Charles Gwathmey; famed N.Y. architect helped define Modernism movement; at 71

He was 71 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was esophageal cancer, said Mr. Gwathmey’s stepson, Eric Steel.

Mr. Gwathmey was part of a generation of architects who put their aesthetic stamp on the “high Modernist’’ style developed in the early 20th century by Le Corbusier and others. Many of Mr. Gwathmey’s best buildings were houses.

A series of wealthy clients - including Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jeffrey Katzenberg - chose him to create living spaces that were boldly geometric and luxuriously appointed, modern but certainly not spare.

Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, which Mr. Gwathmey founded with Robert Siegel in 1968, was a rare architecture firm to maintain a thriving residential practice (its first apartment, in 1969, was for actress Faye Dunaway) while also creating large buildings for schools, museums, and private real estate developers.

Many blended effortlessly into the urban fabric. They included the International Center of Photography in midtown Manhattan; the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens; an expansion of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard; and dozens more.

But a few of Gwathmey Siegel’s buildings, including a 1992 addition to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan and the more recent Astor Place condominiums in the East Village, were denounced by critics as insufficiently deferential to their surroundings.

Among architects, Mr. Gwathmey was admired for his steadfastness during the 1980s, when some of his contemporaries turned to historicist, or post-Modernist styles.

“A lot of people jumped ship, but Charlie was loyal to Modernism,’’ said Peter Eisenman, the architect and theorist.

Cynthia Davidson, an author and editor, devoted an entire issue of her journal, ANY: Architecture New York, to Mr. Gwathmey in the late 1990s.

She did so, she said, after realizing that “there’s a lot of interest in Charles’s work among the younger generation of architects.’’

“He’s somebody they look at, that they have to look at,’’ Davidson added.

Mr. Gwathmey (pronounced GWAHTH-mee) was a dashing figure, given to Savile Row suits and shoes from London bootmaker John Lobb. He drove black sports cars from which he stripped details he considered extraneous and lived in refined style, in an apartment of his own design.

He became a sensation while still in his 20s, when, with his partner at the time, Richard Henderson, he designed a house for his parents, Robert and Rosalie Gwathmey, both artists, on the East End of Long Island. Completed in 1966, at a cost of $35,000, the Gwathmey house attracted throngs of visitors and was consistently named one of the most influential buildings of the modern era.

Mr. Gwathmey described the house - a 1,200-square-foot cedar-clad composition of cubes, triangles, and cylinders - as “a solid block that has been carved back to its essence.’’

“There is no additive, no vestigial, no applied anything that detracts from its primary presence,’’ he said.

Mr. Gwathmey thought of the house and its adjoining studio as sculptures.

“They are not,’’ he declared, “organic or integrated with nature.’’

In 2001, he inherited the house from his mother and began a renovation that included covering the original concrete floor with marble. The upgrade was a sign of Mr. Gwathmey’s extraordinary success during the intervening years. Only a few miles away, he had designed a large vacation compound for Spielberg.

Many of his clients returned to him for second or third houses. Spielberg said in a telephone interview, “Whenever I had a project on the East Coast, the first call I made was to Charlie.’’

He added that Mr. Gwathmey “liked to mix it up,’’ taking strong stands in defense of his design ideas, but “if there hadn’t been the sparks, the architecture wouldn’t have been as brilliant.’’

Mr. Gwathmey formed his partnership with Siegel in 1968. (They had first met as students at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan.)

One of their most daring projects was a renovation of Whig Hall at Princeton University, a neo-Classical building that had been damaged in a fire. Inserting Corbusian forms where part of the original facade was missing, they created a thrilling combination of traditional and avant-garde design.

Other prominent buildings included the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library on Madison Avenue.

Among the firm’s most recent projects was a W Hotel in Hoboken, N.J. The new US Mission to the United Nations, on First Avenue in Manhattan, is under construction.

In New York, Gwathmey Siegel was perhaps most famous for its addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. The addition, completed in 1992, consists of a rectangular 10-story tower behind Wright’s famous spiral.

The firm’s original proposal, for a much larger, cantilevered box, was denounced as obtrusive by critics and preservationists. In the end, Mr. Gwathmey settled on a limestone slab that entirely defers to Wright’s powerful building.

Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic for The New York Times and now a critic for The New Yorker, ultimately concluded that with the renovation master- minded by Gwathmey Siegel and the addition, the Guggenheim “is now a better museum and a better work of architecture.’’

Yale University selected Gwathmey Siegel to renovate and enlarge its Art & Architecture Building, a much-maligned 1963 masterpiece by Paul Rudolph that had been badly altered over the decades.

Mr. Gwathmey was widely praised for bringing Rudolph’s architecture back to life.

But when it was completed, last summer, the same critics who loved the restoration dismissed the addition.

Still, Mr. Gwathmey took pride in having completed a building at Yale, his alma mater, that engaged in a conversation with Rudolph’s building, as well as with the 1953 Yale University Art Gallery by Louis I. Kahn across the street.

Charles Gwathmey was born in Charlotte, N.C., and was reared both there and in New York City.

He began college at the University of Pennsylvania and then moved to Yale, from which he graduated with a master’s degree in architecture in 1962. He then spent two years traveling through Europe, where he paid particular attention to the works of Le Corbusier.

Over the years, he taught at a number of architecture schools, including those of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Cooper Union.

Steel said that “the same level of meticulousness that you see in his work, you’d see in every aspect of his life.’’

Even in the hospital during Mr. Gwathmey’s final illness, Steel said, “everything had to line up.’’