Edward Larrabee Barnes

Architect, United States
The career of Edward Larrabee Barnes has encapsulated and contributed to the course
of modernism across the United States. Barnes entered the architectural profession in
concurrence with the arrival of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer into this country in
1937. He closed his office in 1994, just as a reinvention of modernism appeared to be
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launched. During the intervening years, Barnes crafted an array of private houses notable
for their clarity in plan, volume, and landscaping. The houses exist as a series of
educationl and cultural buildings, instructive for the sensitivity of their siting and
responsiveness to a larger context. Barnes’s body of work also includes several office
buildings, note- worthy for their dedication to Louis Sullivan’s theme of the tall building,
artistically considered.
Barnes was born in Chicago in 1915, to parents who were successful in their chosen
careers of law and writing. He attended preparatory school in the East, and received his
undergraduate education at Harvard College. Following a brief teaching stint, Barnes
returned to Harvard to study under Gropius and Breuer, graduating in 1942 with a
master’s degree in architecture.
Barnes’s wartime career included a year in Washington, D.C., at the Division of
Defense Housing and service as an architect with the Naval Reserve at Hunter’s Point in
San Francisco. At the close of the war, Barnes joined the offices of architect William
W.Wurster in San Francisco, and industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss in Los Angeles.
With Dreyfuss, Barnes designed a prefabricated house for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft,
scheduled for mass production. In 1949 Barnes returned East with his wife, Mary, and
opened an office in New York City.
Like a number of his Harvard contemporaries including Henry Cobb, Ulrich Frazen,
John Johansen, Philip Johnson, and I.M.Pei, Barnes entered the profession during a time
of rapid economic expansion, and increased demand for new construction at all levels,
including residential, institutional, and commercial. For Barnes and the others, the
national growth combined with talent, personal connections, and luck led to rapid
recognition and robust practices by the mid-1950s.
Barnes’s body of work, while infused with a modernist acknowledgment of the
specificities of each project, exudes no dogmatic or easily definable style. His legacy is a
dedication to an overall organizing idea derived from the complexities of each
commission, distilled in a rationally ordered plan.
The Osborn House (1949–51) in Salisbury, Connecticut, typifies a group of early
Barnes houses, with a site plan that creates a distinct precinct within an open meadow,
augmented by carefully considered connections between individual rooms and the
adjacent landscape. In time Barnes extended this strategy to increasingly individualized
spaces, suggesting villages with individual house designs. The plan of the Cowles House
(1959–63) in Wayzata, Minnesota, alludes to a farm assemblage, while sharp-peaked
roofs and bold modulations of surface and void simultaneously separate the residence
from the adjacent acreage.
By the late 1950s, Barnes had developed a portfolio of institutional work, with the
completion of two children’s summer camps for the Fresh Air Fund (Camp Bliss and
Camp Anita, 1953–55, Fishkill, New York). At the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
(1958–63) in Deer Isle, Maine, Barnes combined a bold master plan—running down the
site’s 90-foot slope—with a typological layout and articulation of separate building
elements. Although the individual buildings at Haystack are one-story volumes
constructed of unfinished wood boards, their geometry and the system that orders their
arrangement direct attention to both the natural site and the school as a community,
making the experience of place an emotional and practical one. While Barnes described
his overriding concept as the construction of “a typical Maine fishing village” (minutes of
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the Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 26 July 1959), the simplicity
and inevitability of such a conceit is the product of the architect’s thoughtful design
decisions. In 1994 Haystack Mountain School of Crafts received the American Institute
of Architects (AIA) award for an exemplary American building of 25 years of age or
more. It remains the masterwork of his career. Following Haystack, Barnes designed a
host of buildings for educational institutions, including dormitories at St. Paul’s School
(1959–61 and 1969) in Concord, New Hampshire; faculty apartments and a building for
the arts (1963–71) at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York; and master plans for the
State University of New York at Purchase (1966–68) and Yale University (1968–78).
With the Walker Art Center (1966–71, addition in 1984) in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
Barnes first tackled the program of an art museum; he arranged seven galleries and three
roof terraces around a central service core. The galleries, individualized by their
proportions and apertures, defer in authority to the artwork. Here, the architect
emphasized movement through space over discrete destinations. At the Dallas Museum
of Art (1978–83, additions in 1984 and 1993), a central passageway lends access to an
array of museum functions, accommodating expansion and the distinct schedules of
galleries, public spaces, and auxiliary operations. The linear arrangement reduces the
scale of the overall enterprise and, as with the early houses, allows the development of
independent relationships between interior galleries and exterior gardens.
Although Barnes was lauded in his commercial work, it was more for his articulation
of surface than for his design plan or volume; two towers stand out for the clarity of their
overall design. The New England Merchants National Bank (1963–71) in Boston,
Massachusetts, addresses a sloping site and a complex of disparate civic buildings at its
base, including the Old State House and the new city hall (1962–67, Kallmann
McKinnell and Knowles). The articulation of the crown expresses the presence of a
restaurant and an executive office suite. In between, a tight surface patterned by ribbons
of window and wall convey repetitive office floors. At the IBM tower (1973–83) in New
York City, a similar scheme provides for an entrance base, a clear tower shaft (here
sheathed in green granite), and a differentiated top. At the entrance, Barnes carved out a
triangle-shaped plaza from the first three floors, at the corner of Madison Avenue and
57th Street, over which he cantilevered the tower’s remaining 40 stories. The 1973
zoning law, which allowed increases in overall square footage of commercial buildings in
exchange for public amenities, made possible a greenhouse park planted with dramatic
copses of bamboo on the southwestern half of the parcel.
Barnes was widely recognized for his work and received awards from the AIA for the
Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis, 1972), the Hecksher House (1977), and the private
home in Dallas (1986) in addition to the AIA Firm Award in 1980. He was elected a
fellow of the AIA in 1966, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991. Harvard awarded him a 350th
Anniversary Medal in 1986 and an Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Graduate School of Design in 1993. In addition to teaching stints at Pratt Institute, Yale,
and Harvard, Barnes served as a director of the Municipal Art Society, the American
Academy in Rome, and the Museum of Modern Art, where he remains a lifetime trustee.
Although he associated with partners over the years—namely, Alistair Bevington,
Percy Keck, and John M.Y.Lee—Barnes remained the signature designer of his
eponymous practice during its full 45 years. In his office, he trained a number of the
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leading American architects of the late 20th century, including Ivan Chermayeff,
Alexander Cooper, Bruce Fowle, Charles Gwathmey, Toshiko Mori, Laurie Olin,
Giovanni Pasanella, Jaquelin Robertson, and Robert Siegel.
Writing in Perspecta: The Yale Architecture Journal early in his career, Barnes describes his design process as rooted in
exploration and discovery, followed by synthesis and discipline. He demands
consideration of function—both practical and psychological; site—both immediate
conditions and the larger environment; structure—whose implementation requires clarity
without dominance; and finally, the lasting legacy of the individual work. For all these
concerns, Barnes seeks unity. He notes, “We do not solve our problems by sheer genius
or sudden inspiration, but by a process of exploration and analysis” (Barnes, 1959).
Throughout his career, Barnes remains true to these conditions, producing a body of work
respectful of its programmatic role, expressive of its materials, structure, and volume,
disciplined in its articulation, and evocative of its larger humanistic purpose.