Edward Larrabee Barnes, Modern Architect
Hyfler/Rosner
Edward Larrabee Barnes, Modern Architect, Dies at 89
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times
Edward Larrabee Barnes, a New York architect who cherished
the ideals of clarity and functionality he learned from the
Modernist masters even as he devised novel approaches to
designing houses, campuses, museums, churches and
skyscrapers, died on Tuesday in Cupertino, Calif. He was 89
and lived in Cambridge, Mass. The cause was complications of
a stroke, said his son, John.
For the half-century following World War II, Mr. Barnes's
prodigious output included the I.B.M. corporate headquarters
in Manhattan, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the
Dallas Museum of Art, the Thurgood Marshall Federal
Judiciary Building in Washington, the I.B.M. World Trade
Center in Mount Pleasant, N.Y., and the Sarah M. Scaife
Gallery at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
His many master plans included work for the State University
of New York at Potsdam and Purchase, Yale, Colonial
Williamsburg and the National University of Singapore. He
also made his mark on the the Chicago Botanic Garden and the
New York Botanical Garden.
His Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts on Deer
Isle, Me., built in 1962, was not a building but a village
of shingled cottages linked by a grid of wooden decks
leading to a spectacular ocean view. Its diagonal forms were
a much-noted departure from the cubical massing of the
International Style that prevailed at the time. In 1994, the
American Institute of Architects honored the project's
influence with its 25-Year Award for older buildings,
calling it "an early and profound example of the fruitful
and liberating fusion of the vernacular building traditions
with the rationality and discipline of Modern architecture."
Speaking of Haystack in 1989, Mr. Barnes told Architecture
magazine, "I've always been drawn to making things as simple
as possible, if you can do that without making them inhuman
or dull or oppressive."
As a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design just
before World War II, Mr. Barnes was inspired by Walter
Gropius and Marcel Breuer to pursue the sleek Modernist
vision, characterized by an aversion to ornament and the
so-called "honest" expression of function. His loyalty to
the movement proved stronger than that of some other
better-known Modernist figures like Philip Johnson, who
embraced more eclectic postmodernism in the 1980's.
Mr. Barnes's 1983 headquarters for I.B.M. at Madison Avenue
and 57th Street in Manhattan may have had five sides - which
some purists viewed as a violation of the Modernist ideal of
the box - but it conspicuously lacked the playful and
controversial faux-historic references of Mr. Johnson's
nearby A T & T building, now the Sony building, that was
erected around the same time.
Mr. Barnes's style was so understated that some suggested he
almost lacked one. Peter Blake, the architect and critic,
chose to praise Mr. Barnes for successfully juggling the
many considerations faced by today's architects, from cost
to clients to location to zoning to image - devilish details
that, he dryly noted, would confound Michelangelo and the
historic masters.
In the introduction to the book "Edward Larrabee Barnes:
Architect," which Mr. Barnes published in 1994 at the time
of his retirement, Mr. Blake said that Mr. Barnes sacrificed
"a personal signature" in order to make "a more selfless
contribution."
"He seems to have grasped what few others understood as
clearly or creatively - that a designed building in a
participatory democracy, should respond to a great variety
of factors and that its ultimate form should express those
conditions and demands rather than provide a memorial to its
architect or to those who paid the bill," Mr. Blake wrote.
Many believed that Mr. Barnes attained his reputation as a
world-class architect with his highly acclaimed Walker Art
Center in 1971, which is still considered one of the most
appealing environments for contemporary art in the United
States. It is characterized its white-on-white loft spaces.
The galleries rise in the form of a helix.
Writing in The New York Times, Hilton Kramer called it "a
far better place" to look at paintings than either Frank
Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's
National Gallery in Berlin.
Mr. Barnes never lost interest in building private homes,
even when he was awash with corporate clients. Over the
years, his houses evolved from one-level horizontal
structures to buildings with towers and extended wings to
connect the home to the site at different vertical levels.
"They're a guaranteed money-loser," he said of houses in an
interview with The Saturday Review in 1981, "but I never
want to give them up because of the richness and complexity
involved."
Edward Larrabee Barnes was born in Chicago on April 22,
1915, to a family he described as "incense-swinging High
Episcopalians." His mother, the former Margaret Helen Ayer,
won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel "Years of Grace." His
father, Cecil, was a lawyer.
Mr. Barnes began studying English at Harvard, switching to
art history and finally to the history of architecture.
After graduation, in 1938, he taught English for a year at
the Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, which he had attended.
His visits to the houses that Gropius and Breuer built in
nearby Lincoln persuaded him to be an architect, Mr. Blake
wrote.
After receiving his architecture degree from Harvard design
school in 1942, he served in the Navy. Immediately after the
war, he worked in Los Angeles for the industrial designer
Henry Dreyfuss designing prototypes for mass-produced homes.
When Washington stopped financing that initiative, Mr.
Barnes went to Manhattan and opened his own architecture
office in 1949. Nearly 500 architects, many of them
prominent, were to work for the firm over its
45-year-existence.
"Like his Harvard mentor, Walter Gropius, Barnes may be
remembered by future generations as much for the architects
he helped train as for the buildings he created," Lester
Korzilius, one of those architects, wrote in a glowing
review in Oculus magazine of Mr. Barnes's book.
In 1944 he married the former Mary Elizabeth Coss, an
architect who had worked with Alvar Aalto and others in
putting together exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art.
She survives him, as do his son, John, of Davenport, Calif.,
and two granddaughters.
The architect couple lived in the predictably avant-garde
Manhattan apartment. Mr. Blake wrote that to keep the place
flawlessly neat, visitors were asked to trade in their shoes
for Japanese slippers at the entrance. They added a house in
Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, N.Y., in 1952. When it
was built, the house was a classically modernist flat-roofed
box set on a stone platform on the crest of a hill, The
Saturday Review reported.
"The idea had to do with architecture as something isolated
from nature," Mr. Barnes told the magazine. The basic raft
was added to five times, with the help of John Barnes, also
an architect.
One of Mr. Barnes's most famous designs was also in
Westchester County: a master plan for the State University
of New York at Purchase, in the late 1960's He designed some
of the buildings and assigned others to top architects like
Mr. Johnson. He required them all to use the same brown
brick.
By the 1980's, architectural critics wrote that neither the
ensemble nor the individual buildings worked very well. In
1981, Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of The New
York Times, likened the ubiquitous brown color scheme to the
gray coats of paint that turned ocean liners into troop
ships during World War II.
The next year, a 22-year-old art student protested by
fitting out six windows with green shutters and checked
curtains, hardly part of the Modernist vocabulary. Mr.
Barnes allowed as how that seemed "a normal reaction."
He earlier told The Saturday Review that the buildings on
the campus were "constipated, boiled to the point where
there isn't much juice left." (He did not specify if he was
including his own works in this assessment.) Mr. Barnes said
his style was catalyzed by a visit in the late 1950's to
Mykonos, which had earlier inspired Le Corbusier's elegantly
spare vision. This influence helped Mr. Barnes develop what
he saw as an architecture of three-dimensional volumes not
just angles and planes, which can be seen in his
skyscrapers, described by some as exercises in pure form.
"Barnes' office towers are the embodiment of the late Modern
development of the thin-skinned office tower as a taut
technological membrane," the International Dictionary of
Architects and Architecture said in 1993.
But there could be whimsy in these seemingly monolithic
skyscrapers. In 1990, Mr. Goldberger said the cantilevered
corner of the I.B.M. tower recalled a ballet dancer balanced
on point.
Mr. Barnes thought buildings should speak for themselves,
and made a clear distinction between what he called
"architectural" ideas and "verbal" ideas. When the
postmodernists were using words like "taxonomy" and
"semiotics" and spoke of "deconstructing" buildings, Mr.
Barnes spoke of "simplicity" and "lucidity."
He once said that most architectural ideas could be
expressed on the back of an envelope.