Richard Burton, who has died aged 83, was a third of the architectural partnership of Ahrends, Burton & Koralek (ABK), alongside Peter Ahrends and Paul Koralek. It is not particularly rare that three architects should meet as students and go on to practise together, but most unusual that all three should be involved in design and should remain lifelong friends. The partnership survived controversy when its competition-winning extension to the National Gallery in London was dubbed a “monstrous carbuncle” by the Prince of Wales in 1984 and cancelled, and it became one of the few practices founded in the early 1960s to span the gulf between the public and private sectors.

Of the partners, Burton was perhaps the least affected by the prince’s diatribe, for he had already forged an independent path in the design of low-rise housing, hospitals and energy efficiency, in the last of which he was a pioneer; he and the prince should have got on. Burton subsequently took charge of the firm’s design of the British embassy in Moscow, completed in 2000, after building a house for himself and his wife, Mireille, in Kentish Town, north London, which he opened to the public on Open House weekends.

Burton was born in Kensington, central London. His mother was Vera Poliakoff, an actor and director (stage name Vera Lindsay), the daughter of a Russian engineer, and his father, Basil Burton, was half-Irish and ran the Academy cinema in Oxford Street before second world war service; he later also worked as an actor. Their marriage was short-lived, and as a child Richard stayed with his grandmother, Christabel Burton, a member of the Harmsworth newspaper dynasty and the client for one of Britain’s first modern movement houses, Torilla, outside Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

An early interest in painting was directed towards architecture at Bryanston school, in Dorset, and furthered when in 1944 his mother married Gerald Barry, who became director general of the Festival of Britain. Barry recommended the Architectural Association (AA), where on entering in 1951 Burton quickly teamed up with Ahrends and Koralek, both émigrés. All shared a love of Frank Lloyd Wright, then still unfashionable, as well as of Le Corbusier.

After he had spent 18 months at the London county council, which showed no interest in his designs, Burton’s fortune changed when he joined Powell & Moya, masters of modern architecture then designing Princess Margaret hospital in Swindon and exquisite extensions to Brasenose College, Oxford.

It was in the realm of public housing that Richard Burton found a personal voice

When Burton left to set up ABK with Ahrends and Koralek in 1961, and the new practice needed work (despite Koralek winning an international competition for a library at Trinity College, Dublin), Philip Powell generously passed on two major commissions: a theological college in Chichester – a taut, brutalist composition – and a business school, which became Templeton College, at Kennington, Oxford, built in seven phases to provide comfortable accommodation for business people on short courses and which was both stylish and flexible.

ABK’s interest in structure and light was immediately evident, but in the business school Burton integrated architecture and landscape, with the landscape architect James Hope, who became a regular collaborator. Burton’s mother introduced him to the art dealer John Kasmin, for whom he and Ahrends designed a Bond Street gallery in 1962-63, described by Forbes magazine as “London’s swingingest 60s art gallery”.

It was in the realm of public housing and energy efficiency that Burton found a personal voice, while retaining the ABK “look” of blond brick and oddly pitched roofs. An estate at Chalvedon in Basildon, Essex, comprised a series of friendly courtyards, one and three storeys high. Burton employed a social psychologist to interview the first residents, whose feedback informed more distinctive entrances and cheaper heating in the later phases. A second development in Basildon, Felmore, commissioned in 1974, was the first major housing project in Britain to take account of energy conservation, incorporating high standards of insulation.

Burton became the coordinator for the RIBA’s first energy initiative and chair of its low-energy group. At his next major building, St Mary’s hospital in the Isle of Wight, energy was recycled and steel cladding reflected heat on warm days, while bouncing light into the building. Again he worked with Hope, and incorporated artworks, imparting a sense of place despite having to follow a standardised National Health Service “nucleus” plan. He also designed two buildings at Hooke Park, Dorset (1983-90), where the Parnham Trust set up a training centre dedicated to the sustainable use of timber, and was instrumental in passing the estate to the AA in 2003, contributing generously to secure its future.

Burton also took charge of the partnership’s last major commission, when ABK was invited in 1988 to design the British embassy in Moscow. This was an opportunity for public redemption after the National Gallery, and to connect with his Russian roots. He designed a series of separate pavilions housing residential and office accommodation linked by high-level bridges, rich in detail and with the ceremonial spaces filled by specially commissioned furniture and works of art.

Burton House, north London, which the architect Richard Burton built for his family. Photograph: ABK

The firm closed its practice in 2012 when Ahrends and Koralek retired; Burton had left the partnership in 2002 because of illness. In the late 1980s Koralek had established an Irish office, and this practice continues.

Burton’s own house, largely built by himself and his three sons between 1986 and 1988, and extended in 1991, explored similar ideas in a homespun way, a sequence of three large rooms set behind a conservatory that stored heat or sheltered the house from it according to the season, with a bedroom on top. Constructed mainly of timber and stuffed with treasured objects, this was an inclusive, all-embracing modernist building that was easy to live in. The public held the same view, forming long queues on Open House weekends to be stewarded around the house by Burton’s grandchildren and to chat to the architect for hours. An annexe added in 2002 was ostensibly for his daughter Kate and her family, but Burton seized the opportunity to explore ideas for low-cost student housing, so the unit is divided by a courtyard garden and works equally as bedsitter accommodation.

Burton was an expansive, eloquent communicator and a generous friend. His last major project was a book about his own house, with James O Davies, which is suffused with love for his close-knit family and the craft of art and architecture.

He is survived by Mireille, by their children, Mark, David (known as Bim), Jonathan and Kate, and by eight grandchildren.

• Richard St John Vladimir Burton, architect, born 3 November 1933; died 29 January 2017