Wallace Harrison
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Wallace Kirkman Harrison (September 28, 1895 Worcester, Massachusetts – December 2, 1981 New York City), American twentieth-century architect.
Harrison started his professional career with the firm of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, participating in the construction of Rockefeller Center. He is best known for executing large public projects in New York City and upstate, many of them a result of his long and fruitful personal relationship with Nelson Rockefeller.
Architecturally, Harrison's major projects are marked by straightforward planning and sensible functionalism, although his residential side-projects show more experimental and humane flair. His architectural partner from 1941 to 1976 was Max Abramovitz.
In 1931 Harrison established an 11 acre (45,000 m²) summer retreat in West Hills, New York, which was a very early example and workshop for the International Style in the United States, and a social and intellectual center of architecture, art, and politics. Frequent visitors and guests included Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Moses, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, and Fernand Léger, who waited out part of World War II by painting a mural at the bottom of Harrison's swimming pool.
Harrison's architural drawings and archives are held by the Drawings and Archives Department of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.
[edit] Major projects
- Perisphere and Trylon for the 1939 New York World's Fair;
- LaGuardia Airport;
- The Hopkins Center of 1962, a performing arts, restaurant, and art studio center at Dartmouth College. In detail, it forshadows the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center;
- Master plan for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (coordinating the work of Pietro Belluschi, Gordon Bunshaft, Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen, among others);
- The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center;
- The Time-Life Building at Rockefeller Center, New York City;
- The Exxon Building at Rockefeller Center, New York City;
- Lead architect for the United Nations headquarters complex, coordinating the work of an international cadre of designers including Sven Markelius, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others;
- The New York Hall of Science at the 1964 New York World's Fair;
- The Battery Park City complex, New York City;
- Hilles Library, Harvard University;
- National City Tower, Louisville Kentucky;
- The Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, his last major project.
[edit] Further reading
- Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908-1958. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
