David Parkes designed Britain’s first sheltered housing scheme for elderly people in Stevenage in 1962 and went on to found one of the world’s biggest housing architecture practices, PRP.

He was one of the architects behind the seminal research at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government which pioneered building techniques for a generation of schools and homes. He was also involved in writing the influential Parker Morris report in 1961, from which the Parker Morris standards became mandatory for all housing schemes from 1967-80 — standards which Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has talked about enforcing again in the capital.

Out of this formative research, which involved Parkes collaborating with sociologists, came his design for Britain’s first sheltered housing project for elderly people, in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. As people began to live longer, housing the elderly was becoming a challenge for local authorities, and in some cases elderly people were being accommodated in former mental hospitals.

Ross Court provided 24 flats intended to allow elderly people to live securely but independently with control of their own front doors. The flats were small and convenient, with fixtures and fittings ergonomically designed for ease of use. Each block had a warden and shared kitchen areas to foster a sense of community. The experiment proved to be a success, and local authorities and housing associations adopted similar schemes up and down the country.

The sheltered housing was typical of the kind of contribution Parkes made to residential design: His great gift was his interest in people and in engaging the “end user” to design spaces that would suit them.

David Henry Parkes was born in Heston, Middlesex, in 1931 and brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist. He moved to Frome, Somerset, in 1940 where his father was borough engineer. After attending Hugh Sexey School in Bruton, and National Service in the Royal Artillery, he studied architecture at the RWA school of architecture in Bristol where he met Peter Phippen and Peter Randall with whom he would later found PRP.

While there he was greatly influenced by the Bauhaus architectural philosophy espoused by his tutors. The Bauhaus school, under the great Modernist Walter Gropius, had an industrial aesthetic that would prepare Parkes well for his later research for the government but it also put great emphasis on combining craft with architecture and integrating design and construction. As the practical workshop of the Modernist movement it suited Parkes who was already well versed in woodcraft. He was also a very practical person who was expert with his hands, as well as a fine draughtsman with a good eye for perspective and illustration.

However, this learning environment was disrupted when the governors of the RWA took exception to what they considered the unacceptably subversive views of three tutors. They were forced to resign, and Parkes left the school in protest. He finished his studies at the Birmingham School of Architecture, where the principal Douglas Jones had created a course to involve the students in real commissions. Parkes obtained a commission for the first of three houses in Somerset.

Once qualified, Parkes’s big break in 1956 was a job with the Ministry of Education research and development department, which was experimenting with new forms of construction, partly in answer to the continuing postwar shortage of building materials and the lack of people with skills in traditional building trades, such as bricklayers, and partly to find ways to create quality public buildings more quickly and cheaply.

Parkes was part of a team looking at industrialised building systems for schools. He moved to a similar role at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1960-63 and was involved in teams that deconstructed the British living room and studied light fittings, furniture, heating systems and acoustic performance.

He was thoroughly immersed in the architectural vocabulary of postwar rebuilding and would be involved in many new town developments in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1963 and now working for the architecture practice RMJM, another of his R&D innovations came to fruition with the design of student housing at the University of York, one of the new campus universities built in the early 1960s.