1926-2020

A Bostonian born in 1926, Henry N. Cobb spent half of his seventy-year career as partner of a larger figure, Ieoh Ming Pei, and together they ran what for five decades was one of the most versatile and successful practices in American architecture: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Raised in an old New England family, Cobb attended Harvard College and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where later, from 1980 to 1985, he would serve as Chair of the Department of Architecture. After completing his studies he settled in New York, and there he met the talented Pei, eventually tying up with him. In his thirty-five years as a corporate architect, Cobb was principally responsible for some of the most representative buildings of late modernity in the United States – including the John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse and, most importantly, the acclaimed John Hancock Tower, both in his native Boston – and he personally spearheaded projects bearing a strong Miesian imprint, such as Place Ville Marie in Montreal (1962) and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse (1968).