“If my brother had become an accountant, I’d have become an accountant,” said Philip Powell at a meeting last month of DoCoMoMo, the society dedicated to the documentation and conservation of the Modern Movement of which he was honorary president. Instead Michael Powell became an architect, and his brother, five years younger, duly followed him to the Architectural Association. “Two Powells and one Moya equalled ‘Powell and Moya’,” he explained, although his brother Michael soon left for the more secure world of the London County Council’s Schools Division. Michael’s early death in 1970 still upset Philip 30 years later.The Powells’ father, Canon A.C. Powell, had been Headmaster of Bedford Modern School and then of Epsom College.

Philip Powell was born in Bedford, in 1921, and went to school at Epsom. Despite the shortage of work, the Second World War years were exciting times in which to become an architect. The Architectural Association was evacuated to Hadley Wood, where Powell, Moya and their contemporaries shared a house, and they repeated the experience back in London, where they, their friends, wives and girlfriends moved into the Little Boltons. Powell finally bought the house in 1957.The regular articulation of the pairs of villas informed the regular rhythms and comfortable proportions of his own work, very different though it was in style. It was there that Powell and Moya drew out their entry to Westminster City Council’s competition in 1945 for housing in Pimlico, Churchill Gardens. It was the first competition held after the war and, against a strong field and aged only 24 and 23 respectively, Powell and Moya won.Theirs was a humane modernism, despite the necessarily high densities. The lines of flats, angled to the river, were tempered by a sinuous road curving between them, by jaunty rooftop lift towers, children’s playgrounds and brilliant colours.

The round glass accumulator tower, which stored waste heat from Battersea Power Station across the river, acted as a further foil, as did the Georgian terrace and Victorian pub the architects insisted on retaining as part of the scheme. Powell and Moya won a Civic Trust Award for the buildings, and also one for the landscaping.Yet, whereas other architects can be precious about their buildings, Powell was cheerfully content to see changes made, and freely advised Westminster on alterations to the blocks in the 1990s. He combined a genuine modesty with a dry wit and steely intelligence. While Moya immersed himself in design work, Powell could combine design with administration and committee meetings, necessary for a small practice often engrossed for years in the design of large hospitals or university complexes.Powell and Moya’s work personifies the best of post-war architecture. At a time when jobs were scarce, they won another competition, in 1950, for a vertical feature at the Festival of Britain.