Norman Fletcher, 89; cofounded influential architects group

With seven other architects, Norman Fletcher wanted to create a firm that was as precise and egalitarian as their designs and to forge a marriage between aesthetics and a social consciousness for a postwar world.

"I do think that most of the original partners had an idea that somehow we were smart enough to create ideal communities and by doing so create a peaceful world," he said in an interview last year for "Still Standing," a documentary on The Architects Collaborative, the Cambridge firm they opened in 1945. "We did have faith that architecture could create more than just buildings."

From his personal favorite, a new headquarters for the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C., to projects that rose from the Back Bay to Baghdad, Mr. Fletcher and his colleagues became legends during the half-century The Architects Collaborative was a driving force. He died Thursday in Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Maine. Mr. Fletcher was 89 and had moved to Maine to be closer to his daughter after living for nearly 60 years in a Lexington house he had designed.

"He was the architect's architect," said Chip Harkness of Vinalhaven, Maine, a founding member of The Architects Collaborative. "He just lived and loved architecture."

"He had convictions against which he measured everything in his life: excellence of design, love of music and architecture, and most of all, I think, his family," his daughter Mollie of Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., wrote in an e-mail.

The son of British immigrants, Norman Collings Fletcher was born in Providence and grew up in Willimantic, Conn. His family's finances were modest, and he attended Yale University on a scholarship, graduating from the School of Architecture in 1940.

After a journey around the country to examine examples of architecture, he joined the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1943, and Saarinen, Swanson & Associates the following year. During World War II he did not register for the draft, and a judge placed him on probation, allowing him instead to work on housing.

"I became a very strong pacifist," he said in the documentary. "I didn't want to go down and shoot other civilizations, other cities, other people."

In 1945, Mr. Fletcher married Jean Bodman, an architect who also became a founding member of The Architects Collaborative. The firm's biggest name was Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus art and architecture school in Germany who was teaching at Harvard. Pioneering a collaborative approach to design, the eight partners took equal salaries and met each week to discuss projects, rotating as leader.

"The Thursday meeting was one of the permanent fixtures in the office in the sense of communication," Mr. Fletcher said in the documentary. "We had some very intense discussions on Thursday, and no partner was exempt from criticism."

"The thing that makes it work is that the project itself takes over," Sally Harkness of Lexington, another founding member, said in the documentary.

The firm -- which was known as TAC, much as Mr. Fletcher was almost universally called Fletch -- became an incubator for Boston's architecture community, as other firms were launched by young architects who used the office on Brattle Street in Cambridge as a postgraduate training ground.

Growing to a staff of about 300, TAC won the second annual national firm award from the American Institute of Architects in the 1960s. Mr. Fletcher directed projects including an addition to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, schools across New England, and a community in Redwood City, Calif., that became home to tens of thousands of people.

The firm closed in 1995, its finances battered by unpaid fees for projects in Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War. Robert Campbell, the Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, wrote: "For Boston architects, it's as if the Titanic has gone down."

Still afloat, however, is Six Moon Hill, a small community that architects from the firm designed along Moon Hill Road in Lexington, their collaboration at work spilling into their home lives. The 29 houses embrace a modernist aesthetic without being tethered to a uniform style. Each has expanded over the past 59 years to accommodate larger families or larger incomes.

"In 1948, three couples, including five partners in The Architects Collaborative, were living together in a three-decker on Trowbridge Street in Cambridge, one family on each floor," Mr. Fletcher told the Globe in 1994. "We ate our meals together; we enjoyed life together. But we were sick of paying rent. We thought maybe we should build something, create an example of how architects should live."

Jean Fletcher died of cancer in 1965, leaving Mr. Fletcher a widower with six children in his late 40s. He later married Marjorie Houk. After they divorced, he married Betty Mason about 20 years ago. Through the years on Moon Hill, the Fletcher household hosted neighbors on Christmas Eve, and Mr. Fletcher played the piano for carol singalongs.

"He always took me by surprise by his thoughtfulness," said his daughter Jean Getman of Thomaston, Maine. "He was incredibly loyal, fair, and very, very loving."

"He was an incredibly ethical person from his passivism during World War II to ways he talked to me about how you deal with other people," said his son Joseph of Palo Alto, Calif. "He set a very high standard for his sense of honesty."

During summers on Vinalhaven Island, at his summer home on Company Point, Mr. Fletcher indulged two of his favorite pastimes, painting and sailing. A tennis player since high school, he was competitive enough that his son didn't win a set in their matches until he was a junior in college. Even as his health failed, Mr. Fletcher was watching the French Open in the hospital and analyzing players.

"When you were around him you said, 'Look at how this guy does life,' " said Dr. Chip Kava of Rockport, Maine, who is married to Mr. Fletcher's stepdaughter. His death "left a huge hole in the world, but I'm convinced that his spirit is still with is, and we can take comfort in that."

In addition to his wife, two daughters, and son, Mr. Fletcher leaves another son, Jeremy of Malibu, Calif.; two other daughters, Katrina Walton of Phillipston and Rebecca of Camano Island, Wash.; a stepson, Max Mason of Wynnewood, Pa.; a stepdaughter, Cynthia Kava of Rockport, Maine; and 13 grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday in Follen Church in Lexington.