The Life and Works of Gordon Bunshaft

My name is Ronda Russell and I'm a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. This page is my special project for my Architectural Drafting class and is taken directly from a report I wrote earlier in the year. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments you may have with this webpage, Gordon Bunshaft, Eleanor Roosevelt High School, or myself. ronda6290@oocities.com
Created Thursday March 27, 1997
Last Updated Monday June 16, 1997

Life History and Education

Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York on May 9, 1909 to Yetta and David Bunshaft. His parents worked hard to give their children whatever they wanted, especially Gordon, and they continued to spoil him even during the Great Depresion, not wanting him to know of their financial problems. He was a very sickly child and had diptheria twice. While in bed with diptheria, he would doodle and make drawings of houses, like most children. The family doctor saw his pictures and thought they were so good he should become an architect. Bunshaft was an intelligent, inventive, and hard working student in all his classes except English and French, where he encountered problems because he was mildly dyslexic. His violin teacher had two sons studying engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he decided to go there to study architecture. He entered MIT in 1928 and got his bachelor's degree in 1933. In 1935 he got his Master's degree, and felt himslef extremely lucky to land a job right out of school with Harold Field Kellogg in Boston for five dollars a week. Nine months later, the overtime he had been putting in made him eligible for the $3,000 Rotch Traveling Fellowship. He went to Europe and North Africa for eighteen months on the fellowship and returned in the spring of 1937. In autumn of the same year he joined a small office of the prestigious firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, or SOM, in Chicago. He did not become an actual partner until 1949. William Brown, a retired partner of Bunshaft's, stated that he had never actually seen any finished drawings by Bunshaft, and said the he "cannot draw." Bunshaft destroyed all his rough sketches and did not have any drawings of his own. Gordon Bunshaft died in 1990.

Design Philosophy

Gordon Bunshaft's education at MIT stressed the organization and classisizing design philosophy of the French architecture school, historic architecture, and the importance of efficient circulation and clear differentiation of spaces. He learned axial planning and gained an understanding of spatial climaxes like that of the French, which showed up in his later works. Bunshaft always tried to incorporate works of art into his design because he had a great love of art. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier's, and Frank Lloyd Wright were his favorite architects, and his works up to the mid 1960's reveal the influence of the first two. His design of the Lever House showed the influence of Mies van der Rohe, and it exerted a strong influence on American Architecture. It applied, for the first time, the concept of the curtain-wall constrution and open-site planning to a tall office building. Also, it inagurated a new concept in urban design, in which a building only occupied a portion of its site, the rest of which formed a pedestrian pedestal. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company building showed the same style. Bunshaft's later buildings show a departure from the Miesian ideal, beginning with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and reaching a climax with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Research Building. They show an increased use of concrete and a movement away from the severe style of the 1950's.

List of Works

* indicates First Honors Award from the American Institutes of Architecture

1939 Venezuelan Pavilion, New York World's Fair, Queens, New York
1942 Hostess House, Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Illinois
1950 Manhattan House, New York City, New York
1951 Fort Hamilton Veterans' Administration Hospital, Brooklyn, New York
1952 H.J. Heinz Company, Vinegar Plant and Warehouse, Pittsburgh, PA
*1952 Lever House, Lever Brothers Company Headquarters, New York City, NY
1954 United States Consulate, Dusseldorf, West Germany
1954 United States Consular Housing, Bremen, West Germany
*1954 Manufactures' Trust Company, 5th Avenue Branch Bank, New York City, NY
1955 Istanbul Hilton Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey
*1957 Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters, Bloomfield, CT
1957 Karl Taylor Compton Libraries, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetta
1958 Reynold's Metal Company Headquarters, Richmond, Virginia
*1960 Pepsi-Cola Company Headquarters, New York City, New York
1960 Union Carbide Corporation Headquarters, New York City, New York
1961 First City National Bank Headquarters, Houston Texas
1961 Chase Manhattan Bank Headquarters, New York City, New York
1962 Johhn Hancock Building, New Orleans, Louisiana
*1962 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
1963 Nina and Gordon Bunshaft's House, Long Island, New York
*1963 Emhart Corporation Headquarters, Bloomfield, Connecticut
1963 Computer Center, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
*1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
1964 International Business Machines Corporation Headquarters, Armonk, NY
*1965 American Republic Life Insurance Company Headquarters, Des Moines, IA
1965 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Library-Museum, New York City, NY
*1965 Banque Lambert Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium
1965 H.J. Heinz Company, Ltd. Headquarters and Research Center, Middlesex, ENG
1967 Marine Midland Bank, New York City, New York
1968 One Main Place, Dallas, TX
*1970 American Can Company Headquarters, Greenwich, Connecticut
1971 LBJ Library and Research Building and Sid Richardson Hall, U of TX, Austin, TX
1973 W.R. Grace Building, New York City, New York
1974 Nine West 57th Street, New York City, New York
1974 The Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
1974 Philip Morris Cigarette Manufacturing Plant, Richmond, Virginia
*1981 Haj Terminal, King Abdul Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
*1983 National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Bibliography

Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 2, 15th edition, University of Chicago, 1986 p 634-5.
New Yorker, 10/16/95, Volume 71, Issue 32, p 108.
Gordon Bunshaft of SOM, Krinsky, Carol, Architectural History Foundation, NY, NY.

Links

I am hoping to find more Links to add to this page, but this is what I have so far. Many are of the Hirshorn because it is a Smithsonian building, it is in Washington DC, and it is the best known of his works.

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