Despite resisting the lucrative allure of trendy ideology and prominent design, James Stewart Porchk has designed some of the country’s most important public buildings in a career spanning nearly 70 years. He died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92 years old.
His son, Peter Max Porchk, said the cause was kidney disease.
At a time when so-called Starkitects dominated the profession and used their accolades to pick up profitable projects around the world, Mr. Porchek went the opposite direction, valuing the social value of design over aesthetic values. We took a discreet approach to prioritizing architecture.
“The real importance of architecture lies not in stylistic problems, but in its ability to solve human problems,” he wrote in 1988. “
Such humility did not prevent him from rising to the top of his profession. His works include the William J. Clinton Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. Rose Earth and Space Center at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. the Santa Fe Opera; and the Newseum in Washington.
From 1973 to 1987, he was Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Conservation at Columbia University, transforming it from a sleepy conventional program to a world-class center for research and training in architecture as well as real estate. I’ve changed. Also city planning.
He was equally known for renovations and additions to historic buildings, including the Carnegie Hall upgrade, which took nearly a decade to complete, and the new entrance to the Brooklyn Museum.
His Carnegie Hall project was typical of his work. The existing building is a complex collection of additions added over decades, becoming a chaotic warren of staircases, nooks and useless crevices.
He untied the Gordian Knot in Hall. Instead of tearing through the maze with the spirit of Alexandria, it was a style that respected the hall’s long history with vibrant modernity by skillfully weaving together various parts to create a coherent whole.
Paul Goldberger, a former architecture critic for The New York Times, said in an interview, “Carnegie Hall was meant to be unobtrusive, to look like Carnegie Hall while functioning like a modern building. I had to be careful.
Mr. Porchuk had a modernist sensibility, but not in a strict ideological sense. Rather, he tapped into the early impulses of the modernist movement toward depersonalization of style and a commitment to social justice.
“From an early age, it was instilled in me that personalizing everything is not a good thing,” he said in a 2001 interview with The Times. “Besides, I doubt that such a commodity-driven system would be the most productive architecture.”
Even if Mr. Porchk was not as well known among the general public as architectural luminaries such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, his humane and understated approach was the ego that often dominated postwar American architecture. It was beloved by critics who saw it as the antidote to led design. .
One of his early projects, completed in 1970, was to renovate and expand a row of townhouses in Albany to house the New York Bar Association. It was praised for its careful use of historic preservation at a time when most architects and developers preferred to tear down buildings and start from scratch.
Ada Louise Huxtable, an architectural critic for The Times at the time, wrote that it was “the object’s lesson on how to build intelligently, delicately, and well.” “It’s nice to know someone is doing the right thing,” she said.
Thirty-five years later, critics were similarly fascinated by Mr. Porchuk’s design, with a portion of the Clinton Library projecting 150 feet into the Arkansas River. This is the bridge metaphor that the Clinton administration provided between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Working with his firm’s architect, Richard He Olcott, Porchuk argued that the project involved rethinking a dilapidated railroad span that runs along the southern edge. Once converted into a pedestrian bridge, the museum was made easily accessible to low-income communities across the river.
Blair Comin wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “The Presidential Library breaks the mold, even as it builds an extraordinary bridge between past and present, architectural and urban contexts.” . “A monument to the ruler will also benefit the people.”
Such gestures were important to Porschek, who often referred to architecture as a “healing art.” It meant an attempt to improve people’s lives instead of boosting their egos.
Another of his early projects, which he later called a favorite, was the Mental Health Center in Columbus, Indiana, a small town south of Indianapolis, which assembled a world-class collection of post-war architecture. was
The center was to be adjacent to the hospital along a tree-lined avenue, but Mr. Porchuk had other ideas. He built it over a stream as a bridge, connecting the hospital to a public park and Offered a serene view.Water flowing below.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Porchek never adopted a distinctive style, nor did he adhere to any particular movement. He was an admirer of architects like Eero Saarinen, sublimating their own aesthetic impulses into the context of client needs and projects, especially renovations.
“Some people think it’s too eclectic,” he said of his approach in a 2014 interview with Architectural Record. “But the building reflects a taste for taking the old and updating it with restorations and additions.
Especially in the 1970s and 80s, postmodernism created a retro-design mania, after which architects like Gehry rose to fame for their bold, if sometimes laborious, personal styles.
Work like Mr. Porchek “is not a world-class building, but a business-class building,” wrote another Times reviewer, Herbert Muschamp, in 1995.
Mr. Porchuk did not move. For him, aesthetics was of secondary importance to the building’s social function.
“Modern abstraction and nostalgia cannot produce ideas of lasting value,” he wrote in 1988.
James Stewart Polshek was born on February 11, 1930 in Akron, Ohio. His father Alex was a doctor and his mother Pearl (Beyer) Porchuk was a homemaker.
He first followed his father into a career in medicine. However, at Cleveland’s Western Reserve University (now Case His Western His Reserve University), he was persuaded to change his major in a modern architecture class.
Dissatisfied with the academic offerings in Cleveland, he transferred to Yale University in 1950. On the way to his interview, he stopped in New York City to see the then-under-construction United Nations Headquarters. As he entered the service elevator, he was standing next to the famous French architect Le Corbusier, who was helping direct the project. For him, it was a sign that he was heading in the right direction.
In 1952, he married the surviving Erin Margolis. In addition to her and his son, Mr. Porchk is survived by her daughter Jennifer Porchk. his sister, Judy Porchk Goodman; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Porschek studied under Louis Kahn at Yale University, graduating with a master’s degree in 1955. The following year he moved with his wife to Copenhagen, where he studied on a Fulbright fellowship. He later said his encounter with Scandinavian architecture, whose collaborative approach inspired his own low-key, ego-free design philosophy.
After returning to the United States, he worked for several architects, including IM Pei, before opening his own office in 1963. Midtown his Manhattan center designed by Walfredo Toscanini.
Huxtable wrote in his glowing review of the Center in 1970: A visitor who goes looking for ‘architecture’ in the sense of a striking aesthetic statement, with everything in its assigned place and with appropriate and predetermined relationships, may wonder what it is. not. “
As Porchk’s fame and company grew, the economic recession in the early 1970s forced him to look for other work. In 1973 he was appointed Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture.
He oversaw a thorough revamp of the school’s curriculum, updating and expanding it to include urban planning, real estate, and historic preservation. He added the words “plan and save” to the name of the program.
Mr. Porchuk and his company did almost all of their work in the United States, much of it in New York City. Their projects there also included the Seamen’s Church Institute at South Street Seaport. New York University’s Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine and the Residence Tower. Ed Sullivan Theater. Saltzberger Hall at Barnard College. The New York Times printing plant in Queens. A wastewater treatment plant along Newtown Creek between Queens and Brooklyn.
Mr. Porchuk received the 2018 Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects, the group’s highest honor.
Mr. Porchk retired from his company, then called Porchk Partnership, in 2005. In 2010 the company was restructured and changed its name to Ennead, the Greek word for “nine”. This represents the number of remaining partners. Mr. Porchk took this change as a declaration that architecture was never about him one person, however famous he may be.
“A question I get asked a lot is, ‘How do you do such great work?'” he said in a 2000 interview with Architectural Record.