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On February 5th, the distinguished American architect Harry Wolf died at his home in Porto, Portugal, at the age of 89. Born in 1935, Wolf graduated as an architect from MIT in 1960 and opened his independent practice in Charlotte in 1966. The first work to establish his reputation as a minimalist architect of exceptional stature was the four-story structurally articulate academic complex that he designed for the University of North Carolina, Charlotte between 1975 and 1982. These years also saw the realization of his designs of the four-story Mecklenburg Courthouse which combined the horizontally framed, curtain wall syntax of the university on its northern face with a stone-faced, largely opaque, southern elevation facing out over the monumental courthouse square in the center of Charlotte.

Mecklenburg County Courthouse, North Carolina (1982). Photo courtesy the archive of Harry Wolf Architect

During this same period, Wolf encountered the culture of the Middle East by virtue of being commissioned by the State Department in 1980 to design the new United States Embassy in Abu Dhabi. Wolf’s response to this commission was to propose two six-story, stone-faced cubes, set side by side, and naturally lit by a proliferation of small square windows across the entire exterior of the building. This fenestration pattern would necessarily also prevail within the monumental full height entrance hall.

The base of Tampa’s NCNB building (1988), now known as Rivergate Tower, as seen from the adjacent Kiley Garden, formerly NationsBank Plaza, designed by Dan Kiley. Photo courtesy the archive of Harry Wolf Architect

One of two former banking halls at the NCNB building. Photo courtesy the archive of Harry Wolf Architect

Wolf’s newfound preoccupation with Oriental traditions would transform his architecture, as is evident from his entry for the 1982 competition for the design of the Fort Lauderdale River Front Plaza and from the 31-story North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) office tower built in downtown Tampa between 1983 and 1988. Now known as Rivergate Tower, this singular, cylindrical, stone-faced office structure is unquestionably the built masterwork of his entire career, comprising, in addition to the tower, two free-standing cubic banking halls at its base, plus an extensive riverside park designed in association with the landscape architect Dan Kiley.

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Rivergate Tower pictured in December, 2024 (1); competition entry for the Toulouse Government Center, France (1992) (2); the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure (1999) at Disneyland Resort is among the largest such structures in the world (3). Photos © Architectural Record (1), courtesy the archive of Harry Wolf Architect (2,3)

What follows throughout the rest of the last century is a whole sequence of brilliant but regrettably unrealized projects conceived for sites in both the U.S. and Europe, as well as an entry for Japan’s Kansai International Airport competition of 1988, designed with Ellerbe Beckett. Wolf’s last realized design was the supremely elegant multi-story reinforced concrete garages that he saw built for Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in 1999. He will be sorely missed by myself and many others who had the privilege of working with him.

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