A rare modest figure in a crowded era of star architects and designers has passed away as the New York Times is reporting the death of James Stewart Polshek on Friday at his home in Manhattan. 

Polshek was known as the designer of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Newtown Creek sewage plant in Brooklyn, and Newseum in Washington, D.C., among many others. His colleagues recalled him as a progressive champion who balanced the ideological pull of high modernism with a sensitivity to different forms, themes, building types, and architectural styles. In a statement published by the Architectural Record, Polshek’s former firm partner Richard Olcott said he was "ahead of his time."

Born in Akron, Ohio in 1930, Polshek studied architecture at nearby Case Western Reserve University and later Yale before pursuing a Fulbright Scholarship in Copenhagen and beginning his career in the Paris offices of I.M. Pei. Polshek went on to found his own eponymous practice, now known as Ennead, in New York in 1963, and a decade later, was selected to lead Columbia’s then-named Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where he served as Dean until his full-time retirement from academia in 1987.

His work was defined by a disposition for contextually-sensitive high-profile public design, which he preferred despite the lure of more lucrative private commissions. Major restoration projects for the Brooklyn Museum and Carnegie Hall coupled with understated new designs such as the Times’ College Point, Queens printing plant and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History garnered him a reputation as an exceptionally-versatile architect. In spite of his critical perception, Polshek published two books on architecture, won more than 200 individual and firm awards, and was eventually honored with the AIA Gold Medal in 2018. 

''It is perverse, in a way, to be doing something that is very public and have nothing known of the personality," he said of his egoless approach to design in a 2001 interview. "I don’t think that kind of commodity-driven system makes for the most productive architecture. I believe there have to be reasons for every building, and that the ideas should not be self-referential.'' 

James Stewart Polshek was 92 years old.