Gordon Bunshaft Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990) was an American architect and the leading design partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York office for four decades. His Lever House on Park Avenue set the model for the glass corporate tower, and his Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, with its walls of translucent marble, remains one of the most striking libraries of the twentieth century. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988.

Buffalo and MIT

Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1933 and his master’s in 1935, and a Rotch Travelling Scholarship allowed him to spend two years studying architecture in Europe and North Africa.

SOM and Lever House

He joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1937 and, after wartime service with the US Army Corps of Engineers, became a partner in 1949. Lever House (1952), a slender glass slab raised above an open plaza on Park Avenue, was one of the first International Style office towers in the United States, and the Manufacturers Hanover Trust branch on Fifth Avenue (1954) brought the same transparency to banking.

Beinecke and the Travertine House

For Yale University Bunshaft designed the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963), a box of Vermont marble panels in a granite frame that glows amber inside when daylight passes through the stone. The same year he completed his own house in East Hampton, the Travertine House, a simple pavilion of travertine and glass that he later left to the Museum of Modern Art.

Washington, Jeddah and the Pritzker Prize

Later works include the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin (1971), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington (1974), the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah (1983) and, with the engineer Fazlur Khan, the Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport (1981). Bunshaft retired from SOM in 1979, received the Pritzker Prize in 1988 and died in New York in 1990.