Gordon Bunshaft Interviewed by
Betty J. Blum*
April 4-7, 1989
New York City
Edited by Detlef Mertins
Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1909 and died in New York City in 1990. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1933 and his Master of Architecture two years later. A recipient of two traveling fellowships, he toured Europe and North Africa between 1935 and 1937.
Upon his return to the United States, he joined Louis Skidmore in 1937 in the New York office of Skidmore and Owings. In 1942, he left for military service with the United States Army Corps of Engineers. After four years of service, he returned to work for the firm, which had, in the meantime, become Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). He became a partner in 1949.
The project that brought Bunshaft worldwide recognition was the Lever House, in New York, designed in 1952. Other noteworthy designs included Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co. in New York (1961), the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York (1963), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven (1965), the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1974), and the National Commercial Bank Headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1981-83).
Bunshaft served as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and on the President's Commission on Fine Arts. He was awarded many honors, including the Brunner Memorial Prize, the Gold Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects; and the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Detlef Mertins is Professor and Chair of the Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on the history of modernism in the 20th century and has conducted interviews with former SOM partners Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham for SOM Journal 1 and SOM Journal 2.
Betty J. Blum is an independent oral historian who has been the director of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project at The Art Institute of Chicago for more than twenty years. This project has resulted in oral histories of over fifty distinguished architects.
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