Catherine Ailsa "Kate" Macintosh is a Scottish architect. She designed Dawson's Heights in Southwark and 269 Leigham Court Road, a Grade II listed building in Lambeth. She studied at the Edinburgh School of Art, now part of Heriot-Watt University. After graduating in 1961, she spent a year studying in Warsaw on a scholarship from the British Council, then worked in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki before returning to the United Kingdom in 1964, when she was recruited to Denys Lasdun's National Theatre Team.
She left the project soon afterwards in 1965 to work for local authorities in Southwark, designing public buildings. There, she designed the Dawson's Heights social housing estate in Dulwich.
She joined Lambeth's Architects' Department in 1968. The department was led by Lambeth's Director of Architecture and Planning, Edward (Ted) Hollamby (1921-99), a committed socialist and a talented architect and planner. Under Hollamby, Lambeth's architects produced a diverse stock of housing and welfare buildings, the borough now recognised as being second only to Camden nationally in the ambition and quality of its output. Provision for the elderly included a number of residential homes, houses and flats within its mixed residential schemes, and sheltered housing, of which Macintosh's No. 269 Leigham Court Road is the stand-out example.
Macintosh left Lambeth in 1972 and worked briefly for Arup Associates, and then Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, before leaving London in 1974. During this period of local government reorganisation, county architects departments were being set up and Macintosh embarked on two decades of work designing municipal, educational and housing projects first for East Sussex and then for Hampshire. Macintosh set up private practice based in Winchester (Finch Macintosh Architects) in 1998 and retired in 2008.
She won a Royal Institute of British Architects award in 2005 for her design of a playground in Weston, Southampton, designed in partnership with George Finch, within the practice, Finch Macintosh Architects.
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