GERHARD KALLMANN (1915–2012)

The New York Times’ Dennis Hevesi reports that architect Gerhard Kallmann has passed away. Kallmann was perhaps best known for collaborating with Michael McKinnell to design Boston City Hall; the modernist building won critical acclaim while being disliked by many of the city’s residents. Kallmann was also responsible for buildings including the United States Embassy in Thailand, the world headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, and buildings at Brandeis and Ohio State universities and several University of California campuses. On Hauser Hall, the building designed by Kallmann and McKinell at Harvard, the Boston Globe’s Robert Campbell wrote: “[Hauser Hall] is a commentary on the ways in which, in law as in architecture, the past and the present intermingle in the endless dance of precedent and invention.”