William J. Conklin; architect designed D.C. Navy Memorial

William J. Conklin, an architect and urban planner whose design of the Navy Memorial helped set in motion the redevelopment of Washington’s Penn Quarter neighborhood and who was a principal designer of the early stages of the development of Reston, Va., died Nov. 22 at a retirement center in Mitchellville, Maryland. He was 95.

The death was confirmed by a niece by marriage, Gayle Denney. She said there was no specific cause.

Conklin was a Harvard-trained architect who studied under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Conklin adapted the clean lines of his mentor in countless designs for houses, public buildings, town plans and restorations.

A house he designed in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1958, jutting over the side of a hill, was hailed by Architectural Record magazine as one of the year’s 20 best designs. In 1962, Conklin and his longtime architectural partner, James Rossant, were praised for their innovative Butterfield House, an apartment building in New York’s Greenwich Village.

The architects then joined a design team assembled by Robert E. Simon Jr., who was developing one of the country’s first planned communities, about 18 miles west of Washington.

Conklin was a primary designer of Lake Anne Village, a mixed-use community alongside a man-made lake, which came to be the centerpiece of the town of Reston. It contained pedestrian paths, a fountain, shops, townhouses and apartments.

The first residents arrived in 1964.

“As we became involved in the master plan,” Conklin told The Washington Post in 2002, Simon “decided to try us out on the concept of villages. We introduced the concept of mixed uses and wrote the first zoning that permitted this.”

It was one of the first times that townhouses – the very definition of urban living – had been built in a semirural setting.

“The result . . . is one of the most striking communities in the country,” New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote. “Reston – the name is taken from letters in Simon’s name – looks like an attractive cross between an updated Georgetown and an Italian harbor town like Portofino.”

The Lake Anne Village center is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Conklin, who spent much of his career in New York, later became the chief architect of another major Washington-area project, the Navy Memorial and adjacent Market Square, midway between the U.S. Capitol and White House on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

After several design revisions, the memorial, commemorating the history of the Navy, was dedicated in 1987. A visitors center opened four years later.

The memorial includes a broad plaza with fountains, flags, a “granite-sea” map of the world and a statue dedicated to the “Lone Sailor.” Two adjoining neoclassical buildings, curving around the circular plaza between Seventh and Ninth streets NW, were designed by the firm of Hartman-Cox.