Business
& Labor
Hugh Stubbins, Architect of Landmarks, Dead at 94
(archrecord.construction.com - 08/01/2006)
By Ingrid
Spencer
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click image to view larger
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| Photo: © Eric Roth |
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Citicorp Center, New York
Image: © Ed Jacoby |
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Berlin Congress Hall, Berlin,
Germany
Courtesy The Stubbins Associates |
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Landmark Tower, Yokohama, Japan
Courtesy of Mitsubishi Estate Co. |
Hugh Stubbins, Jr., the Cambridge, Massachusetts,
architect who died on July 5 at age 94, will best be remembered
for the slant-topped Citicorp Center in midtown Manhattan.
The slender, 914-foot tower was designed to snap the boredom
of what Stubbins called "the new, slick, slab buildings
that march up the avenues." Completed in 1978, Citicorp
was clad in alternating bands of aluminum and glass and capped
by a 160-foot-high roof pitched at 45 degrees. Its large public
plaza—which provided enough airspace at ground level
to build a new St. Peter’s Lutheran Church—and unique
three-story market energized the streetscape.
Citicorp exemplified a lifetime of achievement.
Stubbins was born January 11, 1912, in Birmingham, Alabama,
and graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in
1931. A nationally-ranked track star in college, a pulled
hamstring kept him out of the Olympics. He received a master's
from Harvard GSD in 1935, then worked for a firm that designed
Cape Cod–style homes, although he pushed Modernism. Walter
Gropius invited Stubbins to teach at the GSD, where he remained
for more than a decade. During that period he was best known
for the Berlin Congress Hall, which got the nickname the "pregnant
oyster" after the shape of the roof's concrete shell.
Over the next 50 years Stubbins’s
firm designed more than 800 buildings, many of which sported
firsts and superlatives. Citicorp pioneered the use of a tuned-mass
damper in tall buildings. Congress Hall was the largest effort
at employing concrete shell technology at the time. And his
last design, for Landmark Tower in Yokohama, mixed temple-like
corners and modern engineering in a flexible skeleton meant
to absorb earthquake shocks. “I think his personality
was formed by the period,” says The Stubbins Associates
Director of Design C. Ron Ostberg, AIA, who joined the firm
in 1984. “Coming out of the second World War there was
a tremendous optimism that architects were going to build
America. He was enthusiastic and he was self-confident. The
attitude in this country today is, in my opinion, extremely
different.”
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