Leonard Parker FAIA, founder of one of Minneapolis's most significant architecture practices and a well-loved professor at the University of Minnesota, has passed away at after a long illness at 88. A disciple of Eero Saarinen, Leonard worked on the St. Louis Gateway Arch and Christ Church Lutheran, before launching The Leonard Parker Associates (TLPA) in 1958 after Saarinen's death with $8,000 he borrowed from an aunt.
Notable projects designed by TLPA include: the Law School at the University of Minnesota (with one of the earliest green roofs 1978), the Minneapolis Convention Center (1989 & 2002), an addition to the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Kenzo Tange (1974), the State of Washington's Labor & Industries Building (1992), Minnesota Public Radio (1979), the Minnesota Judicial Center (1998), the Totino Fine Arts Northwestern College (1974), the South Korea Embassy in Ottawa (1996), and the US Embassy in Santiago Chile (1994).
TLPA merged with Durrant in 2004, and then was spun off as Parker Design International in 2006.
At the University of Minnesota where he taught over several decades, the Leonard Parker Fellowship was established in 2009 as permanent endowment to support professional degree students in architecture.
from a 2005 profile:
When Leonard Parker was 14, a buddy mentioned a building he wanted to check out-in Racine, 45 miles away from their hometown of Milwaukee. “I didn't care about the building,” says Parker. “But I thought riding a bike to Racine sounded good!”
The boys started out at 4 a.m.; six hours later they arrived at the Johnson Wax headquarters, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. “I'd never seen a building like that,” says Parker. “It was incredible! The building engineer showed us around, and he spoke of Mr. Wright with such deference. I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to design buildings like this and have people talk about you with such respect!' I made up my mind right there-I was going to be an architect.”
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the obits in the Pioneer Press and on MPR
'nother in the star trib with an excerpt from an 1986 interview by Linda Mac:
Still, Parker is the architectural point man. He brings impressive credentials. After receiving architecture degrees from the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked in the office of Eero Saarinen, one of the Modern movement's masters. President of a firm that has won more than 50 design awards, he is a long-standing professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota.
Architectural style, however, is more important than architectural credentials for those who will drive or walk past the convention center every day. Already, people are asking what it will look like. Parker is not providing answers. Fully steeped in the tradition of Modern architecture, in which form follows function, he won't address the look of a building until its functional relationships are clearly worked out and its plan determined.
But Parker is hardly an unknown entity. Imagine buildings of red brick and glass, with strong forms skillfully massed and sparely detailed, and you will have a notion of his style. From the "U" Law School, his best-known work, to the Gelco Corp. headquarters in Eden Prairie, a suburban corporate complex of unusual sensitivity, his work fits firmly into the Modern tradition at its best. These are superbly planned buildings whose exterior forms straightforwardly express their interior functions.
Far from flamboyant, Parker's work avoids both technological high jinks and paste-on ornaments. The Minnesota Public Radio headquarters in St. Paul was a high-tech triumph functionally, but it did not fall into the easy trap of looking like a fuse box. Although Parker's work is restrained, it is not weak. The Gelco headquarters speaks strongly with only glass and poured concrete, simply massed.
His work is sensitive to site and context. The Law School and the Humphrey Institute are large buildings, as the convention center will be. Stepped forms, the curve of an exterior wall around an auditorium, the proportion of an entry, the well-placed window give them human scale.
Throughout his career, Parker has carried the architecture of a building to the logical conclusion of its function - no more, no less. He has grown more open to the humanizing value of ornament for its own sake, and has begun to detail buildings with a lighter hand; witness the recent Humphrey Institute compared with the earlier "U" law school. Master of the Modern aesthetic, he needs to integrate the values of historic styles with those on which he cut his architectural teeth.
Some public officials have expressed concern that Parker will give the city a dull-looking convention center. He certainly will not design anything that will be dated before it is completed, nor will he design a convention center that looks pretty but is confusing for people to use. Odds are that he will give the city a solid and workable convention center that is well-detailed, sensitive to its location and conscious of its place in the city.
Fellow architect David Bennett said it best in a letter he sent to City Council Member Steve Cramer during the selection process: "Parker probably can produce a designer dress of a building if he is pressed. But given the opportunity, he can provide something more valuable and enduring: a solid and profound public building, founded on solid principles of good design, beautiful instead of flashy, crafted instead of just crafty."
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