Philip Hope Edward Bagenal, OBE (11 February 1888 – 20 May 1979) was a British architectural theorist and acoustician who introduced a scientific approach to the acoustic design of buildings.
Bagenal, known by his second name, Hope, was born in Dublin, but the family moved to England when he was two years old.
In 1911 Bagenal joined Edwin Cooper and worked on the Port of London Authority building.
By March 1914, Bagenal was in contact with Wallace Sabine, who was studying the link between reverberation and absorption in auditorium design.
Bagenal, with his engineering background, recognised the significance of this work to the architectural profession, and developed a career in acoustics consultancy.
Bagenal, at that time attracted by the Quakers, volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps and was sent to Flanders, from where he wrote a series of articles, and poems.
He was wounded at the Somme, where he was awarded the DCM, and convalesced at the army's 1st Eastern General Hospital, Cambridge.
Here he met the physicist Alex Wood, with whom he later wrote the pioneering text, Planning for Good Acoustics (1931).
He resumed his architectural career in 1917 and moved into Leaside, a cottage in the Lea Valley, with his extended family in a house partly dating back to early 1800s, surrounded by ancient woodland.
The house in due course became a refuge and meeting place for numerous visitors, from explorers (Sandy Wollaston) to musicians (Toni and Rosi Grunschlag), from psychiatrists (John Layard and Donald Winnicott) to artists (Elinor Darwin and Margaret Calkin James), all held captive by the genius loci of the valley and the warmth and hospitality of the family who lived there.
[3] He returned to the Architectural Association as librarian and editor of the AA Journal, and developed his acoustics consultancy.
His international work included the New Delhi Legislative Chamber, the Sydney Opera House and the New York Lincoln Center.
[4] He toured widely, drawing and photographing classical buildings, and studied in Italy and Greece in 1925 and 1926.
During World War II, Bagenal worked at the Building Research Station as a scientific officer.
Bagenal played a pivotal role in establishing the acoustic research agenda in Britain, introducing advances in the science to the British construction industry.
Throughout his career, Bagenal was preoccupied with the acquisition of measured acoustic data from myriad sites, ranging from cathedrals to concert halls, inserting this corpus of information into his ongoing refinement of predictive models that were to established as principles for design and construction.
His prolific writings expanded into new areas, including topography, history, and theology.
In a play of letters, the nomenclature not only made reference to the initials of the BRS, it also paid homage to three significant contributors to the development of architectural acoustics.
As the Dictionary of National Biography records, Hope Bagenal could be intimidating and remote: physically tall and gaunt, difficult to know, intolerant of fools, yet generous with those with whom he found an intellectual rapport.
[4] Bagenal wrote standard text books on architecture and acoustics, but also on more general issues, as can be seen in the bibliography below.