Gordon Bunshaft facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Gordon Bunshaft
Lever House, 1951-1952; Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 999.
Born	(1909-05-09)May 9, 1909 Buffalo, New York, US
Died	August 6, 1990(1990-08-06) (aged 81) New York City, US
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BA, MA)
Occupation	Architect
Spouse(s)	Nina Wayler ​ (m. 1943)​
Awards	American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award, elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Pritzker Architecture Prize
Practice	Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Buildings	Lever House, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Lever House, New York City

Gordon Bunshaft, FAIA (May 9, 1909 – August 6, 1990), was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century. A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years. His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway (Marine Midland Grace Trust Co.), and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York. (The last was the first post-war "transparent" bank on the East Coast.)

Early life

Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and attended Lafayette High School. A sickly child, he "frequently drew while in bed," his Times obituary notes. "A doctor who admired his pictures of houses told his mother that her son should become an architect." He received both his undergraduate (1933) and his master's (1935) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then studied in Europe from 1935 to 1937 on a Rotch Traveling Scholarship and the MIT Honorary Traveling Fellowship.

Career

After his traveling scholarships, Bunshaft worked briefly for Edward Durell Stone and the influential industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Reflecting on his brief stint ("about two or three months") with Loewy, Bunshaft told an interviewer for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, "I didn’t like it there. Raymond Loewy was a phony. He’d put a gold line on a cigarette or on a railroad train, and he’d get a fee for it."

In 1937, he joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill [SOM], where he remained for 42 years (with a hiatus for his service in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II) until he retired in 1979. Bunshaft's early influences included Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. "Mies was the Mondrian of architecture, and Le Corbusier was the Picasso," he told the Oral History interviewer.

First and foremost among the iconic modernist buildings he designed while at SOM is the renowned Lever House. Completed in 1952, it was New York’s "first major commercial structure with a glass curtain-wall (only the United Nations Secretariat preceded it)," notes the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, "and it burst onto the stuffy, solid masonry wall of Park Avenue like a vision of a new world.”

Other memorable buildings by Bunshaft include the Manufacturers Trust Company Building (1954), the first bank building in the United States to be built in the International Style; the Pepsi-Cola Building (now 500 Park Avenue), completed in 1959; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, completed in 1963; 140 Broadway (formerly known as the Marine Midland Building), topped out in 1966; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas (1971); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1974); and the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1983).

In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Bunshaft reflected on the Beinecke. "I happen to love books, especially bindings and things, and I thought it ought to be a treasure house and it ought to express that by having a large number of beautiful books displayed behind glass," he told Betty J. Blum in 1990.

Bunshaft's only single-family residence was his own, the 2300-square-foot (210 m²) Travertine House. On his death, he left the house to MoMA, which sold it to Martha Stewart in 1995. Her extensive remodelling stalled amid an acrimonious planning dispute with a neighbour. In 2005, she sold the house to textile magnate Donald Maharam, who described the house as "decrepit and largely beyond repair" and demolished it. The architectural historian Nicholas Adams, author of Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism, has lamented the demolition of the Bunshaft house as "the greatest loss" of all the architect's projects that have succumbed to the wrecking ball. "[He] and his wife Nina ... never had children and so their home was not designed for a family so much as it was for art," said Adams, in a 2019 interview. "It had his Miròs, Picassos, Moores, and Dubuffets and was surrounded by a remarkable landscape created by [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s] Joanna Diman."

Awards and honors

Bunshaft was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was the recipient of numerous other honors and awards. In 1955, he received the Brunner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and, in 1984, its gold medal. He also received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award for Lever House in 1980 and in 1988 the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In 1958, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate and became a full member in 1959. From 1963 to 1972, he was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

Bunshaft was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. He also received the Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Style

Bunshaft's biography page on the Pritzker Prize website lauds the architect for "opening a whole new era of skyscraper design with his first major design project in 1952, the 24-story Lever House in New York."

"In the late 1960's and 1970's, his work became more sculptural, in a sense following in a direction set by the Beinecke Library at Yale, a massive box with a central book tower surrounded by squares of translucent marble framed in granite," writes Paul Goldberger in his 1990 New York Times obituary for the architect.

Legacy

Bunshaft's personal papers are held by the Department of Drawings & Archives in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; his architectural drawings remain with SOM.

Buildings

Exterior of the Hirshhorn Museum, facing Independence Avenue

The LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas

Manhattan House in the Upper East Side, New York

• 1942 – Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Hostess House – Great Lakes, Illinois
• 1951 – Lever House – New York City
• 1952 – Manhattan House – New York City
• 1953 – Manufacturers Trust Company Building – New York City
• 1956 – Ford World Headquarters – Dearborn, Michigan, with Natalie de Blois
• 1956 – Consular Agency of the United States, Bremen – Bremen, Germany
• 1957 – Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters – Bloomfield, Connecticut
• 1955 – Istanbul Hilton – Istanbul, Turkey
• 1958 – Reynolds Metals Company International Headquarters – Richmond, Virginia
• 1960 – 500 Park Avenue (Pepsi-Cola Company World Headquarters) – New York City
• 1961 – 28 Liberty Street (Chase Manhattan Bank)  – New York City
• 1962 – CIL House – Montreal, Quebec
• 1962 – Albright-Knox Art Gallery addition – Buffalo, New York
• 1963 – Travertine House – East Hampton, New York
• 1963 – Beinecke Library – Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
• 1965 – American Republic Insurance Company Headquarters – Des Moines, Iowa
• 1965 – Banque Lambert – Brussels, Belgium
• 1965 – Heinz Corporate Headquarters – Hillingdon, England
• 1965 – New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (interiors) – New York City
• 1965 – Hayes Park Central & South Buildings – Hayes, United Kingdom
• 1965 – Warren P. McGuirk Alumni Stadium – University of Massachusetts , Amherst, Massachusetts
• 1967 – 140 Broadway – New York City
• 1970 – American Can Company Headquarters – Greenwich, Connecticut
• 1971 – Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum – Austin, Texas
• 1972 – Carborundum Center – Niagara Falls, New York
• 1972 – Carlton Centre – Johannesburg, South Africa
• 1973 – New York City Convention and Exhibition Center (not built) – New York City
• 1973 – Uris Hall, Cornell University – Ithaca, New York
• 1974 – Solow Building – 9 West 57th Street, New York City
• 1974 – W. R. Grace Building – New York City
• 1974 – Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – Washington, D.C.
• 1983 – National Commercial Bank – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Gallery

• 

  Manufacturers Trust Building
  New York City 1954

• 

  United States Consular Agency
  Bremen, Germany 1956

• 

  Ford World Headquarters
  Dearborn, Michigan 1956

• 

  Connecticut General Life Insurance Headquarters
  Bloomfield, CT 1957

• 

  Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York 1962

• 

  Beinecke Library
  Yale University, New Haven, CT 1963

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  Beinecke Library Interior
  Yale University, New Haven, CT 1963

• 

  Johnson Presidential Library
  Austin, Texas, 1971

• 

  Solow Building
  New York, 1974

• 

  Hirshhorn Museum
  Washington, D.C. 1974

Personal life

In 1943, Bunshaft married Nina Wayler (d. 1994). Avid collectors of contemporary art, the couple owned many major pieces, including works by Joan Miró, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Léger and Noguchi. They lived in the Manhattan House Apartments on New York's Upper East Side, which Bunshaft helped design, and at the Travertine House in East Hampton. He died of cardiovascular arrest in 1990, at the age of 81, and is buried next to his wife and parents in the Temple Beth El cemetery on Pine Ridge Road in Cheektowaga, New York.

Nicholas Adams, the architectural historian and author of Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism, characterizes Bunshaft as "gruff, grumpy, crude, and stubborn," noting, "When pressed about his architecture, he offered staccato descriptive explanations. At dinner parties he would turn his back (and rotate his chair) so that he wouldn’t have to talk to an unappealing neighbor. ..... "His extensive correspondence with [ Henry Moore and Jean Dubuffet ], preserved at the Avery Library, is both playful and witty, describing cheerful conversations, and looking forward to further jovial meetings," says Adams. "In November 1972, he wrote tenderly to Dubuffet after the installation of his Group of Three Trees in front of Chase Manhattan in New York: 'I enjoyed your visit here tremendously. I felt that although I have known you, off and on, for many years, this is the first time we really became closer.'"

A man of few words, he famously said he wanted his buildings to speak for themselves.

See also

In Spanish: Gordon Bunshaft para niños