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Not everyone liked the skywalks, which connect buildings Mr. Franzen designed at Hunter College on Lexington Avenue. Neighbors lamented the loss of sunlight. But Mr. Franzen, a Modernist subscriber to the form-follows-function credo, considered them the functional equivalent of ivy-covered walkways for urban students. It would “become the college community’s main street,” he wrote of the skywalk plan in 1972 in the college’s student newspaper, “well above rush-hour traffic at street level.” — nytimes.com
Bud Goldstone (1926-2012), a former aerospace engineer who worked for over 50 years to save Watts Towers, has died at the age of 86.
In 1959 he devised the test to prove the Towers were structurally sound and stopped the City of Los Angeles from demolishing them. He was a founding member of the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts, Inc., which successfully sued the city in 1985 to save the Towers from the city's neglect.
— kcet.org
Mr. Shelton and his longtime design partner, Lee Mindel, were known for a distinctive modernist aesthetic that blended clean lines with references to classical periods to create opulent settings. Their less-is-more sensibility became a hallmark for apartments ringing Central Park.
“Truly they were leaders in their field,” said Margaret Russell, the editor in chief of Architectural Digest. “They won pretty much every award a firm could win.
— nytimes.com
Mr. Pichler was a sculptor and illustrator whose ... architectural drawings were not just plans; they were also works of art in and of themselves. Other images — “dream drawings,” as he called them — were dark and psychologically loaded. His figures were often skeletal or robotic. — New York Times
Gerhard Kallmann, the architect who, with Michael McKinnell, designed Boston City Hall, a hulking, asymmetrical, Modernist building that has been widely acclaimed by architects for half a century though disparaged by many Bostonians, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 97. — nytimes.com
“He was an extremely talented architect who deserved to be better known but he wasn’t on the circuit and only spoke German,” said former chair of architecture at the Bartlett, Peter Cook. “In a way he was the architectural equivalent of Walter Pichler - he was an exponent of that kind of Austrian art. His bank was an extraordinary piece both formalistically and surface-wise.” — bdonline.co.uk
Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia platform it is today, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 51. — nytimes.com
Very sad. Hillman Curtis was an extremely talented designer that I closely followed while growing up in the web. Too young. Check out his "Artist Series" profile on Daniel Libeskind. Also, Remembering Hillman Curtis, by Gary Hustwit, filmmaker of Helvetica, Objectified and Urbanized. View full entry
Spanish architect Luis Moreno Mansilla has passed away at the age of 53. Mansilla was a founding partner of Mansilla+Tuñón, whose work includes the Fine Arts Museum in Castellón, the Auditorium of Leon, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and Leon MUSAC, which received the Mies van der Rohe Prize.
Mansilla, was a professor at the School of Architecture in Madrid, and had been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University.
— El Pais
This is incredibly sad. He was part of the most promising office in Spain. I saw him lecturing in Princeton while I was a student there, and he was extremely intelligent. But most of all he was a very kind soul, something difficult to find these days in this business. View full entry
Modernist architect Eugene Weston III was in his early 30s when he declared that "the house is the last of the handcrafted objects" in an industrial age...
The architect built a number of homes in and around Pasadena but only one in Eagle Rock, in 1953, for Norman Bilderback, then a director of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
— latimes.com
Mr. Gilmore's specialty was marketing. During his 40 years with HOK, he helped the firm grow from a young St. Louis architectural office into a national and global powerhouse.
He played a key role in public projects including the America's Center and its expansion, the Edward Jones Dome, the Thomas Eagleton U.S. Courthouse, the St. Louis County Justice Center, Terminal 2 at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.
— stltoday.com
Norma Merrick Sklarek, the first African American woman in the country to become a licensed architect, who helped produce Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport and the American Embassy in Tokyo, died Monday at her home in Pacific Palisades. She was 85. — latimes.com
Anne Tyng, a pioneering woman architect whose ideas about geometry influenced Louis Kahn's buildings and who later had a child with him, died Tuesday, Dec. 27, in Greenbrae, Calif. She was 91, said her daughter, Alexandra, who lives outside Philadelphia.
Although Ms. Tyng was among the first group of women to graduate from Harvard University's architecture school in 1944, she struggled her entire career to be taken seriously. Firms would not hire her because she was a woman.
— philly.com
Eva Zeisel, a ceramic artist whose elegant, eccentric designs for dinnerware in the 1940s and ’50s helped to revolutionize the way Americans set their tables, died on Friday in New City, N.Y. She was 105. — nytimes.com
Legorreta continued the tradition of architect Luis Barragan, who died in 1988. Like Barragan, Legorreta used bright colors, massive solid walls, courtyards and geometric cutout windows to interact with Mexico’s abundant sunlight. — washingtonpost.com
Chicago architect Gene Summers, the former dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the chief designer of the muscular McCormick Place convention hall, died Monday. Summers also served as a right-hand man for Mies van der Rohe, working on such significant projects as the Seagram Building in New York. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com