Architect who designed for Jacqueline Onassis, Meryl Streep
Hugh Newell Jacobsen, an award-winning Washington architect whose deceptively simple designs for homes and prominent public buildings honored the values of traditional styles while cleverly inf using modernist sensibilities, died Thursday at an assisted living center in Front Royal, Va.He was 91.
The cause was complications from COVID-19, said his son John Jacobsen. Another son, Simon Jacobsen, said the cause was reoccurring pneumonia and unrelated to the coronavirus.
Throughout a career that included high-profile commissions around the world, Hugh Newell Jacobsen was best known for residential designs that combined the familiar forms of early American architecture with modern architecture’ s emphasis on simplicityand clean lines.
Mr. Jacobsen’s hallmark was often described as a Monopoly house because of its resemblance to the piece from the board game. The light, airy, steeply gabled pavilions were not nearly as easy to create as they might have appeared.
“Designing is like giving birth to a barbed-wire fence,” he often quipped.
He won some of his profession’s highest accolades; Architectural Digest inducted him into its hall of fame; and he was a regular member of the AD100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s top architects and designers.
With a rakish sweep of white hair, impeccably tailored suits and patrician bearing, Mr. Jacobsen moved easily among such wealthy clients as former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, actors Meryl Streep and James Garner, and arts patron and philanthropist Rachel “Bunny” Mellon.
Mr. Jacobsen, who was mentored by modernist masters Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson, began applying their philosophies about order and clarity as soon as he opened his solo architecture practice in Washington in 1958. In time, more than 120 houses in the Georgetown neighborhood were refurbished built by him.
He also undertook major public projects. He created the addition under the West Terrace of the U.S. Capitol; restored two Smithsonian museums (the Renwick Gallery and the Arts and Industries Building); and renovated the
Talleyrand building, part of the U.S. Embassy complex in Paris, and the Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Moscow. He designed buildings at the University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, Georgetown University and his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Maryland.
Mr. Jacobsen’s reputation flourished in the 1980s after Onassis hired him to design her home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Built in 1981, Red Gate Farm caused an uproar in the island community because of fears his modern designwould look out of place.
But the understated house was more New England saltbox than brutalist concrete fantasy. In describing his visit to the house, author Robert T. Littell wrote, “There was something about the inside of both [the main and guest] houses that made you feel you were being wrapped in a big robe of clean, soft, white terry cloth.”
In his best-remembered residential projects, Mr. Jacobsen’s trademark became a series of steep-roofed pavilions unfurling like a telescope. His houses had elongated windows to draw natural light into the space and pervasive white walls to reflect it throughout the room.
“If there is anything that is consistent in my work, it is my absolute obsession with controlling light,” he once told the Washington Star. “I have found that I can hold light in a space almost as you can fill up aglass with liquid.”
Hewing to the modern aesthetic, Mr. Jacobsen’s homes lacked ornamentation — no molding, baseboards or trim. Canister lights were a consistent motif. Bookshelves were designed on a grid to resemble antique wooden egg crates.
Often copied, Mr. Jacobsen’s bookshelves were precisely crafted to be elegant as well as functional. Each cube was 12 inches wide, so books could be removed without starting an avalanche. Filling the shelves with a library turned them into a wall of color. (But don’t leave them empty, the architect begged, or “they’ll look like a liquor store going out of business.”)
In 1998, Mr. Jacobsen was one of the few architects selected to participate in Life magazine’s Dream House series. The editors commissioned architects to design beautiful yet affordable houses for aspiring middleclass homeowners. The mailorder home plans sold for about $600 for a house with a projected construction cost of $200,000.
Morethan 900,000 Jacobsen plans sold, and houses created fromthe plans were built from SouthKorea to Argentina.
“I’ve been an architect for the rich, I’ve been a ‘Jackietect’ — that’s what one of my sons has called me since I did Mrs. Onassis’ Martha’s Vineyard house — but to do a house that people can reasonably build, that’s how every architect wants to be remembered,”Mr. Jacobsen told Life.