Florian Beigel, who has died aged 76, was a hugely influential architect and teacher. For more than 40 years, Architecture Research Unit, his studio at the Polytechnic of North London (now London Metropolitan University), educated successive generations of architects both directly and vicariously, through his compelling lectures, writings and drawings, its numerous, beautiful publications, and a small but important body of built work. A significant influence on many well-known practitioners, in the UK and internationally, ARU was also instrumental in transforming its host institution from a rather minor London architecture school into an internationally respected one.

Born in Konstanz, southern Germany, to Margreth (nee Grossman) and Heinz Beigel, Florian grew up and went to school in Biberach, Baden-Württemberg. He graduated from Stuttgart University’s school of architecture in 1968 and worked with Günther Behnisch and Frei Otto on the innovative tensile structures for the 1972 Munich Olympics, before leaving for London.

He found the city in which he was to live for the rest of his life animated at that moment by both student protest and Beatlemania – an intoxicating mix of politics and pleasure. Radically cosmopolitan, it represented for this idealistic young architect a place to avoid the inevitable limitations of conventional practice, and to search instead for new ways to think about and experience the world.

Following a period at Arup Associates, designing large-scale buildings for IBM, he set up an office with a colleague, Konrad Frey. However, it was an appointment in 1972, to teach at the Polytechnic of North London that provided him with the physical and intellectual space to properly address his ambitions. He was made professor of architecture there in 1990.

ARU was established following the design and construction of a series of innovative, widely published grid-shell structures with students. Conceived as a single environment in which thinking and doing were inseparable, the unit, with its synthesis of studying, drawing, making and building as a continuous process, was to revolutionise the ways in which architecture was thought about and taught.

Florian Beigel’s ethos of ‘architecture as city’ permeated his work at every scale. Photograph: Philip Christou

Florian’s influence as an educator was recognised in 2014 when the Royal Institute of British Architects honoured him with the Annie Spink award for Excellence in Architectural Education. However, as he pointed out in his acceptance speech, Florian wished first and foremost to be considered an architect; this was the passion that underpinned everything he did.

In 1966, while still a student, Florian had designed a prefabricated house in Biberach for his mother, which was erected in one day and is still occupied by his sister, Elisabeth. However, with ARU the pace slowed, and he went on to realise only a small number of built works.

The first important project was the Half Moon theatre in east London, during which Florian was joined by his partner and long-term collaborator, Philip Christou. Completed in 1985, the theatre’s spatial sequence and raw, material character of concrete blockwork and corrugated steel reimagined the act of performance as being contiguous with the everyday experience of the street. Florian called this ethos “architecture as city”, and it became an evolving concern that permeated his subsequent work at every scale. In London this was largely confined to a series of elegant interiors; intimate micro-urbanisms that he considered analogous to the more substantial work ARU was able to engage in elsewhere.

The Half Moon theatre, Mile End Road, east London, Florian Beigel’s first important project, completed in 1985. Photograph: Phil Sayer

Two shortlisted Japanese competition entries, for the Nara Convention Centre in 1991 and Yokohama Port Terminal in 1994, shifted ARU’s focus towards the idea of constructed, artificial landscapes. They were followed by a series of competition wins between 1996 and 1998, which proposed the transformation of large-scale former industrial sites in Berlin and eastern Germany. These Florian termed landscape infrastructures, memorably describing them as “designing the rug, but not necessarily the picnic”. Although a few of these projects were only partially realised, their conception of context, time and the power of the void as tools for architecture became highly influential.

These projects also laid the foundations for a more consolidated body of work in South Korea, where in 1998 ARU designed Paju Book City, which was devoted to the editing, publishing, printing and distribution of books. It was a fully realised landscape infrastructure, within which ARU also constructed three fascinating buildings, Youlhwadang and Positive Thinking publishing houses, and Youlhwadang Book Hall. Their distinctive characters also demonstrated a move towards figurative architecture.

Through this body of work, Florian questioned traditional hierarchies of large and small, and the usual distinctions between history and modernity. Landscapes were conceived as rooms and rooms were invested with the potential of landscape or city, within which traces of past, present and potential futures were overlaid. His ideas culminated in the 2008 proposal for Seamangeum, a new coastal city in South Korea, conceived as a series of constructed islands rather like Venice, each with its own urban form and character.

In 2013, Florian was awarded the Große Kunstpreis Berlin by the Berlin Academy of Arts, in recognition of his contribution to Baukunst, the art of building.

He is survived by Philip, Elisabeth and his brother, Thomas.

• Florian Heinz Beigel, architect, born 10 October 1941; died 25 August 2018