Architect
Edward Larrabee Barnes is one of the greatest modernists in American architecture history. He was born in 1915, Chicago, Illinois, the son of Cecil Barnes, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard, and Margaret Ayer Barns, a successful writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Years of Grace” in 1931. He studied English, art history, and history of architecture in Harvard. After one year teaching in Milton Academy, he returned to the school and studied architecture in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In the school, he was influenced as a modernist under the leadership of two German immigrant architects, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. After travelling in Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, he moved to New York to start his practice. His work ranged widely between residential, commercial, educational, and cultural projects. The style of his work can be described as pure modernist. He often used simple and geometrical forms to approach in his project. His selflessness led him to build projects that corresponded to site and context, client preferences, user friendliness, and he often achieved a good balance in the limited budget and various regulations. The quality of his work contributed to the development of American modern architecture. He died in Cupertino, California, 2004, at 89 years.
Representative work:
- Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine 1958–61
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 1966–71
- Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana 1969
- Smart Museum, Chicago, 1974
- Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1974
- Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas 1978–83
- 590 Madison Avenue (former IBM Building), New York City, 1983
- Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 1990
Read more about this topic: Knoxville Museum Of Art
Famous quotes containing the word architect:
“Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)