Raglan Squire’s architectural practice could scarcely have been more adaptable. He designed temporary postwar housing, converted to flats one of London’s most expensive squares, designed a suite of Hilton hotels in Asia and undertook varied commissions all over the world.

Raglan Squire was born at Chiswick in 1912, one of the four children of Sir John Squire, the editor of The London Mercury. He was educated at Blundell’s School and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied architecture. Afterwards he continued to do so in the hard but practical way, working first in a builder’s yard and then in various architects’ offices, while at the same time studying for the RIBA examinations at polytechnic evening classes. He qualified in 1937.

From 1938 until the outbreak of war he was secretary of the Architecture Club, which his father had founded, and in 1940 he became secretary of the RIBA’s postwar reconstruction committee. Meanwhile he spent four years serving with the Royal Engineers.

Together with Rodney Thomas and Edric Neel he designed the Arcon house, one of the more successful of the postwar temporary houses, of which tens of thousands were built between 1945 and 1949 as part of the Temporary Housing Programme. It was hoped that temporary housing — most of it with a ten to fifteen-year projected lifespan — could accommodate those made homeless by the Blitz and new couples who had married and had children in the war years.

Of 15 different brands of prefabricated dwelling, 156,667 were built in total across the country. Of those, almost 39,000 were Arcons: the design was the second most popular after the prosaically-named Aluminium Bungalow (B2). Despite the short life intended for the buildings, a number of Arcons were still going strong in Newport, Wales, in 2000, though they were then pulled down as part of a millennium rebuilding project.

In 1948 Squire’s firm converted all the houses around Eaton Square into flats on behalf of the Grosvenor Estate. Before the war, 90 per cent of the houses in Belgravia had been occupied by single families, with servants living in the attics and working in the basements. By the time of derequisitioning after 1945, only about 5 per cent were so occupied, and few families could afford the upkeep of such large properties. It had been decided that Belgrave Square would become a diplomatic area, but in its determination to keep Eaton Square residential, the estate commissioned Squire’s firm to subdivide the houses.

Squire devised a plan to create luxurious new living spaces, ingeniously linking them horizontally without disturbing the historic facades. He converted both the north and the south sides of the square, and commented drily that the properties which fetched the most money in the end — the garden maisonettes and the glass-fronted penthouse flats on the top floors — had originally been the kitchens and the servants’ quarters.

In 1948, too, Squire and the widow of his friend Derek Rawnsley chartered an aircraft and flew to France to persuade Picasso, Léger, Braque, Dufy and Matisse to design original work for the School Prints series which Rawnsley had started. The enterprise had been continued by his wife, with Squire as chairman, and the French venture came from a wish to rid the company of its image as a stale retailer of Old Masters in reproduction.

Flying over without appointments, the pair bearded Léger, who instantly agreed to the proposal when told that the pictures were to be circulated in schools.

“C’est pour les enfants du monde? Of course I will do it,” he said. The pair then flew to the South, where without an appointment they encountered Picasso on the beach and, over lunch at his studio, explained the proposal. Matisse, Braque and Dufy also agreed, and later in its life the company enjoyed exclusive rights to prints by others such as Henry Moore.

After the war, Squire served briefly on the council of the Architectural Association. In 1952, after independence, the Burmese Government engaged the services of certain British architects and engineers to design state projects. Raglan Squire & Partners received the commission for a new engineering college at Rangoon University, a job which required him to travel extensively to Burma at a time when few other British companies were active in the area. Once the work was finished, Squire returned to England, but set up an offshoot in Singapore. Today it is one of the island’s leading practices, largely Chinese-run but still trading under the name of RSP. During the 1950s and 1960s Squire’s firm also built banks and offices in Bahrain and Singapore, a hospital in Malacca and many multistory hotels.

It also built up a flourishing practice in the Middle and Far East during the years when the countries of those regions, many of them suddenly enriched by oil, first sought the help on an ambitious scale of Western building experience and technology. Proposals for a hotel in Kuwait (subsequently abandoned) drew the attention of a construction company which had been retained by the Shah to build a hotel in Tehran. Squire’s firm drew up the plans for the hotel, which the Shah asked the Hilton chain to take over early in the development stages. Through his association with the company, Squire drew commissions to design the Hiltons at Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Jakarta, Tunis and Nicosia as well.

Squire was a man of energy and enterprise, adept especially at the business and organisational side of architecture but with a good deal of aesthetic flair as well. This showed especially in his winning submission to the international competition in 1957 for a mausoleum at Karachi for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. With Sir Robert Matthew, he devised a structure composed of six hyperbolic paraboloids which formed a vast star-shaped pavilion in concrete over the site of the tomb. The upper surface was to be covered with gold mosaic, and the interior painted in pale blue: wide flights of steps would lead up the sides of the slope to the pavilion, with waterfalls and standing pools surrounding them. The international jury awarded first prize to the design, but at the last minute Squire was called in by the promoters and told that Jinnah’s sister was unhappy with the project. “You couldn’t put a little dome on top?” they asked. “We were hoping for something a bit more like the Taj Mahal.” Squire withdrew the project.

He was a man of varied interests, being, among other things, a dedicated yachtsman and ocean racer. During the Sixties, his company designed the Hamble Marina in Hampshire, one of the first serious marinas in the United Kingdom. Late in life, he took avidly to gardening, and in 1985 he published a briskly written autobiography, Portrait of an Architect.

In 1938 he married Rachel Atkey. After her death in 1968, he married, in the same year, Bridget (Delia) Lawless. He is survived by his third wife, Mabel, and two sons from his first marriage.

Raglan Squire, architect, was born on January 30, 1912. He died on May 18, 2004, aged 92.