FRANK WILLIAMS (1936–2010)
Frank Williams, an architect whose sleek towers incorporating crisp geometric shapes in many of their facades made a significant mark on the New York skyline, died on February 25 in Manhattan, reports Dennis Hevesi for the New York Times. He was seventy-three. The cause was esophageal cancer, his wife, Veronica, said.
In a career of more than four decades, Williams was the lead architect or collaborated with other prominent designers on twenty buildings in Manhattan; someone standing on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park could see perhaps a dozen of them.
Among his works are the Trump Palace at Sixty-ninth Street and Third Avenue, which at fifty-seven stories is the tallest building on the Upper East Side; 515 Park Avenue, a forty-two-story condominium designed for the Zeckendorf Development Company; the fifty-five-story W hotel in Times Square; the residential complex that is part of World Wide Plaza on Ninth Avenue; and the fifty-five-story Four Seasons Hotel on East Fifty-seventh Street, a collaboration with I. M. Pei.
“One of Frank’s strengths was that he was not a doctrinaire modernist; he would incorporate elements of traditional architecture in his modernist designs,” Michael J. Crosbie, the author of The Architecture of Frank Williams (Rockport, 1995), said Friday. “His buildings are very tightly detailed with a spare but elegant use of materials and primary shapes, incorporating squares, circles, and triangles in the facades and inside the buildings themselves.”
Suzanne Stephens, a deputy editor at Architectural Record magazine, said Williams had persuaded major developers to build skyscrapers “of a higher quality than the white-brick shoe boxes, stood on end, so prevalent in the 1960s.” She said that “while Williams’s towers are not arresting, they do not aggressively take over the skyline like so many big, tall uglies you see all over New York.”
“He definitely left his imprimatur on New York City,” she added, “and many cities abroad.” Williams designed sixteen buildings that stand, or are under construction, in Bangkok, Beijing, Dubai, Hong Kong, Moscow, Seoul, Shanghai, and Taipei. “For a lot of clients abroad,” Crosbie said, “he delivered our standard of American corporate architecture, which they wanted so that, in a way, they could say they had arrived.”
