Barnes, Edward Larrabee

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Barnes, Edward Larrabee (1915–2004). Chicago-born architect who studied under Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, later opening an office in NYC. He employed bold geometries, evoking forms used by Le Corbusier, but, influenced by vernacular architecture, his designs often respond with sensitivity to their surroundings (e.g. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Island, ME (1958–62) ). Indeed, Barnes was one of the first architects of the Modernist tendency to become a proponent of contextual design. His Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. (1971–4), employs the simplest of forms, and in 1988 Barnes designed an urban sculpture-garden to enhance it. His museum interiors are treated as simply as possible, but the exteriors are given a civic presence, as at the Dallas Museum of Art, TX (1983–4). Later work of his office became more Historicist, as with the Allen Library at the University of Washington in Seattle (1991), with Neo-Gothic gables and finials, and the Judicial Office Building, Washington, DC, which had Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts influences. His IBM office building, Madison Avenue, NYC (1973–83), was designed with a great atrium within it, and his planning expertise was demonstrated at the State University of New York campus at Purchase, NY (1966–77), derived from Jefferson's work at Charlottesville, VA. With the Equitable Tower West, NYC (1987), came a venture into Post-Modernism.

Bibliography

Blake (1994);
Diamonstein (ed.) (1980, 1985);
Kalman (1994);
Morton et al. (eds.) (1994);
Jane Turner (1996);
van Vynckt (ed.) (1993)

A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

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Barnes, Edward Larrabee

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