Robert Geddes; changed how architecture is taught
Robert Geddes, the transformative first dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture and an architect of elegant modernist buildings, many in New Jersey and his native Pennsylvania, died Monday at his home outside Princeton, N.J. He was 99.
His son, David Geddes, confirmed the death.
As an educator, Mr. Geddes worked to put architecture on an equal footing with other academic disciplines. Before he arrived at Princeton in 1965, beginning a 17-year tenure there as dean, architecture was part of the art and archaeology department and taught from a fine arts perspective. Mr. Geddes forged ties to social scientists (even giving sociologists appointments in the architecture school) and to policy experts in the university’s School of Public and International Affairs, to enrich his urban planning curriculum.
“He had a vision of architecture as a complex endeavor connected to many different fields,” said Stan Allen, a Princeton architecture professor who served as the school’s dean from 2002 to 2012.
Mr. Geddes elevated the school’s profile by bringing in a number of important architectural historians and theorists, including Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vidler, Alan Colquhoun, and Robert Maxwell, all of them from the United Kingdom. (Mr. Geddes admired the work being done by British architects and urban planners at the time.)
He continued practicing architecture while serving as dean. His firm, Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham, may be best known for its two buildings at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Both the dining hall and academic office building have facades of glass and concrete reminiscent of the work of Le Corbusier, one of Mr. Geddes’s idols alongside Louis Kahn and Alvar Aalto — all modernists who knew how to make spaces inviting. He was less enamored of the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose glass boxes, he told Eugenia Cook of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1984, have “not been satisfying to the human psyche.”
Reviewing the Princeton buildings in The New York Times in 1972, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that the architecture was as elevated as the institute’s research. “The level of the building’s design suggests immediately the level of the work being done,” she wrote, adding that the buildings were an “extremely thoughtful exercise in solving functional needs with a maximum of taste and sensibility.”
Mr. Geddes was also responsible for the Philadelphia Police Department headquarters, which opened in 1962 and is known as the Roundhouse for its curved exterior — meant to signal a softer police presence in the city. But, as preservationist Jack Pyburn wrote in 2021, the building instead became “a physical manifestation of a persistent, systemic and brutal history of policing,” particularly from 1968 to 1980, when Frank Rizzo was the city’s police chief and then mayor.
When, in the 2010s, the police department said it might move to another location, many Philadelphians said they hoped to see the building demolished. Pyburn and others argued that it should be preserved not despite its checkered past but because of it, as a kind of monument to the victims of police misconduct. (The police moved out of the building last year, and a spokesperson said the city was planning to sell it.)
Mr. Geddes’s master plan for Liberty State Park in Jersey City, which transformed 800 acres of derelict landfill into open lawns and a crescent waterfront walkway with sweeping views of Manhattan, was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. But more important for Mr. Geddes, it is a design that seems to be working today.
“In terms of impact, the plan for the park is doing very well,” he said in a 2021 interview for this obituary. “The crescent stone edge is spectacularly successful, as a place for people to walk and as an image of the park.”
Mr. Geddes was born Robert Leon Goldberg on Dec. 7, 1923, in Philadelphia. He was the only child of Louis J. Goldberg, a clothing manufacturer, and Kate (Malmed) Goldberg, a milliner. He grew up in Atlantic City, N.J., but spent several years in California when the family moved there for business reasons.
After graduating from high school in Atlantic City, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he transferred to Yale to be closer to his family. He spent three years in the Army Air Forces, teaching radar operations, mostly in Madison, Wis. There he met Evelyn Basse, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin.
They married in 1947, a year after he and his parents changed their surname from Goldberg to Geddes. Mr. Geddes returned to Yale but in 1947 left without a degree for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he earned a master’s in architecture in 1950.
While he was at Harvard, the teaching of architectural history was practically banned by modernists, including émigré professor Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school. “There was almost nothing to read or to look at,” Mr. Geddes said in the 2015 interview.
From Harvard he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught architecture for 15 years, until 1965, when Princeton University named him to a new position, dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. After stepping down as dean in 1982 and taking emeritus status in 1990, he moved to New York University to teach architecture and urbanism. “They even let me design the room that I would teach in,” he said, delightedly, in 2021.
After working briefly for architect Hugh Stubbins Jr. in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Geddes founded the firm that became Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham in 1953. One of his favorite buildings was the College of Liberal Arts of Southern Illinois University, which he said did a good job of establishing an edge between a campus and a forest. He also designed buildings for Stockton University in New Jersey, the University of Delaware, Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, and several campuses of Rutgers University, as well as affordable housing in Princeton and Trenton, N.J.
In addition to his son, an anthropologist and business consultant, Mr. Geddes is survived by his daughter, Ann Geddes, an architect and ceramic artist; seven grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. Mr. Geddes’s wife of 73 years, Evelyn, died in 2020.