Chris Churchill
Remembering the architect who gave Nipper to Albany.
If you live around Albany, there’s a good chance you’ve stepped inside a Harris Sanders building. The architect designed divine spaces, including the Congregation Ohav Shalom. He designed public buildings, including the Washington Avenue library branch and the Albany County Nursing Home. He was even the architect for the old Story Time amusement park near Lake George.
But Sanders, who died Tuesday at 91, is best known for something he did not design: Nipper.
When a client wanted to make an unremarkable building memorable, it was Sanders who had the crazy idea to put a 25-foot version of the RCA logo on the roof. Sixty years later, the city’s beloved pooch is still there, giving Sanders an unexpected and unusual legacy.
“That’s my claim to fame,” he once said.
Did Sanders even like dogs?
“Not especially,” said his son, Daniel Sanders. (Nobody tell Nipper.) Harris Sanders was an Albany kid, born in 1927, the son of a plumber and raised on Philip Street in the South End. Sanders was also a plumber for a time, but, as the story goes, a close encounter with a rat in the pipe of a downtown building convinced him there must be better career options. He went to Penn State and became an architect.
Daniel Sanders, who spoke to me on Friday, a day after his father’s funeral at Albany’s Temple Israel, said his dad never lost the mindset of a man who works with his hands.
He knew that small details matter. He understood the guts of a building, the unseen particulars that determine whether a project succeeds or fails. He had a connection to the contractors who turn an architect’s fancy drawings into hard reality.
“He was more of a Renaissance architect than somebody who was working at a computer all day,” the son said. “He was an artist.”
Sanders loved his hometown, the diversity of its people and the richness of its architecture. He was proud of his city and didn’t apologize for it.
But while Albany is best known for older buildings and historic neighborhoods, Sanders was, stylistically, a modernist whose work broke from traditional patterns. His designs were about the crisp cleanliness of form and function.
He also admired Frank Lloyd Wright, an influence that is obvious in the Delaware Avenue library branch. Sanders designed the building to be a funeral home, its horizontal lines and double cantilever straight from Wright’s stylebook.
“We try to sneak in some interesting ideas here and there,” Sanders said in a 2014 Times Union profile. “That’s what architects do.”
In that same profile, Sanders vowed never to retire. Indeed, he worked until the end. His death was quick and unexpected, Daniel Sanders said. The architecture firm he founded in 1954 lives on, with his son running the show.
For a man who worked for decades and peppered his hometown with his designs, it might have seemed odd to be so closely associated with a dog shipped from Chicago on rail cars and assembled by a 10-story crane. There was more to Sanders, of course, just as there was more to him than his work — his family, faith and passion for travel.
But Sanders embraced his connection to Nipper. In his obituary, written by Sanders himself, the dog who “sits and watches over his hometown” gets a prominent mention.
And why not? Sanders gave Albany a landmark and an icon, and that’s no small thing.
Former Mayor Jerry Jennings, another Albany icon, once told me that when he was a kid, he knew he was home when he looked up and saw Nipper, his head forever cocked with curiosity.
Today’s children know the same.
That big dog helps keep Albany from becoming what Wendell Berry called a “city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.” The world has more of those places every day, but Albany, despite its flaws and faults, is not one of them.
Architecture, at its best, is about creating a sense of place and belonging. Nip per does that as well as any building.
Sanders couldn’t have given his city a better gift.