My friend and fellow architect Michael Duncan, who has died aged 86, imbued his architecture with human scale and proportion, whether for the extensive buildings for Stirling University, at Victoria Quay housing the Scottish Executive in Leith, or in the modest yet stately headquarters for United Distilleries in Edinburgh.
Working on the new Scottish parliament building was his most demanding task. The design was won in competition by the Spanish architect Enric Miralles, with Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall (RMJM) as the local collaborators. Mick, as a director of RMJM, was named as associate architect. The project dominated his life from the mid-1990s until the building opened with much fanfare in 2004. The completed work is a dramatic presence facing Holyroodhouse in the medieval heart of Edinburgh.
Mick asked me to write a book on the project, Creating a Scottish Parliament (2005), for which I was given a great deal of written material produced during the construction phase. This showed me the significance of the creative relationship between Mick and Miralles, and the key role Mick had in guiding all the complexities of the Miralles design into a satisfactory built form.
Born in Glasgow, Mick was the son of Williamina (nee Allan) and James Duncan, who were both schoolteachers. He went to Buckie high school after the family moved to the town on the Moray Firth coast, before studying architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and University of Edinburgh.
On graduation in 1961 he went to the Doxiadis School of Ekistics in Athens on a Carnegie scholarship for two years. Returning in 1963, Mick joined RMJM in Edinburgh. He became a director in 1990 and retired in 2004.
Mick was a gifted architect and a natural designer and yet for me it was his brilliance as an artist that was his greatest strength. At our first meeting as students at the Edinburgh College of Art, he rather shyly brought some diaries out of his briefcase, saying: "These are what I like doing." He had kept them since his early teens, and for every day there was a tiny, exquisite vignette depicting the events of that day, a practice he continued for many years. Over the years he also produced many paintings and drawings made for pleasure and to be shared with friends. In addition he submitted imaginative architectural drawings annually to the Royal Scottish Academy.
Mick is survived by Susan (nee Campbell), a secretary whom he married in 1969; their daughters Laura and Emily; three grandchildren Mia Jack and Ella; and his sister Kay.