Gordon Bunshaft
Death: 1990Buffalo native Gordon Bunshaft was an award-winning architect. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1937 and would later become the firm's Partner-in-Charge-of-Design. Notable buildings designed by Bunshaft include the Lever Building in New York City, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas and the 1962 addition to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
When Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was engaged to create the master plan for the University at Buffalo's new campus in Amherst, Bunshaft submitted a design for a three floor megastructure (measuring one mile long and a quarter mile wide) with multi-story towers for interdisciplinary groupings of UB's academic schools. This design was ultimately rejected by SUNY, the State University of New York Construction Fund and UB.
In 1969, Bunshaft received the Chancellor Charles P. Norton Medal, UB's highest honor.
- Sources:
- Gordon Bunshaft obituary, source unknown, 1990
- Furnas, Sparkle Moore (editor). Chancellor's Medalists, privately printed, 1975. Copies available in the University Archives
- Greiner, William R. and Headrick, Thomas E. Location Location Location: A Special History of the University of/at Buffalo. Center Working Papers, Buffalo, NY, 2007, pp. 87-90.
Affiliation(s): Buffalo Connection Only
Record Group(s): 3
Biographical File Contains:
- Obituary