Paul Katz, 57, President of Kohn Pedersen Fox, who led the firm’s growth as a global powerhouse in the design of large, mixed-use complexes, died unexpectedly last week. Katz, known for his extremely quick mind and dry wit, was a passionate advocate for the impact that good architecture and innovative planning could have on the world’s rapidly evolving cities. Gene Kohn, a founding partner, posted this announcement.
Architect Judith Edelman, 91, died on October 4, in New York City where she left a profound mark, both on the built environment and as a role model for younger women architects.
When this magazine declared the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis “America’s leading museum of design” in 1990 [RECORD, March 1990, pages 45-47], it was paying tribute to Mildred Friedman, who died on September 3, at 85, in New York City. Photo courtesy Martin Friedman A portrait of the young Mildred Friedman. Beginning in 1969, Mildred—who went by Mickey—had been the museum’s go-to-person for anything and everything relating to design. She was best known for curating a series of prescient exhibitions on architecture and design while editing the Walker’s incisive and influential Design Quarterly. At the same time, she presided over
Designed by Coyula and other colleagues, El Parque de los Mártires Universitarios, completed in 1967, stands at a major intersection down the hill from the University of Havana's steps, where it remains one of the city's most powerful monuments to the revolution. The celebrated Cuban architect and urban planner Mario Coyula Cowley died in Havana on July 7, after a long battle with cancer. He was 79 years old. During his career Coyula was director of the School of Architecture at the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverria (ISPJAE), head of the Group for the Integral Development of the Capital,
Fred Schwartz, visiting his 9/11 memorial in New Jersey in June 2011. Frederic Schwartz, who died on April 28 after struggling with cancer, wasn’t so much an architect as a public citizen who used architecture as a tool to improve lives. Other tools included empathy and patience. His best-known project in New York was the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a project he inherited from his former employers, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, after public officials tinkered with their design so many times they felt unable to continue. Schwartz picked up where they left off, focusing not so much on
The U.S.-born, London-based architect pursued a contextual modernism that smartly bridged different eras. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (with SMBW), Richmond, Virginia, 2010 Rick Mather’s death on April 20 from mesothelioma (caused by exposure to asbestos) was especially unexpected because, although approaching his 76th birthday, he always had a youthful air about him. Born in Portland, Oregon, a distant descendant of Puritan minister Cotton Mather of Salem Witch Trials notoriety, he moved to London in 1963 to study urban design and stayed. Having a strong interest in history, he found himself attracted to studying and working in the older European
Acclaimed Japanese architectural photographer and founder of Global Architecture (GA) magazine Yukio Futagawa died of cancer on March 5, 2013, at the age of 80.
Image Courtesy Dorothy Alexander Ada Louise Huxtable at her New York apartment on March 7, 1974. Everyone has a favorite quote from the architecture critic par excellence, Ada Louise Huxtable. A pithy one dates to 1973: “The let-them-eat-travertine perfectionism of SOM superstar Gordon Bunshaft is seldom less belligerently antihuman these days,” she wrote in the New York Times about an office building in New York. Huxtable, who died of cancer on January 7 at 91, brought architecture criticism visibility and influence at a crucial time. In the boom years after World War II, the banality of commercial Modernism, the demolition
