Richard Seifert was born to a Swiss family in 1910 and first came to London as a boy. He won a scholarship to the Bartlett School of Architecture and graduated in 1933. After an apprenticeship as a trainee surveyor and architectural assistant, he set up his own practice, specialising in speculative housing schemes of traditional appearance for which he claims he used to charge three pounds a house.

During the second world war Seifert served in the Royal Engineers in India and Burma, rising to the rank of Colonel, a title he often insisted on using in practice as an architect.

Through a mixture of relentless attention to detail, commercial savvy and a mastery of town planning Seifert essentially brought the commercial tower block to UK city centres. Nowhere did he achieve this more notably than in London. He is said to have built over 500 buildings in the capital alone, paving the way for the high rise aesthetics of twentieth century practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

Stylistically, Seifert was a creature of pragmatism, veering from Modernism-by-numbers to bombastic forms of Brutalism, always with a view to securing his clients' unprecedented space, height and value for money.

Centre Point, at the foot of Tottenham Court Road, remains Seifert's most notorious building. Dismissed by Ernö Goldfinger as 'London’s pop-art skyscraper,' the building has earned a fond place in the public's heart since its completion in 1963 and has undergone an extensive refurbishment. It was Grade II listed in 1995, thanks in part to the support of Seifert's former enemies at the Royal Fine Art Commission, who cited its 'elegance worthy of a Wren steeple.'

Seifert's reputation has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years. Centre Point and the South Bank Tower have both been preserved in line with Seifert's original designs, proving that an appetite for Seifert's unique brand of high rise design remains well into the twenty-first century.