Martin Pawley was the most intriguing British architectural commentator of the late 20th century. He was at once the most serious and the most mischievous. Long before his time, he was a pioneer of recycling and sustainability in architecture. Yet he came to denounce the contemporary practice of sustainability as “utterly meaningless”.

At heart he was a Modernist, deriding Post-Modernism and what he saw as its fundamentally unserious intellectual foundations. Yet he understood that Modernism, like any other movement, was sustained by myths.

He was not a proselytiser of any particular architectural stylistic cause as architectural commentators are wont to be. Although he wrote the architectural hagiographies that most freelance architectural journalists have to write to survive, his main interest was the broad context in which architecture operated. He will also be remembered as an incisive architectural columnist, for which he won a number of awards, and as a brilliant contrarian. Six years ago he argued against prevailing wisdoms thus: “Cars rescue people from cities, offering a way of escape from urban concentrations - to the freedom of low-density living.”

Pawley was born in 1938 in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, and studied architecture at the Oxford School of Architecture, the École Normale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, and at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, then still a hotbed of architectural experiment and innovation. He graduated in 1968 and soon returned to teach at the AA.

He moved to the US in 1973 where he taught as a visiting professor at Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, both in New York State, UCLA and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University before returning to Britain where he was appointed editor of the architectural weekly Building Design. He was subsequently the architecture critic of The Guardian and later The Observer. He was also a regular contributor to the BBC Two arts programme The Late Show. Until recently he wrote a weekly column in the Architects' Journal.

His first important book was Architecture Versus Housing in 1971. In the following year, as a consequence of its radical propositions about construction methods, he was asked by the Chilean Government to advise it on building with recycled materials. He began a programme, which included a short period of research with Cornell students, about emergency housing construction based on re-using parts of vehicles. The enterprise collapsed with the coup against Salvador Allende's Government and the Pinochet dictatorship, but Pawley went on to advise the UN on the use of recycled materials in building construction and to publish a book in 1975, based partly on his Chilean experience, called Garbage Housing.

It included a large section on a Heineken experiment with beer bottles designed to be used as interlocking building bricks. In the next book, Home Ownership (1978), he developed his long-held position that there was little to choose between renting a home and buying one on a mortgage. He had been working on a book with the working title Extreme Architecture, but his last major published work was Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age (1990), a title whose similarity to Reyner Banham's seminal Theory and Design in the First Machine Age was thought to be a little presumptuous despite Pawley's many talents.

The pattern of Pawley's writing was developed early at the AA where his weekly tabloid, Ghost Dance Times, regularly irritated the school's managers and any architect who happened to read it. The school's head closed it down. His post-graduation job was as an assistant news editor on the rather establishment weekly Architects' Journal where standards of reporting were held in high regard. His later disregard for exactitude was probably formed as a reaction. An admiring journalist colleague recently wrote of him: “He was by some distance the most unscrupulous journalist I ever worked with. He wrote headlines first, then retrofitted the story. He made things up.”

Pawley and his third wife had moved to Somerton in Oxfordshire when three years ago the combination of Parkinson's disease and dementia began to impair his thinking and writing. He remained as courteously cantankerous as ever while working on a collection of his essays, The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism, published by Black Dog. Early reviews had been favourable. Professor Colin Davies wrote: “Reading a Pawley piece is a risky business. You are certain to be provoked and you may well find yourself satirised and sidelined ... He sees what everybody else has missed.”

Pawley died a few days before its formal publication. He is survived by his wife, Philippa, and by three sons.

Martin Pawley, architectural critic and teacher, was born on March 21, 1938. He died on March 9, 2008, aged 69