Jan Kaplický was born in Prague in 1937 to a sculptor and a botanical illustrator, trained at the city's College of Applied Arts, and left for London in September 1968 rather than live under the Soviet occupation that followed the Prague Spring. He worked successively for Denys Lasdun, for Piano & Rogers on the Centre Pompidou team, and for Foster Associates before founding Future Systems in 1979 with David Nixon, joined from 1989 by Amanda Levete as partner. Kaplický distrusted the rectangular room on principle — he liked to ask where it was written that buildings had to be boxes — and pursued organic, aerodynamic forms through the Lord's Media Centre and the Selfridges store in Birmingham. A late commission to rebuild Prague's National Library collapsed in 2008 under fierce local opposition to its bulging form; he died in his native city in January 2009.
