“Every structure that I have built has been a ‘first’ for me—I have refused to emulate any existing form or idea.” So wrote Gunnar Birkerts in the preface to a 2009 monograph of his work. The Latvian-American architect died yesterday at the age of 92 from congestive heart failure. He will indeed be remembered for his original, and often unusual, buildings that extended the boundaries of the Modern movement.
Considered part of a second wave of foreign-born modernists in the United States, Birkerts came to prominence in the 1970s. He began his studies in architecture as a ‘displaced person’ at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany just as World War II ended. There, studying with Rolf Gutbrod, Birkerts trained under a strong Bauhaus curriculum. “We had a faculty of Bauhaus people there. And right across the street, practically, from the college, from our building, was the Weissenhof—an arrangement of buildings by all the Modernists,” Birkerts recalled in a 2014 interview. “There was Mies van der Rohe, Hans Scharoun…everybody had a building. It was almost like a village. So this thing was sort of absorbed, inhaled.”
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