Gunnar Birkerts, an acclaimed Detroit-area architect who designed major buildings throughout the Midwest, including the former Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and an addition to the University of Michigan Law Library, died Tuesday.
Birkerts, 92, died at home in the Boston suburb of Needham, Mass., where he had moved to be near family, according to his daughter-in-law, Alison Ranney of Chicago. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
Birkerts was best known for light-filled modernist buildings that reflected the Scandinavian architectural tradition that influenced him. Many were essays in bold curves or angular, irregular shapes.
“Straight-line geometry is very man-made,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Detroit Free Press. “The angle is what we find in nature. And if I can work with a form that moves, I can express the nature of the building.”
Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1925, Birkerts escaped his native country during World War II and graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1949. One of his influences was the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. According to Birkerts’ family, he arrived in the U.S. in 1949.
After a brief stint at the Chicago firm of Perkins and Will, Birkerts moved to the Detroit area in the early 1950s when that city’s architectural scene was surging with energy.
He worked for Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where his colleagues included such future stars as Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche and Robert Venturi. He later became chief designer at the firm of architect Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of New York’s World Trade Center. In 1963, he established his own firm, Gunnar Birkerts and Associates in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham.
One of Birkerts’ major works, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank of 1973, was among a series of projects around the nation that departed from the staid, neoclassical bank buildings of the past. It used suspension bridge technology, boldly expressed in an arch on its glass exterior. The bank later was converted into a commercial office building.
At the University of Michigan Law Library addition of 1981, Birkerts did not mimic the Collegiate Gothic architecture of the school’s celebrated law quadrangle. Instead, he shaped an underground building that felt like anything but a basement. It used large “light wells” to bring in natural light from several directions, ingeniously directing it to three below-ground levels.
Among Birkerts’ other buildings are the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., the south wing of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., the University of Iowa’s Boyd Law Building and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in the small-town architectural mecca of Columbus, Ind.
In 2014, Birkerts realized a work of great personal meaning, the Latvian National Library in Riga. That design, inspired by the mythical Glass Mountain of Latvian folklore, is know known as “The Castle of Light.”
Birkerts was a professor at the University of Michigan’s architecture school and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His honors included a gold medal from the Michigan Society of Architects and awards from the American Institute of Architects.
Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Sylvia; three children, Sven, Andra and Erik; and 7 grandchildren.
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