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
In honor of what would have been Ada Louise Huxtable's 100th birthday on Sunday March 14, RECORD is sharing the tributes paid when she died in January 2013.
William Mitchell, a longtime technophile and booster of the idea that computers could aid designers, died on June 11 in Boston of complications from cancer.