Architect who designed Alley Theatre dies
Ulrich Franzen, a German- born architect whose design of Houston’s Alley Theatre building in the 1960s created controversy, died Oct. 6 in Santa Fe, N. M. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Josephine.
Franzen’s firstmajor solo project was the fortresslike building for the Alley, which opened in 1968 for the city’s resident theater company. Critics praised it as a triumph of the Brutalist style, characterized by the use of rough exterior materials like concrete.
But many Houstonians hated it. One letter in The Houston Chronicle condemned the building’s “totalitarian” aura.
The theater has no right angles but does have wide bands and terraces and is “reminiscent of Frank LloydWright’s buildings.”
Franzen said that he selected the concrete exterior because he was inspired by Houston’s location and the warm weather of the Southwest.
Known for skywalks
Franzen had amajor impact on New York, where his fortresslike buildings seemed to buttress the interior landscape during the shaky 1970s, andwho gave it some buoyancy, too, with skywalks. Not everyone liked the skywalks, which connect buildings Franzen designed at Hunter College on Lexington Avenue.
Neighbors lamented the loss of sunlight. But Franzen, aModernist subscriber to the formfollowsfunction credo, considered them the functional equivalent of ivy- covered walkways for urban students. It would “become the college community’s main street,” he wrote of the skywalk plan in 1972 in the college’s student newspaper, “well above rush- hour traffic at street level.”
Franzen was part of a generation of prominent American architects, including Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and I. M. Pei, to emerge from the Harvard School of Design afterWorldWar II. The group was deeply influenced by the Bauhaus architecture masters Walter Gropius andMarcel Breuer, who taught at Harvard after fleeing the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s.
EarlyModernist
Franzen’s early works exemplify theModernist style, among them his first designs for private residences, most of them clean- lined, single- level structures perched on waterfronts and rock ledges, wrapped in sliding glass and flooded with light.
He also helped design the first- generation shopping mall Roosevelt Field, on Long Island, working with Pei and Henry Cobb, another graduate of the Harvard program. The mall, which opened on a former air field in 1956, is a vast duplex in an ocean of parking space.
He and his wife lived for many years in Rye, N. Y., in a house he designed, before retiring to Santa Fe. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Peter and David; a daughter, April; and three grandchildren.