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EDWARD LARRABEE BARNES
 
 
 
 
  Name   Edward Larrabee Barnes
       
  Born   April 22, 1915
       
  Died   September 22, 2004
       
  Nationality   USA
       
  School    
       
  Official website    
       
       
       
     
 
BIOGRAPHY        
   

The career of Edward Larrabee Barnes has encapsulated and contributed to the course of modernism across the United States. Barnes entered the architectural profession in concurrence with the arrival of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer into this country in 1937. He closed his office in 1994, just as a reinvention of modernism appeared to be launched. During the intervening years, Barnes crafted an array of private houses notable for their clarity in plan, volume, and landscaping. The houses exist as a series of educationl and cultural buildings, instructive for the sensitivity of their siting and responsiveness to a larger context. Barnes’s body of work also includes several office buildings, note- worthy for their dedication to Louis Sullivan’s theme of the tall building, artistically considered.

Barnes was born in Chicago in 1915, to parents who were successful in their chosen careers of law and writing. He attended preparatory school in the East, and received his undergraduate education at Harvard College. Following a brief teaching stint, Barnes returned to Harvard to study under Gropius and Breuer, graduating in 1942 with a master’s degree in architecture.

Barnes’s wartime career included a year in Washington, D.C., at the Division of Defense Housing and service as an architect with the Naval Reserve at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. At the close of the war, Barnes joined the offices of architect William W.Wurster in San Francisco, and industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss in Los Angeles. With Dreyfuss, Barnes designed a prefabricated house for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, scheduled for mass production. In 1949 Barnes returned East with his wife, Mary, and opened an office in New York City.

Like a number of his Harvard contemporaries including Henry Cobb, Ulrich Frazen, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, and I.M.Pei, Barnes entered the profession during a time of rapid economic expansion, and increased demand for new construction at all levels, including residential, institutional, and commercial. For Barnes and the others, the national growth combined with talent, personal connections, and luck led to rapid recognition and robust practices by the mid-1950s.

Barnes’s body of work, while infused with a modernist acknowledgment of the specificities of each project, exudes no dogmatic or easily definable style. His legacy is a dedication to an overall organizing idea derived from the complexities of each commission, distilled in a rationally ordered plan.

The Osborn House (1949–51) in Salisbury, Connecticut, typifies a group of early Barnes houses, with a site plan that creates a distinct precinct within an open meadow, augmented by carefully considered connections between individual rooms and the adjacent landscape. In time Barnes extended this strategy to increasingly individualized spaces, suggesting villages with individual house designs. The plan of the Cowles House (1959–63) in Wayzata, Minnesota, alludes to a farm assemblage, while sharp-peaked roofs and bold modulations of surface and void simultaneously separate the residence from the adjacent acreage.

By the late 1950s, Barnes had developed a portfolio of institutional work, with the completion of two children’s summer camps for the Fresh Air Fund (Camp Bliss and Camp Anita, 1953–55, Fishkill, New York). At the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (1958–63) in Deer Isle, Maine, Barnes combined a bold master plan—running down the site’s 90-foot slope—with a typological layout and articulation of separate building elements. Although the individual buildings at Haystack are one-story volumes constructed of unfinished wood boards, their geometry and the system that orders their arrangement direct attention to both the natural site and the school as a community, making the experience of place an emotional and practical one. While Barnes described his overriding concept as the construction of “a typical Maine fishing village” (minutes of the Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 26 July 1959), the simplicity and inevitability of such a conceit is the product of the architect’s thoughtful design decisions. In 1994 Haystack Mountain School of Crafts received the American Institute of Architects (AIA) award for an exemplary American building of 25 years of age or more. It remains the masterwork of his career. Following Haystack, Barnes designed a host of buildings for educational institutions, including dormitories at St. Paul’s School (1959–61 and 1969) in Concord, New Hampshire; faculty apartments and a building for the arts (1963–71) at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York; and master plans for the State University of New York at Purchase (1966–68) and Yale University (1968–78).

With the Walker Art Center (1966–71, addition in 1984) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Barnes first tackled the program of an art museum; he arranged seven galleries and three roof terraces around a central service core. The galleries, individualized by their proportions and apertures, defer in authority to the artwork. Here, the architect emphasized movement through space over discrete destinations. At the Dallas Museum of Art (1978–83, additions in 1984 and 1993), a central passageway lends access to an array of museum functions, accommodating expansion and the distinct schedules of galleries, public spaces, and auxiliary operations. The linear arrangement reduces the scale of the overall enterprise and, as with the early houses, allows the development of independent relationships between interior galleries and exterior gardens.

Although Barnes was lauded in his commercial work, it was more for his articulation of surface than for his design plan or volume; two towers stand out for the clarity of their overall design. The New England Merchants National Bank (1963–71) in Boston, Massachusetts, addresses a sloping site and a complex of disparate civic buildings at its base, including the Old State House and the new city hall (1962–67, Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles). The articulation of the crown expresses the presence of a restaurant and an executive office suite. In between, a tight surface patterned by ribbons of window and wall convey repetitive office floors. At the IBM tower (1973–83) in New York City, a similar scheme provides for an entrance base, a clear tower shaft (here sheathed in green granite), and a differentiated top. At the entrance, Barnes carved out a triangle-shaped plaza from the first three floors, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, over which he cantilevered the tower’s remaining 40 stories. The 1973 zoning law, which allowed increases in overall square footage of commercial buildings in exchange for public amenities, made possible a greenhouse park planted with dramatic copses of bamboo on the southwestern half of the parcel.

Barnes was widely recognized for his work and received awards from the AIA for the Walker Museum of Art (Minneapolis, 1972), the Hecksher House (1977), and the private home in Dallas (1986) in addition to the AIA Firm Award in 1980. He was elected a fellow of the AIA in 1966, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991. Harvard awarded him a 350th Anniversary Medal in 1986 and an Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award from the Graduate School of Design in 1993. In addition to teaching stints at Pratt Institute, Yale, and Harvard, Barnes served as a director of the Municipal Art Society, the American Academy in Rome, and the Museum of Modern Art, where he remains a lifetime trustee.

Although he associated with partners over the years—namely, Alistair Bevington, Percy Keck, and John M.Y.Lee—Barnes remained the signature designer of his eponymous practice during its full 45 years. In his office, he trained a number of the leading American architects of the late 20th century, including Ivan Chermayeff, Alexander Cooper, Bruce Fowle, Charles Gwathmey, Toshiko Mori, Laurie Olin, Giovanni Pasanella, Jaquelin Robertson, and Robert Siegel.

Writing in Perspecta: The Yale Architecture Journal early in his career, Barnes describes his design process as rooted in exploration and discovery, followed by synthesis and discipline. He demands consideration of function—both practical and psychological; site—both immediate conditions and the larger environment; structure—whose implementation requires clarity without dominance; and finally, the lasting legacy of the individual work. For all these concerns, Barnes seeks unity. He notes, “We do not solve our problems by sheer genius or sudden inspiration, but by a process of exploration and analysis” (Barnes, 1959). Throughout his career, Barnes remains true to these conditions, producing a body of work respectful of its programmatic role, expressive of its materials, structure, and volume, disciplined in its articulation, and evocative of its larger humanistic purpose.

AMY S.WEISSER

 
 
 
 
 
 
TIMELINE        
   

15 April 1915 Born in Chicago

1938 Studied at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts under Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius; bachelor’s degree ;

1942 master’s degree in architecture;

1942–47 Lieutenant, United States Naval Reserves;

1944 Married Mary Elizabeth Coss :1 child;

1949 Private practice, New York from ;

1954–59 Architectural design critic and lecturer, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York ;

1957–64 taught at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut ;

1960 director, Municipal Art Society of New York from ;

1963–78 trustee, American Academy in Rome ;

1965–68 member of the visiting committee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge;

1966 Fellow, American Institute of Architects ;

1969 associate National Academy of Design;

1972–76 member, Urban Design Council of New York ;

1974 academician , National Academy of Design;

from 1975 trustee, Museum of Modern Art, New York ;

1975 Westchester Planning Board, New York from ;

from 1978 taught at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University ;

1978 fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences ;

1980 Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville ;

1984 member, advisory council, Trust for Public Land from;

September 22, 2004 Died in Cupertino, California, USA

 
 
 
 
 
 
FURTHER READING        
   

Barnes, Edward Larrabee, Edward Larrabee Barnes Museum Designs, Katonah, New York: The Katonah Gallery, 1987

Campbell, Robert, “Evaluation: A Classic That Retains Its Appeal,” Architecture, 78 (February 1989) Crosbie, Michael J., “8 over 80,” Progressive Architecture, 76 (July 1995) Edward Larrabee Barnes: Architect, New York: Rizzoli, 1994

Selected Publications

“The Design Process,” Perspecta, 5 (1959) “Control of Graphics Essential to Good Shopping Center Design,” Architectural Record (June 1962) “Remarks on Continuity and Change,” Perspecta, 9/10 (1965)

 
 
 
 
 
 
RELATED        
    Breuer, Marcel (United States); Gropius, Walter (Germany); Johnson, Philip (United States);
 
 

 

 

 


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