Architect, United States
Gordon Bunshaft was a partner in the New York office of Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill and was an adherent of European modernism as well as one of the leaders of a
generation of architects who made buildings of glass, metal, reinforced concrete, and
travertine familiar in North America. At his best, he created works of highly refined
proportion, efficient function, imaginative construction, and adaptation to sites that were
often difficult. His later works were often bulkier and simplified in geometric form;
nevertheless they include imaginative solutions to complicated problems, humane
consideration for those who work in them, and dramatic boldness. His work encompassed
institutional buildings such as the Beinecke Library (1963) for rare books and
manuscripts at Yale University (a building he thought might potentially be his most
enduring work), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1974) on the Mall in
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Washington, D.C., and the presidential library for Lyndon Johnson in Austin, Texas
(1971). Corporate headquarters built to his designs included Lever House (1952) in New
York City, the Banque Lambert (1965) in Brussels, the American Can Company offices
(1970) in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the National Commercial Bank (1983) in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia. Buildings for business constituted most of the works for which he became
well known, although he also designed other types of structures. These included the
Venezuelan Pavilion at the World’s Fair of 1939 (held in New York City), the Istanbul
Hilton Hotel (1955) in association with Sedad Eldem, a pristine cubic addition to the
Albright-Knox Museum (1962) in Buffalo, New York, the Philip Morris Cigarette
Manufacturing Plant (1974) in Richmond, Virginia (where garden courts alternate with
work areas), the spectacular Haj Terminal at the Jeddah airport (in collaboration with the
engineer, Fazlur Khan), and a one-story house for himself and his wife in Easthampton,
New York.
Bunshaft was the son of immigrants from Russia and attended public schools in
Buffalo, New York, before receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was there that several of the
younger instructors showed him the new forms, generated in Europe by Le Corbusier,
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, among others. Bunshaft found their work
inspiring, but did not execute mere copies of their works; instead, he adapted European
ideas to the specific circumstances of American commissions that differed in type,
materials, location, and legal constraints. With the help of a Rotch Traveling Fellowship
from MIT, Bunshaft visited Europe for several months in 1935–36, and then sought work
in New York City. After working briefly for Edward Durell Stone, Raymond Loewy, and
other practitioners, he secured a position in 1937 with the young firm of Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill. Louis Skidmore’s experience in exhibition design secured work for
his firm at the World’s Fair of 1939, and the firm expanded rapidly thereafter. Bunshaft
returned to the office in New York, after serving in several branches of the military
(1942–46), and became a partner in the firm in 1946.
Bunshaft’s work on such varied projects as Manhattan House, a large apartment house
in New York City, and the Fort Hamilton Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Brooklyn,
is characterized by a taste for geometric form, siting to enhance both efficiency and
amenity, refined proportion, and attention to landscaping and ground-level amenity.
These characteristics reappeared at Lever House (New York), a modestly sized corporate
headquarters that was the first glass box, commercial office building in the city. During
the next decade, Bunshaft designed other buildings that often appeared delicate despite
their substantial size, including the glass-walled branch bank for the Manufacturers’ Trust
Company in Manhattan, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (1957) in
Bloomfield, Connecticut, and the Reynolds Metals Company headquarters (1958) in
Richmond, Virginia, where the company’s aluminum formed a substantial part of the
exterior surface.
During the 1960s, Bunshaft’s style included attention to dramatic structure, with large
boxlike buildings supported on small pin joints; the Beinecke Library is one example of
the style, and another is the American Republic Life Insurance Company headquarters
(1965) in Des Moines, Iowa. At this time, he used concrete more often than glass and
metal, but continued his intense interest in designing the thinnest possible metal and glass
curtain walls, as he used at 140 Broadway (1967) in New York City.
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The taste for dramatic buildings continued into the 1970s, with
sometimes-clumsy results, as in the Hirshhorn Museum. The museum is a
doughnut-shaped building that attempted to mediate between the disparate
shapes of neighboring museums. By contrast, praise abounded for his
National Commercial Bank (Jeddah) where he ingeniously placed
multistory openings on a prismatic, largely blank building, allowing partly
cooled air to help ventilate the office tower in a hot, dry climate.
National Commercial Bank, Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia, designed by Gordon
Bunshaft (1983)
The
Tefloncovered tents at the terminal in Jeddah for the pilgrims to the annual Haj, earned universal admiration, providing as they do, an elegant, airy solution to
climatic and social problems.
These buildings are too intricate to have been designed by one person, and Bunshaft
acknowledged his debts to his administrative partners as well as to his design assistants
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and engineers. His architectural colleagues included William S.Brown, J.Walter
Severinghaus, Natalie de Blois, and Sherwood A.Smith. A practical person who was
interested in specific situations rather than in theory, Bunshaft was a man of great energy,
a decisive decision-maker with a habit of blunt speech, and a man of fundamental
honesty.
His interests in landscaping and in the placement of works of modern art inside and
outside the firm’s buildings are lesserknown aspects of his work, but they were essential
to his idea of good architecture. He favored the sculpture of Henry Moore, Joan Miró,
Alberto Giacometti, and Isamu Noguchi, whose works were in the private collection that
he and his wife willed to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His collection included
paintings by Miró and Jean Dubuffet and modest examples of African sculpture.
His building designs earned him 12 First Honor awards from the American Institute of
Architects, the Gold Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,
and the Pritzker Prize, which he shared with Oscar Niemeyer.
