Frank Gehry obit

Frank Gehry, Celebrated Architect, Dies at 96

Among his many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Berlin’s DZ Bank Building. 

He was not on the list.

Frank Gehry, who designed some of most imaginative buildings ever constructed and achieved a level of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect, has died. He was 96.

Gehry died Friday in his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.

Gehry won every major prize that architecture has to offer.

Gehry’s fascination with modern pop art led to the creation of some of the most wildly imaginative buildings ever constructed and brought him a measure of worldwide acclaim seldom afforded any architect.

Among his many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Berlin’s DZ Bank Building.

Gehry was awarded every major prize architecture has to offer, including the field’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize, for what has been described as “refreshingly original and totally American” work.

Other honors include the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award, and his native country’s highest honor, the Companion of the Order of Canada.

Years after he stopped designing ordinary looking buildings, word surfaced in 2006 that the pedestrian Santa Monica mall project that had led to his career epiphany might be headed for the wrecking ball. Gehry admirers were aghast, but the man himself was amused.

“They’re going to tear it down now and build the kind of original idea I had,” he said with a laugh.

Eventually Santa Monica Place was remodeled, giving it a more contemporary, airy outdoor look. Still, it’s no Gehry masterpiece.

Gehry, meanwhile, continued to work well into his 80s, turning out heralded buildings that remade skylines around the world.

The headquarters of InerActiveCorp, known as the IAC Building, took the shape of a shimmering beehive when it was completed in New York City’s Chelsea district in 2007. The 76-story New York By Gehry building, one of the world’s tallest residential structures, was a stunning addition to the Lower Manhattan skyline when it opened in 2011.

That same year, Gehry joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as a professor of architecture. He also taught at Yale and Columbia University over the years.

Not everyone was a fan of Gehry’s work. Some naysayers dismissed it as not much more than gigantic, lopsided reincarnations of the little scrap-wood cities he said he spent hours building when he was growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario.

Princeton art critic Hal Foster dismissed many of his later efforts as “oppressive,” arguing they were designed primarily to be tourist attractions. Some denounced Disney Hall as looking like a collection of cardboard boxes that had been left out in the rain.

Still other critics included Dwight D. Eisenhower’s family, who objected to Gehry’s flamboyant proposal for a memorial honoring the nation’s 34th president. Although the family said it wanted a simple memorial and not the one Gehry had proposed, with its multiple statues and billowing metal tapestries depicting Eisenhower’s life, the architect declined to change his design significantly. As of 2014 the memorial remained unbuilt, with local planning officials again asking Gehry to make revisions.

Gehry did agree to tone down a proposed expansion for Facebook’s Northern California headquarters at the insistence of the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who said he wanted a more anonymous look.

Robert A.M. Stern obit

Robert A.M. Stern, noted American architect, dies at 86

 He was not on the list.

Acclaimed architect Robert A.M. Stern, a prominent figure in American architecture who designed notable museums, libraries and residences, died Thursday, according to a statement from the firm he founded. He was 86.

The statement did not specify a cause of death, but said Stern “died comfortably at his home.”

“At RAMSA, we grieve the loss of our founder, mentor, and friend, and remain committed to carrying forth his ideals,” the statement from the firm’s partners said.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, Stern founded the Robert A. M. Stern Architects firm, now known as RAMSA, in 1969. He gained acclaim for his decades of work and style, which blended postmodernism with contextual design, drawing inspiration from historic and traditional styles.

He was widely known for 15 Central Park West, a luxury condominium featuring a recognizable limestone exterior in Manhattan bordering Central Park. The building opened in 2008 and has attracted prominent, wealthy and famous tenants.

Stern’s works also include the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Florida.

He served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016. He was previously the director of Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture

Helmut Jahn obit

Helmut Jahn, architect of One Liberty Place, dies in bicycle crash

The Philly skyscraper was the first to tower over City Hall

 

He was not on the list.

Helmut Jahn, the German-American architect credited with modernizing Philadelphia's skyline, was killed while riding his bicycle Saturday afternoon in a Chicago suburb. He was 81.

Jahn was struck by a pair of cars at a T-shaped intersection in Campton Hills, an Illinois town located about an hour west of Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune. Witnesses told police that Jahn failed to stop at a stop sign. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Jahn designed Liberty Place, a pair of skyscrapers that prompted a contentious public debate about the city's identity when they were first proposed in April 1984.

The 945-foot One Liberty Place became the first skyscraper to rise above William Penn's statue atop City Hall. As a result of a gentlemen's agreement, the 548-foot tower had remained the highest point in Philadelphia since it was constructed in 1901.

For decades, the tower was blamed for the city's professional sports woes. It was only after a William Penn figurine was placed atop the Comcast Center that the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, breaking the so-called "Curse of Billy Penn."

The building's development was met with staunch opposition from famed city planner Edmund Bacon and others who argued it would destroy the city's downtown atmosphere.

However, former Mayor Wilson Goode helped drum up support among City Council, the Planning Commission and residents. The tower was completed in 1987.

Rouse and Associates, the skyscrapers' developer, selected Jahn through an architectural contest. He was told that the building "better be done good," and he understood just how important the project was to the city.

"When a building replaces a public building ... it has a responsibility to have a content, to have an expression which justifies that it is so tall," Jahn told PhillyVoice in 2017. "So many buildings do that — the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Just built for an exhibition — now, it's the most memorable thing you identify with in Paris."

Jahn used the Chrysler Building in New York City as his influence for One Liberty Place. He implemented similar setbacks into the top, mimicked the shapes along its core and cast his building in reflective blue glass and granite.

"Buildings aren't just monuments," Jahn said. "They have to be functional. This is something we're very keen about — if it works first and if it's constructed the right way."

The construction of Liberty Place accelerated the development of several other skyscrapers that rose above City Hall, including the BNY Mellon Center, Three Logan Square and G. Fred DiBona Jr. Building.

"It's not how new and how interesting a building is when it's finished and it gets a lot of attention," Jahn said. "It's what you think of a building after the test of time. ... The good buildings get better in time. The bad buildings you forget."

Jahn is best known for being at the forefront of the postmodern movement in Chicago. His most notable work there includes the James R. Thompson Center and the United Airlines Terminal at O'Hare International Airport. He also designed buildings in Germany and Bangkok.

Jahn served as a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

He was born near Nuremberg, Germany in 1940 and emigrated to the United States in 1966 to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Jahn is survived by his wife Deborah and son Evan, according to his obituary.

I.M. Pei - # 209

Renowned architect I.M. Pei, who designed the City View building, has died

They say famous people die in bunches of three. Well three days in a row a person from the list has died. Doris Day, Tim Conway and now I.M. Pei, He is number 209 on the list.

I.M. Pei, (Ieoh Ming Pei) the world-renowned Chinese-born American architect, designed many iconic buildings over his decades-long career: the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in D.C., the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. But he also designed a building in Pittsburgh.

Pei, who died at age 102 on Thursday, was the architect behind City View, the 24-story residential high rise on the Lower Hill. Pei designed the structure in the early 1960s, and the structure was completed in 1964, a few years after the neighboring Civic Arena as part of a massive urban renewal project.

Originally called Washington Plaza, the building was recently renovated and renamed City View in 2014.

Pei's work in Pittsburgh was one of his last before rising to national prominence. As work was being finished up on the Lower Hill, Pei was announced as the surprise winner of a contest to design a presidential library honoring John F. Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy, who personally made the final choice of architect, said Pei’s selection was "really an emotional decision.”

"He was so full of promise, like Jack; they were born in the same year,” she told Carter Wiseman for his 1990 Pei biography. “I decided it would be fun to take a great leap with him."

The project suffered more than a decade of setbacks, but the commission generated a great level of recognition for Pei and he went on to become one of the leading modernist designers of municipal structures and museum buildings.

Among his other designs were Dallas City Hall (1978), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland (1995), the Mihio Museum in Kyoto, Japan (1997), the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C.(2008), and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2008).

Oscar Niemeyer - # 33

Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies at 104

Oscar Niemeyer has died. He was number 33 on the list.

Architect Oscar Niemeyer, who re-created Brazil's sensuous curves in reinforced concrete and built the capital of Brasilia on the empty central plains as a symbol of the nation's future, died Wednesday. He was 104.

Elisa Barboux, a spokeswoman for the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro, confirmed Niemeyer's death and said the cause was a respiratory infection. He had been hospitalized for several weeks and also on separate occasions earlier this year, suffering from kidney problems, pneumonia and dehydration.

In works from Brasilia's crown-shaped cathedral to the undulating French Communist Party building in Paris, Niemeyer shunned the steel-box structures of many modernist architects, finding inspiration in nature's crescents and spirals.

His hallmarks include much of the United Nations complex in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Niteroi, Brazil, which is perched like a flying saucer across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.

"Right angles don't attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man," he wrote in his 1998 memoir "The Curves of Time." "What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love."

His curves give sweep and grace to Brasilia, the city that opened up Brazil's vast interior in the 1960s and moved the nation's capital from coastal Rio.

Niemeyer designed most of the city's important buildings, while French-born, avant-garde architect Lucio Costa crafted its distinctive airplane-like layout.

Niemeyer left his mark in the flowing concrete of the Cabinet ministries and the monumental dome of the national museum.

Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho was born Dec. 15, 1907, in Rio de Janeiro, and earned his architecture degree at Rio's School of Fine Arts.

He won the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture in 1970, the Pritzker Architecture Prize from Chicago's Hyatt Foundation in 1988 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1998.

Niemeyer never ceased working. He also never abandoned his faith in communism, befriending Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Until the end, he embraced architecture as a humanist endeavor and rejected criticism that his buildings were more enjoyable to look at than to live or work in"The architect ... must feel that human beings also are important," he said. "Because nothing (else) is important. Life lasts but a minute."

Raymond Watson obit

Raymond Watson dies at 86; architect guided development of Irvine

 

 He was not on the list.

Raymond Watson, the architect and community planner who steered the development of Orange County’s signature master-planned city of Irvine and briefly ran Walt Disney Productions during one of its most tumultuous periods, has died. He was 86.

Watson died Saturday at his longtime home in Newport Beach from complications of Parkinson’s disease, his family said.

A carpenter’s son, Watson was born in Seattle in 1926 and raised by his grandmother in what he described as a rootless childhood in Oakland, sometimes in boardinghouses.

In 1960, seven years after he graduated from UC Berkeley with a master’s in architecture, Watson became the chief planner of the Irvine Co. The company, now a real estate and development colossus, was then an agricultural operation considering plans for its 93,000-acre ranch, which constituted about a fifth of Orange County.

Spurred by Los Angeles architect William Pereira, the Irvine Co. gave 1,000 acres to the University of California with the idea of building a town around the envisioned campus.

It fell to Watson to help build the town from scratch.

“Ray went around the world, studying cities, asking people what worked,” said Larry Thomas, a former Irvine Co. spokesman and longtime colleague of Watson.

The expanse of asparagus plants, orange groves, scrub and rolling ranch lands proved a planner’s dream — a blank slate on which he could construct a community distinct from “the suburban molasses oozing everywhere,” he said in an interview with the Orange County Register.

Central to Watson’s vision for Irvine — which was incorporated in 1971, and now has a population of nearly a quarter million residents — was the concept of “separate villages that had their own character,” Thomas said. “When you ask Irvine residents where they’re from, they often say, ‘Woodbridge’ or ‘Turtle Rock,’ not Irvine.”

It was billed as the largest project of its kind in the country. The self-contained but interlocking villages would have their own schools, parks, greenbelts and shopping plazas, along with housing ranging from high-end homes to apartments. One of the first and largest villages — which Watson considered among the city’s crown jewels — was Woodbridge, which features a large artificial lake.

Critics have long derided Irvine as sterile and stupefying in its orderliness, criticism to which Watson responded publicly with equanimity, saying that it was a free country and that people lived there because they liked it. The city’s success has inspired similar developments, such as Coto de Caza and Rancho Santa Margarita.

One of Watson’s sons, Bryan Watson, said that when he was a child in the late 1960s and early 1970s his father would take him and his three siblings for after-dinner trips to look at the city of Irvine in its nascent stages.

“He’d drive us out to the orange fields, and he’d talk about where things would be,” said Watson, 54, of Solana Beach. “I do remember him talking about this notion of a village, how people could feel like they’re inside of something.… He wanted to bring his family in on it. He always included us.”

When he was in college, Watson said he would challenge his father’s community-planning approach with common complaints that were in the air.

“I said, ‘Why are we just perpetuating this sprawl? Why don’t we make vehicle-less villages? Why do we have all these things spread out, with cars required to drive everywhere?’ ” Bryan said. “He had very thoughtful answers, about how we can’t really dictate what people do.... People moved to California and they wanted to live in these neighborhoods.”

Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank that Watson once chaired, knew Watson for 30 years. In his later years, he said, Watson enjoyed driving around Irvine and telling stories about the place he’d helped to build.

“He had a story about everything,” Baldassare said. “He could point to something and say, ‘This is how that happened. This is why we used a slope on this hill here, because it would work for this particular landscaping.” When residents went home at night, he said, Watson wanted them to feel “they were part of something, not just a big anonymous suburb.”

Watson was president of the Irvine Co. from 1973 to 1977, and vice chairman of the board from 1986 to 2003, when he retired. In 1999, a 73-year-old Watson grinningly described his continuing role as advisor to Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren: “I go in, I pontificate, I leave.”

Apart from Bren, Watson also worked with another central figure in Orange County’s history, Walt Disney, who in the mid-1960s summoned Watson to his office to hear his views on an early iteration of Epcot. That inaugurated Watson’s long association with the Disney company, which included a brief chairmanship in the 1980s when it was beset by takeover attempts.

In 2005, a bridge connecting UC Irvine to a business center was named for Watson.

Watson is survived by his wife of 58 years, Elsa Watson, their four children — Kathy Godwin, Bryan Watson, Lisa Lambert and David Watson — a sister and 10 grandchildren.