Jan Kaplicky dies on Prague street

The architect who designed the spacecraft-like media centre at Lord's cricket ground, Jan Kaplicky, has died suddenly aged 71 from a heart attack while walking the streets of his native Prague. The tragedy of his unexpected death is compounded by the fact that it came just hours after the birth of his daughter, Johanka, by his second wife Eliska Kaplicky Fuchsova, a Czech TV producer with whom he had started a new life in his home country.

Considered one of the most radical architects of the last 40 years, Kaplicky, who emigrated from Czechoslavakia in 1968, worked for both Norman Foster and Richard Rogers before setting up his own practice, Future Systems, in 1979. He was fascinated by the technology of cars, planes and the US space programme, and applied these influences with great success to his own buildings, which include the curvaceous, sequin-clad Selfridges in Birmingham.

Paul Finch, the director of the World Architecture festival and a friend of Kaplicky, believes that his most recent commission, an octopus-shaped design for a new national library in Prague, which had been opposed by politicians, might have contributed to his death.

"I saw him before Christmas and he was very upset," said Finch. "Forty years since he left his home country to come to Britain, he had a chance to make a truly extraordinary building there, but he was shocked by the virulence and organisation of people who didn't like the architecture. I have no doubt that the pressure of trying to fight for that project contributed to his too-early death." ·