Wilem Frischmann escaped the Holocaust as a teenager, arrived in Britain as a refugee at the age of sixteen, and went on to engineer some of the most recognised buildings in London. He designed the structural system for Centre Point, the tower at the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road that became one of the city’s most controversial postwar landmarks, and he oversaw the engineering of Tower 42 in the City of London, which was the tallest building in Europe when it was completed. He died on 20 August 2026 at the age of 95.
He was born Wilem William Frischmann on 27 January 1931 in Ungvar, a city in Czechoslovakia that is now Uzhhorod, in western Ukraine. He was of Hungarian Jewish descent. The German occupation of his region and the Final Solution that came with it forced him out of Central Europe. He arrived in Britain after the war as a displaced person, learned English, and pursued the professional education that would give him the tools to rebuild something lasting.
He studied at Hammersmith College of Art and Building and then at Imperial College London, and earned a doctorate from City University London. In 1958 he joined the engineering practice CJ Pell and Partners. He became a partner in 1961 and was appointed chairman in 1968. Under his leadership, the firm grew from approximately thirty employees into a multidisciplinary consultancy employing more than a thousand people and operating internationally. It became Pell Frischmann, and the name carried his identity into every project the company took on.
Centre Point was the landmark project of his early career. The thirty-four-storey tower, developed by Harry Hyams and completed in 1966, became notorious for years because Hyams left it largely unoccupied while waiting for a single tenant who could take the entire building. The controversy about that decision obscured the engineering achievement. Frischmann designed a pre-cast concrete external column system that allowed the building to be constructed without external scaffolding, a first in British building practice. The prefabricated structural elements were assembled on site with a precision that the construction industry had not seen at that scale before. The building is now Grade II* listed.
Tower 42, built as the headquarters for the National Westminster Bank in the City of London and known for decades as the NatWest Tower, topped out at 183 metres in 1980 and was the tallest building in Europe at its completion. Frischmann also contributed to the early development of Canary Wharf and worked on Drapers Gardens. The skyline changes he helped create in London are visible from across the city.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 for services to engineering. Ground Engineering’s obituary was headlined “Designer of Centre Point.” New Civil Engineer described him as having “helped reshape London’s skyline.” A man who had arrived in the country with nothing, speaking no English, built some of the largest structures the city had ever seen. He was 95.