Sir John Summerson; Architecture Historian

Sir John Summerson, 87, a leading historian of British architecture. Summerson’s writings and lectures, which ranged from the architecture of Elizabethan England in the 16th Century to that of the Victorians in the 19th, were a major influence on young architectural historians. He was curator of Sir John Soane’s museum in London from 1945 to 1984. Among his books, “Georgian London,” published in 1946 and “Heavenly Mansions,” a collection of essays published in 1949, became popular classics. Summerson was educated at Harrow, one of Britain’s top private schools, and at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London. He was profoundly influenced by the wave of German art historians who fled to London from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, in particular Rudolf Wittkower and Nikolaus Pevsner. In London on Nov. 10 of the complications of Parkinson’s disease.