Charles Gwathmey, Architect and Builder  

• Charles Gwathmey was born in 1938 in Charlotte, North Carolina. His parents were artists. His father, Robert, was a painter and his mother, Rosalie was a photographer.  

• When Charles was eleven his father took him out of school for a year and they traveled through Europe.
  
  “He was a great father, a great teacher. He took me everywhere he went. We went to Paris for a year and we traveled to every cathedral, every chateau, museums, places to experience art and architecture simultaneously, to keep my eyes open. This whole year sort of consolidated the idea that I had to build, making things with my hands; understanding that architecture lasts was appealing to me. Every building experience we had confirmed this idea. It was interactive, experiential, it was a buddy.” (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)
  
  
• In 1965-1967 he built the Gwathmey Residence, a 1200 sq foot house for his parents in Amagansett, Long Island. This house launched his career.  
  
  Charles Gwathmey talks about this house. “It doesn't have to be big to have presence. The essence is true. So composite, so reductive, so clearly articulate about what is space and what is form. It seems carved away from a solid block and what is left is ideal. It has size of content, size of presence even though it is small.”
  

  “Geometry is a basic determinant but I also like to distort it.”
  (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)

• Charles Gwathmey is known as one of the “New York Five”; five architects whose work was featured in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art organized by Arthur Drexler in 1967. The other architects in the group are Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. The exhibit featured houses by the architects.
  
  Philip Johnson, the mentor of these five architects, says of Gwathmey:
  
  “Charles Gwathmey is a builder (in the sense of Mies’ highest compliment: That building is built!). His geometric juxtapositions are bludgeon-like clear, his shifts of axis, his warping of the scale sufficiently disturbing to cause the observer pleasant jitters.” (Five Architects, New York, OxfordUniversity Press 1975, ISBN 0-19-519794-1) see note at end on Mies

• Charles Gwathmey completed the renovation of the Guggenheim Museum in 1992.
  Gwathmey Siegel’s addition to and renovation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City is one of the firm’s most celebrated and critically acclaimed works. It contains 51,000 square feet of new and renovated gallery space, 15,000-square-feet of new office space, a restored theater, new restaurant and retrofitted support and storage spaces. (Gwathmey-Siegel website)  

• Currently working on the United States Mission to the United Nations, expected completion 2010
  
  The challenge was to design an iconic tower that would transcend strict programmatic and technical constraints, and become a compelling and representative landmark for architecture and democracy. The tower refers abstractly to skyscraper precedents of base, middle, top, while presenting a composite, layered and interlocking composition of forms and materials, vertically and horizontally. (Gwathmey-Siegel website)

• His works include hotels, museums, civic centers, healthcare, apartments, houses, office buildings, educational buildings.
  
  (Walt Disney World Convention & Exhibition Center, New York Public Library Mid-Manhattan Library, The North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Spielberg Residence, 2.5 million dollar residence for Sean (Puffy) Combs)
  

• On the question: “Drawing, are you born with it?”
  
  “I think there is an eye-hand coordination that people have and one can assimilate through the eye, translating through the hand. The eye-hand process is a process of both elimination and self-editing and to do it and to evaluate it and to do it again and be able to edit your own drawing as a layering idea is an elimination process that one as a creative person and as a designer has to go through.” (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)

• Charles Gwathmey on Modernism and on the artistic process:
  
  “I think you are a victim of your times. When I went to school there was no question that modern architecture was the ethic. We studied history but it was always to confirm and to clarify modernism as an ideal.
  
  “You keep reevaluating and refining and growing. You can’t grow without being self-critical and self-editing. It is an evolution. You grow when you are willing to risk what you haven’t done before. Each time I try with these opportunities to explore and learn something new and very consciously not repeat. You do repeat because you have a certain backup that is irrefutable but what you do, I hope, is you take the essence and then reinvent to discover something new.
  (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)

• Charles Gwathmey at the CameronArt Museum:
  

  “He could walk in the front door and he could tell you if a line wasn’t straight or something wasn’t balanced. He was so conscientious. He wanted it to be everything it could be. He was personally invested. He didn’t compromise anything essential” Rebecca Laymon (Oct. 2007)

• Charles Gwathmey - Museums:
  
  There is a sense of expectation, a sense of volume. The experience is enriched by having both the architecture and what is exhibited strong. So I am not one of those background architecture advocated for museums.
  
  There is a whole sensory experience as you move through and around through the space. Very dynamic architecture, all the forms are defining and modulating variations in space. That is sensory. You may not be able to articulate what you are feeling but you are moving through an experience of feeling of form that is counterpointed with the works on the walls and that is a fuller experience visually and in your memory as a museum experience. (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)
  
  The above remarks were made when talking about the Photography Museum at 43rdSt and 6th Avenue in New York. He mentions a "cloud" in the ceiling and the stairs as being things in the museum that help you remember the experience.
  
  "Creating sympathetic settings for art is probably second nature to Charles Gwathmey, son of two artists" (Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, Buildings and Projects 1992-2002 Edited by Brad Collins, First published by Rizzoli International Publications)
  
  "I think there's a new sort of idea that museums are informative experiences that combine both education and spirit, and that architecture and art enriching each other is a very dynamic condition", says Gwathmey, who also designed the Center for Jewish Life at Duke University. "And the museum as the nonbuilding or the museum as the background both in terms of memory and experience is, I think, a suspect philosophy today" (Bricks & mortars, The News & Observer, April 21, 2002)
  

• Charles Gwathmey on what he would like to be remembered as "Gwathmey" to the architectural dialogue.
  
  That the commitment and the ethic and the loyalty to discovering what's essential about space and form through architecture has continued. (Charlie Rose Interview, December 6, 2000)
  
  
• Architectural Influences on his work
  
  The early work of Le Corbusier has been their guide, but they have not been imprisoned by their master...Gwathmey Siegel have seen in Le Corbusier not only compositional strategies and specific tropes of plan and section; they have also seen a senuousness of shape and color and texture...There is another powerful architectural influence at work, which perhaps explains why the influence of LeCorbusier, though almost never absent in the work, is never tyrannizing. That other influence is Louis I. Kahn. Charles Gwathmey first learned of Kahn while an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and transferred to Yale to study with him - only to find that his would be master had quit New Haven for Philadelphia. Be that as it may, Kahn's presence can be felt in the work: in the bold geometries exploring elemental shapes, and even more so in the tectonic clarity of the work. Le Corbusier was a painter-architect, but Kahn was a constructor, whose every building was considered in terms of specific materials selected, and construction techniques pursued and explicitly expressed. The sense of architecture as a builder's art is central to the work of Gwathmey-Siegel and quite apart from most work by contemporaries. (Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, Buildings and Projects 1992-2002 Edited by Brad Collins, First published by Rizzoli International Publications)
  
  
• "It still confirms the essence of what I think about good architecture as being reductive, abstract and lacking of any ornamentation.'' Gwathmey when talking about rennovations on his parent's house (Design Notebook, Polishing Up a Well-Cut Gem", by Julie V. Iovine, NY Times, June 6, 2002)
  
  
• Charles Gwathmey - the teleidoscope, ''I love the light, the refractivity, the abstract graphics, the multiplicity of images,'' he said, like a schoolboy with a new toy and a degree from M.I.T. ''I used to get a new one every time I would go down to Chinatown with my family when I was little,'' he recalled. ''I had quite a collection.''
  POSSESSED: An Arcitect's Eye by David Coleman, May 23, 2004 from the New York Times
  
  
• The museum had a place in his heart, as his mother, photographer Rosalie Gwathmey, was born in Charlotte and lived there most of her life. Charle's childhood summers were spent at Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington. The late Claude Howell, a beloved North Carolina artist and longtime St. John's supporter, was also dear to the architect. Gwathmey's father, Robert Gwathmey, an artist whose work is part of the museum's collection, served as mentor and benefactor to Howell after meeting him in Wilmington. Howell traveled with the Gwathmey family, often acting as caretaker to young Charles. The project enabled Gwathmey to honor Howell, while serving a city he loves. (Bricks & mortars, The News & Observer, April 21, 2002)
  
  
• Holistic is a word that has been applied to his approach to a commission. Signature is another. If the commission bears Charles Gwathmey's name, one can be assured that it is easily recognizable as being Gwathmey's. One also can be assured that Charles Gwathmey has approved everything from the first drawing to the last blade of grass. Gwathmey has put it this way: "Architects think about space and form and materiality and color as integral and composite parts of the design development. It's not additive; it's not coming back after the fact." He has been quoted as saying that a commission is a combination of marriage, therapy and enlisting the marines. Gwathmey added: "I'm uncompromising in what I believe." And what does he believe? He has said: "In the spirit of graphic essence and referential logic, the rotated square overlaid on the circle is irrefutably articulate, primary and memorable". (Omar Mardan, October, 2007)
  
  
  
• Charles Gwathmey loves North Carolina Barbecue!  When he came for the opening there was a picnic in the St. John's courtyard with barbecue and Southern fried chicken (Rebecca Laymon, September 2007)
  
  
• Charles Gwathmey was not a licensed architect when he built his parent's house.
  When he went to take the professional licensing exam there was a question on the test "Which is the organic house?" The choices included a picture of his parent's house. He wanted to answer his house but in order to pass the exam he chose "Fallingwater" by Frank Lloyd Wright because he knew that was the answer they wanted. He did pass the test. (In Search of Clarity, The Architecture of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, Checkerboard Films, 1995)
  
  
• Seven year old Charles Gwathmey modeled for the white boy in his father's painting "Ancestor Worship" , a satirical composition. Robert Gwathmey, The Life of a Passionate Observer, by Michael Kammen, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999
  
  
• Charles Gwathmey - watch designs , he has designed a white geometric bird house, a dog house (#3 on the page), a five-piece place setting (Chicago pattern) from "The Architect's Table: Swid Powell and Postmodern Design," an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery of housewares design by architects, a desk and credenza for Knoll.
  
  
• Charles Gwathmey and the World Trade Center,
  

  ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPOSALS; Beyond Mourning, Building Hope on Ground Zero, Mark Taylor, December 29, 2002, NY Times

Note: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential Twentieth-Century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity.

Charles Gwathmey biographical info from the Gwathmey-Siegel website:

Charles Gwathmey received his Master of Architecture degree in 1962 from Yale University, where he won both The William Wirt Winchester Fellowship as the outstanding graduate and a Fulbright Grant.

In the decades since, Mr. Gwathmey has been honored with the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970 and elected to the Academy in 1976. In 1983, he won the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and in1985, he received the first Yale Alumni Arts Award from the Yale School of Architecture. Three years later, the Guild Hall Academy of Arts awarded Mr. Gwathmey its Lifetime Achievement Medal in Visual Arts, followed in 1990 by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York State Society of Architects.

Mr. Gwathmey has served as President of the Board of Trustees for The Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1981.

From 1965 through 1991, Mr. Gwathmey taught at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Texas, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He was Davenport Professor (1983 and 1999) and Bishop Professor (1991) at Yale, and the Eliot Noyes Visiting Professor at Harvard University (1985).

Mr. Gwathmey was the spring 2005 William A. Bernoudy Resident in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Prepared by Anne Curtin, art docent at the Cameron Museum , October 2007