Pulitzer Prize–Winning Journalist Robert Campbell Has Died
Robert Campbell. Photo by Judith Bromley
Longtime RECORD contributor Robert Campbell died on Tuesday, April 29. He was 88 years old. The cause of death was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
As architecture critic of The Boston Globe for more than 40 years beginning in 1973, Campbell wrote about buildings new and old. According to the newspaper, a popular feature in the Globe Magazine was “Cityscapes,” a collaboration between Campbell and the photographer Peter Vanderwarker. With a text by Campbell, an archival photograph of an old building would appear alongside one of the present-day site, taken by Vanderwarker. The feature inspired a book, Cityscapes of Boston: An American City through Time (1993). Yet, the Globe writes, Campbell “unfailingly emphasized that what mattered most in architecture wasn’t any one building, no matter how beautiful or imposing it might be, but the larger whole that building contributed to—or detracted from.”
Campbell was also a practicing architect, founding his own firm after working with Josep Lluís Sert at the Cambridge-based Sert, Jackson and Associates. In his last piece for RECORD, in 2019, Campbell wrote about the transformation of Sert’s Holyoke Center at Harvard University. His contributions to RECORD were varied, from writing about a Record House in Boston’s South End to advising architects to pick up a golf club.
Robert Douglas Campbell Jr. was born in Buffalo on March 31, 1937. An English major at Harvard, he received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He pursued a journalism career in New York, then returned to Cambridge to get a master’s in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Campbell was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Institute of Architects. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1996. He was a recipient of the AIA’s Medal for Criticism and, in 2004, the Boston Society of Architect’s Award of Honor. In 2018, he received the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C.
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