The death of an architect offers the opportunity to reflect on past icons while narrating their careers through architecture with the thoughts of their peers and a list of achievements in tow. Looking back, we recount lives in the field all too often simplified into being preeminent or respected with their outputs, like the state of architecture, being too far spread and impermanent to ever adequately explain.
In 2022, we saw the passing of many foundational figures in the industry. This year, we add more familiar names as we remember their work and legacy as part of our annual Year in Review rundown.
Below are some of the influential architects, landscape architects, and industry leaders we lost in 2023.
In August, the passing of the beloved French theorist and architectural historian was shared widely as past students and other admirers remembered fondly what his writings have done in their own lives and careers. He became a sought-after chronicler of the many modern titans (Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Gehry) and was compelled by his side-by-side fascination with the multinational confluences of architecture. The French pavilion he curated at the 2014 Venice Biennale was a statement on his native country’s role in leading those movements. Other curatorial efforts at the MoMA and Rome’s MAXXI Museum were memorably worthy expositories. Cohen died conspicuously before the sum of his works could get a similar treatment.
A sad day at Archinect came in March, when Viñoly’s unexpected death was reported via social media. Viñoly had become a favorite among critics and online commenters resenting the new residential gilded age after starting out with less baleful designs for the Duke University Nasher Museum and a college football stadium for Princeton. In the end, there were almost 50 completed in less than a 30-year span. Viñoly said his musical abilities informed his practice throughout. He was reportedly working on a hotel renovation in Uruguay at the time of his death. It and the recently commissioned National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, will stand as the final creative pushes to what he admitted was more of "an exercise in translation than authorship.”
A different kind of star figure in the world of building, a man whose constant striving towards the best social endeavors of architecture bettered countless lives, Doshi ascended from early relationships with Le Corbusier and his other key mentor Louis Kahn to become at his death one of India’s primary examples of the power of post-colonial modernism. Favorites include his very first building project, the beautiful house he named for his wife Kamala in Ahmedabad. Doshi had a knack for the vernacular and craft traditions important to designing healthier societies regardless of location. He won the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2022 RIBA Royal Gold Medal for his rectitude and was acclaimed as a “brilliant architect and a remarkable institution builder” by his country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The founder of The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) began her career in Hawaii before finally obtaining a license to practice in California ten years later. As it unfolded, her contributions were as far-reaching as the invention of CARLA (the world’s first computational design software) and work as a founding Trustee of the National Building Museum. Through such high positions, she espoused constantly for the advancement of women in the design and construction trades. Architectural efforts also proved to carry further lessons in the development of accessibility concepts, adaptive reuse, historic preservation, and sustainable design.
One of the driving figures in the early development of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) as a faculty member until 2018, Mangurian also taught at Yale and other East Coast universities. SCI-Arc’s current Director Hernán Díaz Alonso said in an online statement, “His influence in the architectural landscape in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the world at large has been massive.” Outside of teaching, he worked successfully with art world icons like James Turrell and Larry Gagosian. Other local figures Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss were counted as his close associates and academic colleagues. Mangurian “was architect and individual—a provocateur, a dedicated fabricator, and a deeply poetic teacher,” another friend, Steven Holl, wrote in his personal reflection.
Squire established a firm that became one of the best-known names in London architectural circles fairly quickly after its founding. As the leader of Squire & Partners, he worked on projects that remade the city in the shadow of his architect father and grandfather. Their own adaptive reuse of a department store space in Brixton is now a sterling example of possibilities of future popular employment of the method. They said they will miss his “youthful energy, love of life, and mischievous humour will be hugely missed by all that knew him” in a statement on his passing this May.
“Gene” was one-third of the firm known simply as KPF. Kohn provided the business savvy to back up his partners Sheldon Fox and William Pedersen’s artistic vision. The combination worked to establish the firm in key Asian markets and led to even more commercial success by expanding outside a program of major corporate commissions. Away from the firm, he served on the boards of both the National Building Museum and Urban Land Institute while contributing to two separate graduate schools at Harvard. KPF President James von Klemperer remembered him as a consensus-builder whose “limitless interest in other human beings gave him powerful insights into the social aspect of building programs and larger urban agendas.”
Moriyama became an important part of the story of Canadian architecture after midcentury, when figures like Arthur Erickson and Douglas Cardinal helped garner international attention. Timeless designs rendered his cosmopolitan view of Toronto on places as foreign as Riyadh and so honored in an ambassadorial return to ancestral Japan. Having kept such an unbound spirit eventually helped him on to Gold Medal honors from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) in 1997. The same organization’s ten-year-old Moriyama RAIC International Prize now carries forth this legacy as the country’s recognition of the world's best building.
Markson made his adopted home of Toronto a much more socially stabilizing place for immigrants after his own life took him from Lithuania to Canada at an early age. A steady six-decade output followed while he simultaneously enriched academic life at his alma mater, the University of Toronto, as a dean and longtime faculty member. KPMB’s co-founder Bruce Kuwabara said his designs bettered the “quality and character of the built environment” while making the city into a “cosmopolitan place that expresses conviviality through architecture.” His late 2022 RAIC Gold Medal provided a crescendo to a significant civic-minded career which had by then earned 50 other major architectural awards and honors.
Another prominent Canadian who pushed for inclusion and love in its biggest cities, Cormier excelled after leaving Toronto for Harvard and returning to work in Montreal in 1993. The Cultural Landscape Foundation President Charles A. Birnbaum said Cormier’s approach “pulverizes the notion that history and design can't be happily wed.” His practice won over 100 separate awards and honors, authoring the designs for distinctive and uplifting Berczy Park in Toronto and downtown Montreal’s new unifying The Ring installation. A statement from the firm called him a “great visionary who influenced us in surprising and powerful ways, thanks to the creative force and joie de vivre he brought to all our lives.”
Portoghesi’s blended Baroque influences formed a modernism unique to the other figures in his Italian generation. He strove to better the theory and found more success in his academic pursuits, including an inspiring tenure as Dean of the Politecnico di Milano. The editor of Controspazio and other important journals, Portoghesi was also the first Director of the Venice Biennale before serving as its President from 1982 until 1993. He died in the 1980 home he designed for himself in the seaside village of Calcata at the age of 91.
Like the vanguard of fellow planner-architects working in post-war France, Gailhoustet left a mark on social housing efforts in the Paris region, creating blocks that were reflected in the works of contemporaries like Moshe Safdie. “Her buildings are bright and surprising, with big windows and planted terraces at all levels,” A deserved Royal Academy Architecture Prize finally came last year. The school said in an Instagram post reflecting her legacy that she “continues to inspire thinking about what generous housing truly entails and shaped a new vision for what it means to build cities where we can live together.”
One of Louis Kahn’s many devotees and a romantic partner, Pattison studied at the University of Pennsylvania and designed several projects in Maine and Philadelphia, including the master plan for the Hershey Company corporate headquarters. She wrote a memoir of her experience as Kahn’s assistant until 1974. She would eventually be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2016. Her son, filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, provided an Oscar-nominated look at the family’s dynamic in the classic documentary My Architect from 2004.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson was inspired to follow in the footsteps of both his and Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. to become an architect. Over time, crafting his skills at renovation work through an apprenticeship he undertook with his grandfather at Taliesin. A fascination with organic architecture was another guiding force. In the end, he was defined by “profound exploration of [architecture’s] ongoing possibilities growing from fundamental ideas,” according to his father's biographer Alan Hess. He also established the Chi-Am Group and Chi-Am Consortium to advocate for the representation of Chinese architects in America.
Munger died at this self-designed private residence in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. He will be remembered for a proposed dormitory in Santa Barbara that would have bunked 4,500 UCSB students in a new American record for capacity were it not designed with 90 percent of its units lacking windows. He called the architect whose resignation launched the controversy an “idiot” while fighting the overwhelming critical response to his project, known infamously as “Dormzilla.”
Before he died, living in the house designed for himself for the past 70 years, he told CNBC reporters: ″[Warren Buffett} and I are both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses. And I would say in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier.” The will to challenge that quotient was central to the recent failure of his amateur design.
Be sure to follow Archinect's special End of the Year coverage by following the tag 2023 Year In Review to stay up to date.
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