Nicholas Terry was a classic example of the self-effacing architect; someone who believed wholeheartedly in collaborative working rather than the cult of the individual superstar. After furthering his career internationally, he rose to become head of Britain’s biggest firm of multi-discipline architects, engineers and designers, BDP. As a meticulous designer himself, he was heavily involved in two of the largest and highest-profile recent cultural projects in London: the rebuilding and refurbishment of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (in collaboration with the architects Dixon Jones), and the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington. Equally adept at office and retail buildings and interior design, Terry was one of architecture’s quiet organisers and progressives.

Nicholas John Terry was born in 1947 and educated at Bilborough Grammar School, Nottingham, and the University of Bath School of Architecture. In 1970 he was married to a fellow student and architect, Dorothy Atkins, also a fellow perfectionist, and together they set up a small business based in Bath. When Terry gained his qualifications in 1972, however, the couple decided to move in a different direction. They were interviewed for a job with the charismatic founder of BDP (then Building Design Partnership), the socialistically inclined, Lancashire-based Sir George Grenfell-Baines. He was a pioneer of convergence and integration between the professions. Architects, engineers, planners, cost consultants and all types of other designers would do better work if they all worked collaboratively in groups under the same roof, Grenfell-Baines believed. He disapproved of “signature” architects, and had removed his name from his own firm, relaunching it as BDP in 1961.

By 1972 it was plain that the idea worked. BDP, with its cult of anonymous work for the common good, was also becoming a design powerhouse. Impressed by the ideology, the Terrys joined BDP together and worked as a team in its Manchester office. At this time they participated in projects such as an ambitious scheme to rescue the near-derelict historic Albert Dock complex in Liverpool — the plan being to convert it to house what was then Liverpool Polytechnic. In the dire economic climate of the early 1970s, the scheme was axed, and it was to be another decade before — in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots — Albert Dock was finally rescued as a cultural and commercial centre.

Terry saw some of his early projects built — such as the acclaimed Millburngate shopping centre in the historic context of Durham, for which his drawings were exhibited in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. But by 1975, with Britain in a deep economic slump, the Terrys quit the UK for Vancouver in Canada. There they worked, among others, for the Canadian Modernist master Arthur Erickson, before returning to Britain. By 1981 Terry was managing director of the British arm of a large American firm, Heery International. His noted organisational skills had made him a master of the exacting science of the office fit-out. Now with a young daughter, the Terrys took time out to build the first of two family houses for themselves in a Cambridgeshire village.

That done, it was back into the life of the large practice. Terry rejoined BDP in 1990, was a director by 1995 and was elected chairman in 2002. Typically of the ethos of the firm, he did not cease to design despite holding administrative positions and many posts on cross-industry organisations. Starting with shopping and interiors projects, he soon moved into other sectors.

It was as chairman of BDP that he saw one of his most complex jobs — the painstaking lottery-funded upgrading of the Albert Hall — finally completed. In some ways it was a perfect example of a Nick Terry/BDP project. It was large and complex, involving the weaving together of the skills of several design disciplines, all carried out in thoroughgoing but near invisible fashion, with the minimum period of shutdown for the popular venue. There is much ingenious engineering and new accommodation in the revamped Albert Hall — most of it concealed beneath its south steps.

Terry was perhaps too much the backroom professional to be able easily to adapt to the high-profile role of chairman of such a large enterprise as BDP. Affable and undemonstrative, noted for his collection of eye-searing ties, he was, however, not a man given to self-promotion. He was more than happy to step down from the chair in 2006 and resume his multifarious design-related activities — among them the vital business of harmonising design systems internationally. With BDP now building in many parts of the globe, Terry became an expert in this field. As chairman of the international BuildingSmart alliance he was due to speak at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Paris conference last year when he was struck down with the aggressive cancer that was to kill him a year later. Until then he had been a fit, trim non-smoker who loved walking the Lake District fells.

His colleagues remember him as being a generous and serious-minded architect, a lover of explanatory diagrams who would put in long hours to get the details just right — and in whose minimalistically designed Cambridgeshire home nothing was ever out of place.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and a daughter.

Nicholas Terry, architect, was born on November 12, 1947. He died on November 30, 2008, aged 61