Henry N. Cobb; his creations helped transform the look of Boston

Henry N. Cobb, an architect whose buildings and plans helped change the face of Boston in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, died Tuesday at his Manhattan home, according to his office, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. He was 93 years old.

Mr. Cobbs Boston's buildings include 200 Clarendon, the former John Hancock Tower, in Back Bay; Harbor Towers, at the water's edge; and John Joseph Moakley's US courthouse and Harborpark on Fan Pier. His most recent local design, the One Dalton skyscraper in Back Bay, opened in 2019. Cobb also helped create the blueprint for what was to become the Government Center.

Harry, you took my Boston, his father once told him.

In an email, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court wrote that Harry was a great architect, a natural teacher and a completely decent human being. Breyer, then a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeal, worked closely with Mr. Cobb and U.S. district judge Douglas P. Woodlock on the design of the Moakley courthouse in the early 1990s.

He was not the prominent character as his longtime partner I.M. Pei. Pei died last May. The late James Ingo Freed was the third partner of Pei Cobb Freeds. Yet within the profession, Mr. Cobb was a highly respected senior statesman.

All of my architectural friends loved and admired Harry, said Laurie Olin in a telephone interview from her Philadelphia office. A landscape architect, Olin worked with Mr. Cobb on several projects. He was a great collaborator. He was a great intellect. He was a very warm friend. Usually you can get one or two of these qualities, but you don't get them all. You did it with Harry. He was an architect. "

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman once described Mr. Cobbs' best designs as geometrically eloquent and deceptively simple. However, his modernist partiality to the rigor of glass and metal did not prevent him from using the tactility of brick and granite for the Portland Museum of Art (1983) in Maine or limestone for the National Constitution Center (2003) in Philadelphia. At the Moakley Courthouse, these two approaches to materials converge, with its brick and granite facade and an 88-foot-tall curved glass wall aft, facing Boston Harbor.

Mr. Cobbs' mastery of the towering scale did not blind him to the need for a nuanced and varied approach to urban space. Five years spent working with New York developer William Zeckendorf in the early 1950s, Mr. Cobb, later recalled, would provide crucial postgraduate training in the role of the speculative business as a catalyst in the ever-changing interaction of competing interests that shape a city.

Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen interviewed Mr. Cobb for his 2019 book, Saving Americas Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. In an email, she recalled how much Mr. Cobb "valued what he called the populist cure for the descending disease of urban renewal, but he regretted that in recent years we have not have failed to reconcile this need to respect and involve communities with an ability to think ambitiously about cities as a whole. Cobbs' critical relationship to what is and can be a city, that it has implemented on many scales, from the design of beautiful buildings to the imagination of more perfect and democratic cities, will be difficult to find.

Among Mr. Cobbs, other designs are Place Ville Marie in Montreal (1962); the campus of New York State University Fredonia (1968); Johnson & Johnson Global Headquarters, New Brunswick, N.J. (1983); UCLA Anderson School of Management, Los Angeles (1995); and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and Torre Espacio in Madrid (both in 2008).

Mr. Cobb was a particularly eloquent writer. His dissertation, Henry N. Cobb: Words & Works 1948-2018, "offers an impressive overview of a career and a career in progress. Several projects, such as the International African American Museum of Charleston, SC, are underway.

Cobb was also particularly outspoken. Disastrous, he called Harbor Towers in an interview with The Globe in 1998. "A fundamental problem … for which I hold myself responsible is the idea of ​​towers (there) to begin with. 39 is a misuse of a very precious commodity. It is not what one would like to see there.

City Hall Plaza, he said in an interview with The Globe in 2018, is oversized, underpopulated, coldly institutional and stubbornly resistant to the many efforts that have been made to bring it to life. In all fairness, Mr. Cobb had imagined a calm lawn underfoot rather than brick.

The candor also took the form of self-depreciation. An appraiser of an aptitude test that Mr. Cobb passed in 1942 expressly advised against architecture, adding that with your skills, the work of manufacturing executives would be ideal for you. Mr. Cobb included a facsimile of the report in Words & Works. & amp; # 39; He also noted with puckish pride that his first constructed job was an addiction in North Haven, Maine. His family stayed there for a long time.

Mr. Cobbs' most famous building was also, for a time, his most famous: the Hancock. Architectural historian Douglass Shand-Tucci once described it as a bell tower of Bostons, and its cool thoughtful presence now seems as much a part of the fabric of the city as its neighbors Trinity Church and Boston Public Librarys McKim Building.

However, the idea of ​​placing a skyscraper next to these buildings (still the tallest building in Bostons, at 60 stories) was initially considered a scandal. It wasn't a question of whether the design was good, said Cobb in an interview with The Globe in 2003, but wasn't it the wrong thing to do to start with? The underlying premise of the project was deemed unacceptable by a large number of people.

Mr. Cobb believed that if the project had been proposed as little as two or three years later, the city would not have approved it.

Pei had executed the original design. It consisted of a concrete tower and a pair of low-rise buildings on two blocks with an open space in between. Hancock dismissed it as too expensive. Mr. Cobbs Design has consciously sought to minimize the impact of the projects. The reflective surface and the rhomboid shape of the buildings have led to compare the Hancock to a sail, a sculpture, a huge mirror and pure volume. Olin remembers telling Mr. Cobb. You know, Harry, you just did the biggest color field painting ever. It’s always beautiful, it’s still there, it’s always in the sky.

It is a silent building, said Mr. Cobb in this 2003 interview. "The reason why his silence is his intention to meet at Copley Square. If he was not silent, he would be really offensive in his presence. "

The cacophony, not the silence, has marked much of the next decade. After a start of inauguration in August 1968, the excavation was botched. Colonization affected the surrounding buildings and streets, including Trinity. Once the building was erected, things got worse: Windows started to come out. With plywood covering 33 floors from the outside, the opening of Hancocks was delayed by five years, from 1971 to 1976. No building in our time has been more cursed, writes the New York Times. Mr. Cobb was not at fault. A flaw in the design of the windows was the problem.

The curse was quickly lifted. The American Institute of Architects awarded a national honor to the Hancock in 1977. A 1994 survey by architects and historians of the Globe ranked Boston the third best work in the world. architecture, after Trinity Church and the McKim Building. "Obviously, from where it started, its reputation could only go up," noted Cobb in 2003, with characteristic dryness.

What he described as the other most important building in his career was the Moakley Courthouse. This creates a stark contrast to the Hancock: low rather than high, civic non-commercial slings, defining a new urban space rather than responding to an existing one, and with the most important architectural element hidden beneath it. interior: buildings 27 courtrooms.

His goal, wrote Cobb in response to a series of questions posed to the commission's finalists, was that the courthouse be both adaptable and stand out.

What mattered most in his design, later wrote Mr. Cobb, was the unambiguous assertion. . . that the courthouse and Harborpark are public property and that the courts and their procedures are open to all. "

In his email on Mr. Cobb, Breyer wrote that Harry was a craftsman who understood the importance of detail. He designed buildings that work both efficiently and bring beauty to the lives of those they touch.

Henry Nichols Cobb was born on April 8, 1926 in Boston. He grew up in Brookline. His father, Charles Kane Cobb II, was an investment advisor. Her mother, Elsie (Nichols) Cobb, was a housewife. He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College. At Harvard, he was treasurer of the Lampoon. He participated in the Naval ROTC program and then served in the Naval Reserve.

At the Harvards Graduate School of Design, he first met Pei, who was his teacher. We shared some enthusiasm and aspirations, "recalls Mr. Cobb in 1998. They formed their partnership in 1955. He would teach himself at the school of design, as chairman of the architecture department of 1980 to 1985.

For his thesis project, Mr. Cobb designed a group of towers for the then dying wharf of India. Boston, he wrote almost seven decades later, seemed to me full, self-satisfied, and deeply resistant to change.

He quickly moved to New York, he told The Globe in 1998, because I was an ambitious young architect and I didn't think anything was going to happen here. In doing so, he joined a starred tradition: a long line of natives, from historian Henry Adams to poet Robert Lowell to composer-in-chief Leonard Bernstein, who left Boston while continuing to shape it as he had shaped them.

Mr. Cobb is survived by his wife, Joan (Spaulding) Cobb; three daughters, Sara and Emma, ​​of New York and Pamela, of Northampton; one brother, John W.; and three grandchildren.

Plans for a memorial are incomplete.

Mark Feeney can be contacted at [email protected].