Samuel Muhlfelder; student faced illness with wit, energy

Full of plans and brimming with scampish humor and charm, Sammy Muhlfelder wrote a personal note several months ago while applying to renew a scholarship at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture.

Though he had been ill about a year, it wasn't his nature to concede a day of the future.

"Upon leaving Michigan, well, who knows? I'm twenty-three now and I'll be twenty-five-plus then; time to find a wife in Spain, Italy or Israel -- all three architecturally sound options," he wrote. "My only foreseeable hope is that, wherever I do land, I stay true to the design ethic raised in these three-plus years of education. The real world kills many an idea and many a designer. The real world will not kill me, and it better not destroy the inspiration currently within."

A few weeks ago, the scleroderma that had afflicted him intensified, and he died Nov. 29 in Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 23 and had grown up in Newton.

"Sammy was brilliant; he was a true visionary," Carolyn Centeno, a college friend from the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail to his parents. "He had a poetic soul, a humor only he could get away with, a sense of levity with everything in life. . . . I remember how quickly he would come up with ideas. He would sketch in his bed when he woke up in the morning. He would be in the studio till all hours, and his drawings were always beautiful, his ideas genius."

After Mr. Muhlfelder died, friends from across the country and around the world wrote to his parents offering anecdotes, memories, and tributes, together creating a biography of a brief life lived well. Some had been close for years, others measured their best times with him in semesters, months, or a spring break sojourn. They wrote of how he inspired by example with compassion, love of life, and a sense of humor that was as disarming as it was offbeat.

"It was fast, sarcastic, and essentially indescribable, because it was so idiosyncratic -- it was so Sammy," Paul Rome, a friend since childhood, wrote in remarks he prepared for Mr. Muhlfelder's funeral service on Dec. 1. "Those who got it couldn't get enough of it. Sammy was hilarious."

One friend wrote about how he brought down the house during a dull lecture in a college physics class by nonchalantly asking a question so astonishingly irrelevant that even the professor laughed.

"Teachers would try to get mad, but they couldn't, because what he did was typically clever," said Mr. Muhlfelder's father, Lewis.

"He seemed to always be amused by life," Matt Levy, another friend, wrote in an e-mail. "Even when he was the unfortunate star of his own stories, he laughed just the same. Though he laughed at everything and everyone, he scorned nothing and no one."

Samuel Jacob Muhlfelder was born in Newton and graduated from Newton South High School. The older of two brothers, he was Sammy to everyone.

His father and mother -- Esther Cohen, a native of Spain -- first met in Israel. Mr. Muhlfelder emulated his parents' international romance and his father's calling as an architect. He always believed he would marry a European woman, and as a child showed glimmers of a talent for design.

"I remember he would uncover little salamanders in the backyard, and he would make elaborate moats and covered bridges so the salamanders could run in between," his father said.

"Sammy was the perfect best friend for me," wrote Rome, who was 5 when they met. "I found the world overwhelming and a bit scary. Sammy was adventurous and mischievous."

Fluent in Spanish, his mother's first language, Mr. Muhlfelder visited relatives in Spain while growing up and went to a summer camp in Normandy, France.

"He became very European in his outlook, and that helped form his more expansive view of the world," his father said.

Having added Italian to his languages during high school, Mr. Muhlfelder took time away from Middlebury College in Vermont to study in Italy and Spain.

"When we traveled, he liked to show up with no guidebook, no place to stay, and no real plan," Levy wrote. "And it always worked out for him. He talked us into packed hotels late at night, into private birthday parties and crowded restaurants. And everywhere we went he made friends, switching from English to Italian to Spanish and charming equally in every language."

Walking the streets of Ferrara, Italy, with him was no different than strolling through Newton or his college town in Vermont. Mr. Muhlfelder, Levy wrote, "seemed to greet everyone, from the German students to the middle-aged women at the cafeteria."

"Not cocky or brash, Sammy was simply happy being Sammy," Rome wrote. "He radiated happiness, energy, and optimism."

Mr. Muhlfelder graduated from Middlebury College, where he majored in art history and architectural studies and minored in Italian. Then came the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where he was in his second year as a graduate student.

First diagnosed with Raynaud's disease in April 2005, Mr. Muhlfelder was neither interested in sympathy nor willing to let illness define his life.

"He didn't want people to know," his father said. "He wanted people to see him as a healthy person. He really was incredibly stoic."

"I remember speaking with him about his disease, and he never was fearful," Centeno wrote. "He didn't want people to pity him. He didn't want to be the sick kid . . . and he never was. He never gave in."

"It is utterly heartbreaking that we will no longer hear his laugh or be dumbstruck by his talent and brilliance," wrote Kristen Dotson, another classmate.

Mr. Muhlfelder came home from Michigan just before Thanksgiving, intending to return after being treated in Boston. To the end, his ardor for creating designs remained undimmed. In the note with his scholarship application, he had concluded with two sentences, setting them apart on the page as if they were a couplet.

Bring on architecture. But, please, keep bringing the inspiration.

In addition to his parents, Mr. Muhlfelder leaves his brother, Teddy of Newton, and his grandmothers, Adelaide of Albany, N.Y., and Nelly Levy of Barcelona, Spain.

A service has been held.