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British architectural historian (1945–2020) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alexander David McLees (9 November 1945- 14 June 2020).[1][2] was a British architectural historian. From 1998 to 2001, he was a director in the Executive Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB).[1]
Alexander David McLees was born in St Andrews Fife, Scotland. He was the son of Mary Adamson Syrmington, a school teacher, and Alexander Gray McLees, the deputy rector in Madras College in St Andrews. This is where McLees and his older sister Margaret completed their studies.[3] During his school years, McLees played on the college rugby team from 1962 to 1964,[4] and in 1964 he won the college's Coronation Medal for History.[5]
In 1969 he was awarded a Master of Arts degree by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he wrote his MA dissertation on parish church architecture in Gloucestershire.[6]
After his MA, McLees kept on researching British architecture. In 1972, McLees won the Reginald Taylor and Lord Fletcher essay prize from the British Archaeological Association[7] and six years later, in 1978, he became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.[8]
McLees’ most circulated work is perhaps the Cadw guide to Castell Coch, written in 1988.[9] The guide proved popular and has had two further editions: one published in 2005,[10] and the other in 2018.[11] In his research of the archives, he discovered previously unseen photographies of the castle, showing that Castell Coch had commercial vineyards before the 1930s- making it a rare case in Britain.[12]
After this first collaboration with Cadw, McLees became an Inspector of Historical Buildings for the Welsh agency.[13] McLees worked for Cadw again in 2013 in a campaign to preserve traditional Welsh terraced houses. He wrote a booklet about the historical value of such houses, with guidance on their care and preservation.[14] McLees died in June 2020.
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