DER SCUTT (1934–2010)
Fred A. Bernstein reports in the New York Times that Der Scutt, an architect who designed several of the most prominent buildings in Manhattan––including Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and the vast One Astor Plaza overlooking Times Square––died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was seventy-five. The cause was liver failure, his son, Hagen, said.
Scutt, a modernist, was best known for whetting Donald Trump’s appetite for mirrored glass boxes, first with his plans for the Grand Hyatt Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal (for which he was a design consultant) and then with his design for Trump Tower, which brought vast swaths of bronze-colored glass to the stretch of Fifth Avenue that had been known for limestone edifices.
Trump Tower became a popular tourist attraction, in part because of its glamorous atrium. In 1983 Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic of the New York Times, called the space “warm, luxurious and even exhilarating.” In recent years, Scutt became a specialist in recladding existing buildings, replacing their masonry facades with metal-trimmed glass curtain walls. Scutt was also known for helping property owners win approval for large projects. “My father was absolutely a developer’s architect, and he prided himself on respecting the wishes and goals of the owner while injecting his own style and design expertise,” said Hagen Scutt, who is the senior architect at Der Scutt Architect, the firm his father founded.
Donald Clark Scutt––he changed his name to Der as a young man––was born on October 17, 1934, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of George Washington Scutt, who was also an architect, and the former Hazel Smith. He attended Wyomissing Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, and Yale University, from which he received a master’s degree in architecture. He took a job with Paul Rudolph, Yale’s dean at the time, who became his mentor.
Scutt spent three years running Rudolph’s office in New Haven. But he never developed a style as distinctive as Rudolph’s, perhaps because he moved on to two large firms––Kahn & Jacobs, for which he designed One Astor Plaza, and Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, for which he began the design of Trump Tower. He founded Der Scutt Architect, in 1981, when he was nearing fifty.
After forming his own firm, Scutt designed 100 United Nations Plaza Tower, a fifty-five-story condominium, and the fifty-seven-story Corinthian at First Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. With its deeply curved facades suggesting a fluted column, the Corinthian, designed with Michael Schimenti for the developer Bernard Spitzer, is reminiscent of several of Rudolph’s undulating buildings.
