Gunnar Birkerts — architect stressed light
Gunnar Birkerts, a modernist architect who created dozens of elegant, gleaming buildings worldwide, including a national library in his native Latvia that became the country’s symbolic Castle of Light, died Aug. 15 at his Needham, Mass., home at age 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said a son, literary critic Sven Birkerts.
Mr. Birkerts began sketching buildings as a teenager in Latvia, studied architecture in Germany and built his career in Michigan, where he was a protege of the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.
In 1982, a survey of architecture professors named Mr. Birkerts one of the country’s 10 most important architects of “nonresidential structures,” along with I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson and others.
With one of his first major buildings, the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, completed in 1974 and now a commercial office building, Mr. Birkerts adapted construction principles of the suspension bridge, with most of the building’s floors supported by cables, allowing for a column-free interior. The idea was further reflected in the glass facade, with a deeply curving line reminiscent of bridge cables.
Mr. Birkerts rarely repeated himself throughout his career and did not have a signature visual style, other than an ingenious ability to arrange windows and mirrors to refract light deep inside his buildings.
Some of his buildings, such as the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, which seemed to grow naturally from its setting in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, had an organic, earthy quality. His corporate headquarters for Domino’s Pizza in Ann Arbor, Mich., was designed at the behest of company founder Tom Monaghan in the low, ground-hugging manner of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style.
Mr. Birkerts’ Calvary Baptist Church in Detroit is an orange pyramid thrusting out of the earth. Other buildings, including the Corning (N.Y.) Museum of Glass and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., used concrete, glass and steel in ways that seemed to flow, almost as if shaped by hand. He also designed the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which opened in 1972.
The Corning Museum, which opened in 1980, “has the sensible beauty of a hand-cut crystal tumbler,” architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt wrote in the Post. “And like a crystal tumbler, the building can be viewed as a precious work of art or as practical utensil.”
Mr. Birkerts designed many buildings on college campuses, including additions to libraries at Cornell University, UC San Diego and the University of Michigan, where he was a longtime faculty member. At Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, he built an underground law library addition that filtered light into three subterranean levels.
Mr. Birkerts said an architect should be “someone who has compassion for humanity,” adding that “architecture may indeed be an art of accommodation, but it is also an art of communication.”
Allegiance to history and culture, and not simply the mode of the day,” he told Blueprint magazine in 2014, “is essential to the lasting quality I strive for in my architecture.”