1930-2022

Deceased on 11 February at 92 years of age, James Stewart Polshek was one of those archi-tects who, in spite of having completed noteworthy buildings, could not bear the load of me-dia glitz and preferred a quiet and fruitful professional activity, either by destination or by cha-racter. Polshek graduated from Yale in 1955, and worked for a time with I. M. Pei, whose geo-metric rigor and professional efficiency he admired to the point of turning them into the identi-ty signs of his own studio – James Polshek architect –, founded in New York in 1963. He led the office for more than forty years, completing dozens of buildings across the United States, like the William J. Clinton Presidential Center (2004) in Little Rock, Arkansas; the at the time highly publicized Rose Center for Earth and Space (1999); and, in particular, two of his interventions in existing buildings, like the Carnegie Hall restoration and the well-known new entrance to Brooklyn Museum. A key representative of a corporate way of working but sensitive and with stylistic ambition, Polshek was also a committed professor and became Dean of Columbia’s GSAPP in 1972.