Hugh Newell Jacobsen grew up wanting to be a painter, which may explain the almost surreal flatness of much of his architecture. On the outside, his buildings lacked overhangs; on the inside, there were no moldings, baseboards or trim. Yet their familiar forms—often suggesting Monopoly houses—made traditionalists happy, helping Jacobsen, who died on March 4 at 91, find a middle ground between the modernism of his mentor, Louis Kahn, and the older architecture he admired. “You must never flex your muscle to destroy the progression of the street,” he told his son John, in a 2010 video interview. “Good architecture never shouts at its neighbors.”
That’s one reason he broke large houses into smaller volumes, sometimes grafted onto each other in ways that would never have worked without his extraordinary attention to detail. A house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, completed in 1981, consists of portions of seven idealized Georgian dwellings, each slightly bigger than the next, arranged in a continuous, telescopic form. (If that wasn’t surprising enough, the largest gable end was a mirrored glass window, 42 feet high at its peak.)
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