Gordon Bunshaft
American architect (1909–1990)
Gordon Bunshaft (May 9, 1909 – August 6, 1990) was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century. A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years. His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway (Marine Midland Grace Trust Co.), and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York, the first post-war "transparent" bank on the East Coast.
Early life
Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, and attended Lafayette High School. His parents, David and Yetta, were first cousins who had immigrated to the United States a year prior to Gordon's birth. A sickly child, he "frequently drew while in bed," his New York Times obituary notes. "A doctor who admired his pictures of houses told his mother that her son should become an architect."
He received both his undergraduate (1933) and his master's (1935) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then studied in Europe from 1935 to 1937 on a Rotch Traveling Scholarship and the MIT Honorary Traveling Fellowship.
Career
After his traveling scholarships, Bunshaft worked briefly for Edward Durell Stone and the influential industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Reflecting on his brief stint ("about two or three months") with Loewy, Bunshaft told an interviewer for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, "I didn’t like it there. Raymond Loewy was a phony.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gordon Bunshaft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.