David A. Crane; architect helped reshape Boston districts

As a boy growing up in Africa, David A. Crane learned from his missionary parents that one should work not only to enrich oneself, but to enrich the world. He lived by that lesson.

An architect and city planner for 50 years, Mr. Crane did not build skyscrapers. He strove to make cities and their neighborhoods more livable and people-friendly, from Boston to a desert area in Egypt midway between Cairo and Alexandria.

''I would say that Boston, more than any other place, bears the stamp of his work," his son Matthew of Charlottesville, Va., said of Mr. Crane, who died May 20 in the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville of complications from a blood disorder. He was 78.

''Dad was a crusader, an earnest, idealistic man," his son said. ''He always fought for the underdog."

In 1961, Mr. Crane and his crew of nine were brought to Boston by Edward J. Logue of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the internationally known development administrator for Mayor John F. Collins, to support the massive physical transformation of the city that was underway.

As chief planner under Logue, Mr. Crane and his staff crafted urban renewal plans for Boston's Government Center, the waterfront, Charlestown, the South End, the central business district, and many other neighborhoods.

''Logue's mandate was to carry out neighborhood revitalization without massive relocation and to revive the economic base of downtown," said Cambridge architect Tunney Lee, who worked for Mr. Crane for four years. ''We all learned on the job, including Dave, the realities of poverty, city politics, powerful institutions such as Harvard or Tufts or the Vault, and planning with people. And neighborhood resistance shaped and enriched our simple views of how to bring about change."

Despite opposition to some plans, Lee said, ''Dave persisted in pursuing courses of action with such fervor and tenacity that could only be explained by his upbringing in a missionary family and his career as a fullback at Georgia Tech. . . . No matter what the obstacles, Dave always saw the possibilities and held a larger vision."

Mr. Crane taught architecture at several universities, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University. He inspired a generation of younger architects who became top names in the field. One of them, Denise Scott Brown, now a principal in the Philadelphia architecture firm of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, writes, in a book not yet published, ''His ideas place Crane in the forefront of 20th-century thinkers and philosophers on urban design."

David Alford Crane was born in the former Belgian Congo, where his parents, Charles Lacoste and Bessie Louise (Dixon) Crane, were Presbyterian missionaries. When he was about 14, the family moved back to the States, and he finished high school in Tuscaloosa, Ala. At 17, his son said, he fibbed about his age to enlist in the US Navy.

Mr. Crane was so worried about the fate of his country, his son said, that he spent the night he was to ship out sitting on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, ''trying to take in what his country was about and what we were fighting about."

Mr. Crane later enrolled at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in architecture and became a vocal critic of how the government could allow the poor to live in slums that proliferated around the university. Once asked by Georgia Tech to introduce the governor of the state, Mr. Crane took the opportunity to chastise him for not doing something about the poor. The governor was so humiliated, Mr. Crane's son said, that ''he tore up the speech he was going to give and talked about football instead."

Mr. Crane earned a master's degree at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1952. He traveled to Italy on a fellowship and studied the country's famous piazzas.

His former wife, Bonnie (Loyd) Crane of Wellesley, recalled a stay in Cairo in 1978 and 1979, where he was engaged to head the Sadat City Development Group, to start a new city in the desert. She said a water buffalo was brought in and slaughtered to mark the occasion.

Mr. Crane returned to Boston in 1979 and worked as consultant. He moved to Tampa in 1986 and taught at the University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design.

Daniel Bennett, dean of architecture at Auburn University in Alabama worked on some projects with Mr. Crane in Florida and said that Mr. Crane was working on strategies late in his career to develop affordable housing for migrant workers there. Mr. Crane's lifelong efforts to help the less fortunate, Bennett said, were an inspiration. ''He has had a profound impact on the lives of well over 1,000 architects and planners who practice and teach all over the US and around the globe," Bennett wrote in 2001.

Besides his son and former wife, Mr. Crane leaves two daughters, Melinda of Berlin and Amanda of Los Angeles; a brother, Sid, of Indianapolis; a sister, Louise, of Charlottesville, Va.; and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Aug. 19 in the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge.