Hope Bagenal

Philip Hope Edward Bagenal, (11 February 1888 – 20 May 1979) was a British architectural theorist and acoustician who introduced a scientific approach to the acoustic design of buildings. Education and early career

Bagenal, known by his second name, Hope, was born in Dublin, but the family moved to England when he was two years old. He attended various schools as his father moved first to the North (including St Peter's School, York) and then to East Anglia, finishing at Uppingham School. From 1905 to 1909 he studied engineering at Leeds University, but left without qualifying. He then joined an architectural practice in London and studied at the Architectural Association. In 1911 Bagenal joined Edwin Cooper and worked on the Port of London Authority building.

By March 1914, Bagenal was in contact with Wallace Sabine, who was studying the link between reverberation and absorption in auditorium design. Bagenal, with his engineering background, recognised the significance of this work to the architectural profession, and developed a career in acoustics consultancy.

Bagenal, at that time attracted by the Quakers, volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and was sent to Flanders, from where he wrote a series of articles, and poems. At the end of the Great War, the best were reprinted in Fields and Battlefields under the pseudonym No. 31540.

He returned to the Architectural Association as librarian and editor of the AA Journal, and developed his acoustics consultancy. He was as adviser to Charles Cowles-Voysey for the White Rock Pavilion, Hastings and subsequently worked on most of the major concert hall, theatre, and civic halls in the United Kingdom. His international work included the New Delhi Legislative Chamber, the Sydney Opera House and the New York Lincoln Center.

Among his most important acoustics projects were the refurbishment of the Royal Albert Hall and the construction of the Royal Festival Hall, the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, and the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. As consultant to the Building Research Station during the 1960s Bagenal investigated the weathering of buildings in London. His prolific writings expanded into new areas, including topography, history, and theology.

Reputation Bagenal was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and his work was recognised by the state in 1956 when he was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1975, Bagenal was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Institute of Acoustics.

In the 1940s, the Building Research Station constructed three blocks of flats at Abbots Langley to test new building methods, including acoustic insulation. They were named Bagenal House, Rayleigh House, and Sabine House. In a play of letters, the nomenclature not only made reference to the initials of the BRS, it also paid homage to three significant contributors to the development of architectural acoustics.

As the Dictionary of National Biography records, Hope Bagenal could be intimidating and remote: physically tall and gaunt, difficult to know, intolerant of fools, yet generous with those with whom he found an intellectual rapport. The two major technical books to which he contributed remain classics in their genres.

Publications Bagenal wrote standard text books on architecture and acoustics, but also on more general issues, as can be seen in the bibliography below. He wrote extensively on classical architecture, combining direct observation of Greek and Roman sites with speculation about the origin of classical forms, the relationship between architecture, geology, climate and landscape, and the symbolic content of architectural form.

In the 1970s, Bagenal wrote a series of letters to his niece. In these he retraced his life until 1918 and his Anglo-Irish heritage. They cover his childhood, his days serving as a sergeant in the RAMC, the interesting people he met in Cambridge with his wife, Alison, during his convalescence there in 1916, his interest in acoustics and his early days as an architect.

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