who saw crits as a platform to showboat or talk about themselves.
He always had compassion and care for those in his charge. If he ever swung a real punch, it was only ever upwards, to those he felt were behaving not in the best interests of others.
Many have noted his incredible generosity with time, energy and money. All of that is true. I’d also add his loyalty. He particularly stood up for Nigel Coates at the RCA in a challenging period, when it counted. Later, at the LSA, when it emerged a vulnerable colleague needed help, Clive put his own team of builders to work for six weeks to renovate their apartment.
Clive was one of the few people I would trust with my life.
Though energetic, charismatic and not shy, he was devoid of ego. For someone with incredible ambition, he had no overarching goal for it, let alone measures of success. He was perhaps more about beginnings, the chemical reaction of his idea meeting someone else’s, and the spark of creativity that resulted.
And what aspects of Clive were better hidden? He could be an able bureaucrat: quoting some obscurantist but apt bit of policy (which you would have bet he’d never read) to a visiting panel, to their nods of approval.
His teaching developed considerably, in line with his practice. His diploma project about surface over content turned naturally into FAT, then morphed into branding, before becoming much more engaged with the reality of making the city through design’s intersection with politics, finance and development.
His pedagogical shift at the LSA was borne of the belief that students needed to understand the levers of power to effect change. It was a genuine shedding of the RCA work’s focus on the drawing into a different phase of his teaching. It was an evolution, not a repeat.
It occurs to me that he may have approached the role of developer almost like an art practice in itself. His willingness to dress the building in the skin of the client’s choosing, picked from models dressed as if for a shop window, feels in the same intellectual lineage as his diploma thesis project, an art gallery reductio ad absurdum about surfaces. In the end perhaps nothing is more subversive than playing it completely straight?
I was lucky to have met him; lucky he picked me out to teach with him when I was a recent grad; and lucky he gave me the confidence to take on such a huge challenge as setting up a school. He made me bolder. He was also terrific fun. He is gone far too soon. But – WOW! – he sure lived his life.
The Board of Trustees of the London School of Architecture is saddened to hear of the death of Clive Sall.
On behalf of the London School of Architecture, its staff, faculty and students, we extend our deepest condolences to Clive’s family and his friends.
— The London School of Architecture (@LSofARCH) February 24, 2023