Ulrich Joseph Franzen, a prominent New York architect in the latter part of the 20th century, died after a brief illness on October 6 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 91. After studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the mid-1940s when Walter Gropius was its chair of architecture, Franzen became part of a cohort that would disseminate the Modernist vocabulary of the Bauhaus founder in the U.S. during the boom period after World War II.

Most of the Gropius generation—which included Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and John Johansen—initially made its mark designing houses. Franzen’s own house in Rye, New York, was featured in the first Record Houses issue in 1956. The floating parasol-like roof with a pair of attenuated, diamond-shaped forms made it distinctive: it has been compared to Le Corbusier's diagrammatic design for the Porte Maillot exhibition pavilion in Paris (1950) that he later developed for the Heidi Weber Pavilion (1965) in Zurich. In 2005 Franzen received the AR50 Award for the house as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Record Houses, which coincided with the exhibition Forever Modern: 50 Years of Record Houses, at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery.