Charles Gwathmey, Architect of Important Campus Buildings, Dies at 71

A chair is the perfect companion to a cutout in the wall of the addition Charles Gwathmey designed for Yale’s Art & Architecture Building. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

The architect Charles Gwathmey, who died early Monday at age 71, designed a number of influential buildings on campuses. In fact, important buildings at Princeton and Yale Universities almost bookend a career during which his firm, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, became especially well known for its residential work but at the same time designed or renovated buildings on dozens of campuses.

Early on, the firm’s 1971 renovation of a Classical Revival debating-society building at Princeton, Whig Hall, garnered attention and praise when it introduced daring Modernist elements without infringing on the columned front. Among other high-profile projects of later years was the University of Cincinnati’s Tangeman University Center, completed in 2004, for which the firm preserved the red-brick facade of an older building but grafted on a metal-clad addition and created an interior that was nothing short of a Modernist fantasia.

One of Mr. Gwathmey’s final projects was the renovation of Yale University’s Brutalist Art & Architecture Building, designed by Paul Rudolph and opened in 1963—while Mr. Gwathmey was an architecture student at the university and an assistant to Rudolph. The project was a particular challenge, requiring that Mr. Gwathmey respect Rudolph’s design and repair decades’ worth of damage to it, as well as design a large new addition. When the project was completed, Mr. Gwathmey was widely praised for improvements to the original structure, but his addition drew lukewarm reviews at best.

Mr. Gwathmey’s firm designed the Tangeman University Center at the U. of Cincinnati.

The design preserved a red-brick facade, along with a clock tower, and grafted on a metal-shrouded addition.

The Tangeman Center’s interior is a Modernist fantasia.

Mr. Gwathmey’s addition to Yale’s Art & Architecture Building looms over a smaller Gothic Revival neighbor.

The ceiling of the library in Mr. Gwathmey’s addition is starkly Modernist.

At the building’s top, a block of the Rudolph structure overlooks a deck by Mr. Gwathmey.

Overall, the renovation was judged a success.