Royston T. Daley, 77; architect 'helped reshape' BC campus
The first structures Royston Tuttle Daley designed were small by necessity. They had to fit along the Lionel train set he and his two younger brothers shared in their Belmont home in the early 1940s.
"He would make models of houses and buildings to decorate around the track," said his brother Robert of
Mr. Daley was still creating villages around a model train track years later, albeit for his children's set, but by then he was imagining buildings on a grander scale. As part of The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, he helped design hotels, factories, housing, and schools around the world and took a personal hand in projects at Boston College.
"He was not quite a house architect here for a while, but he really helped reshape the campus," said Jeffery Howe, a professor of fine arts at the college.
Mr. Daley, who built his own life on a foundation of passions that ranged from hiking the tallest mountains in New Hampshire to shedding tears over a moving piece of classical music, died in his Concord home Tuesday of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 77.
"Architecture quite clearly is not merely building," he said in a 1997 lecture at Boston College, where he designed the McMullen Museum of Art and the Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Library and oversaw the renovations of the Bapst and Burns libraries. "Building aims solely at utility in a relatively narrow practical sense, whereas architecture aims to meet the total needs of man, including intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual."
Howe said the late modernism evident in Mr. Daley's design for the O'Neill library reflected his years at The Architects Collaborative, which was started by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus art and architecture school in Germany.
By contrast, Howe said, Mr. Daley remodeled the Bapst and Burns libraries by rediscovering the Gothic origins of the buildings, "modernizing and humanizing, bringing it up to date, but respecting the past."
With the McMullen Museum, Mr. Daley created walls in 4-foot sections that could be configured in a variety of ways, depending on the demands of the ever-changing exhibitions in a building with a small permanent collection.
"He gave us really a wonderful and very flexible facility in a very small space," said Nancy Netzer, an art history professor at Boston College and director of the museum.
The design, she said, "is unfailingly elegant. I think that most people would call his designs very elegant and very user-friendly -- a masterpiece of small space."
Born in Belmont, Royston Tuttle Daley was 15 when his father died of pancreatic cancer, a loss that influenced his decision to study chemistry at Williams College after graduating from Belmont High School.
"I think he was in his junior year when he concluded he couldn't see spending his life in the lab," his brother said, "so he just switched in his senior year to architecture and went to Harvard to finish."
Mr. Daley graduated from Williams in 1951 and from Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1956.
A scholarship student , he was awarded a Prix de Rome prize in 1960 that allowed him to study at the American Academy in Rome for two years.
He worked at a few firms before joining The Architects Collaborative. Gropius became a father figure to Mr. Daley, who always kept a framed photograph of his mentor at home, his wife said. He rose to become director of the firm in 1988.
Mr. Daley's first marriage, to Lillian Todd, ended in divorce, but he shared custody of his four children and worked to give them as broad a background as his own.
"He was a passionate architect," said his daughter Lisa Lyons of Marblehead. "People think of him that way, and they kind of forget that he was a Dad. He was really involved."
After Mr. Daley's father died, his mother led her sons on hikes up Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. Following her lead, he often took his own children on hikes and vacations to rural parts of New Hampshire and Vermont, where television usually was not among the offerings.
" He would sit around at night and read us books. He was a great reader," his daughter said. "He'd go into character ."
Mr. Daley had read all the works of Charles Dickens twice, said his wife, Nancy Powell-Daley, "and he was crazy about Jane Austen and Italian films."
He watched the movie "Mediterraneo " over and over and was a devotee of classical music performances. When he listened to the "German Requiem " by Brahms, his wife said, "tears would flow."
Between his passions for architecture, hiking, reading, and music, his wife said, "he was pretty hard to keep up with at times, I'll tell you."
"He followed that philosophy in raising his kids," his daughter said. "You had to be active outdoors and in culture, reading, and writing; you had to learn an instrument; you had to play a sport and had to stick with it for at least two years. He was a perfectionist through and through. Whether with his work or with his children, he was always trying to make things as good as possible."
In addition to his wife of 20 years, daughter, and brother, Mr. Daley leaves two other daughters, Jennifer Modrall of Littleton and Stephanie Lichtman of Newmarket, N.H.; a son, Christopher of Portland, Ore.; a grandson; and a granddaughter.
A funeral service will be held at 10 a.m. today in Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord. Burial will be in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
