Bernard Spring, former Boston Architectural College president, dies at 97

Boston Globe

28-01-2025

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'Known for his transformative leadership in architectural education, he leaves behind a legacy of innovation, advocacy, and dedication to the profession,'
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In its memorial tribute, what is now the
Mr. Spring's return to Boston, where he finished his college administrator career, was welcomed from those inside and outside of academia.
'He's the perfect person for the BAC,' Jane Holtz Kay, an author and architecture critic whose work was published in the Globe and elsewhere, told the Globe in December 1980.
Mr. Spring, she added, is 'very solid, very caring. He has a rare mix of qualities, both an architect and an educator.'
Throughout his years as a teacher and administrator, which included stints at MIT, Cooper Union in New York City, and Princeton University before he became a City College dean, Mr. Spring was also a practicing architect.
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'That was one of the basics of my career always, to have practicing teachers,' he said in a 2023 interview with architect Dalton Whiteside.
'When they weren't practicing, I tried to get them to practice, and I wouldn't hire anyone who was not in practice,' Mr. Spring said. 'And so I think that improves a faculty a lot.'
As the leader of what is now Boston Architectural College, in the Back Bay,
Mr. Spring was 'a role model I look up to — an institution builder,' Daas said in an interview.
'We realize that these institutions have an impact for multiple generations. I think he recognized that calling,' Daas said, adding that because of Mr. Spring's transformational role, 'we stand on his shoulders.'
Born in the Bronx borough of New York City on July 9, 1927, Mr. Spring was the youngest of four siblings.
His parents were Eastern European immigrants from areas where national borders kept shifting before and after World War I and World War II.
His father, Herman Spring, was a kosher butcher in the Bronx before running one of the first self-serve supermarkets in the city. Mr. Spring's mother, Rose Polmer Spring, was working at the checkout of the store when she and Herman fell in love and married.
In the interview with Whiteside, Mr. Spring recalled that in his Bronx boyhood, he 'played stickball in the streets like a real New Yorker.' He was about 11 when his family moved to Manhattan.
While attending William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx, initially 'it looked like I was going to be a writer and go into journalism,' he told Whiteside, until a teacher who had aspired to be an architect encouraged him to follow that path.
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Mr. Spring counted among his boyhood friends the future film director Stanley Kubrick. Through another friend he met Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-German architect, and Walter Gropius, a pioneering modernist architect who founded the Bauhaus School.
As a Taft student, Mr. Spring took a train to Boston to meet them, and subsequently was the only child in his family to attend college, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in architecture.
Then he went to MIT for a master's in architecture, studying under teachers such as Louis Kahn. Another teacher believed architecture students benefited from at least one art course, and sent them to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
.
In a pottery course there he met Phyllis Tubiolo, whom he married in 1951.
'Everybody else was very proprietary about their glazes, and my mother said, 'Sure, go ahead use my glazes. They're on this shelf,' ' said their daughter Elin Spring Kaufman of Swampscott.
An educator with a doctorate from Columbia University, Phyllis Spring coordinated the talented and gifted program in the southern part of suburban Westchester County when the family lived in New York City.
As Mr. Spring's MIT graduate studies ended, the Navy recruited him to work at the Boston Naval Shipyard, where he helped design improvements for ships that would see action during the Korean War.
After the war, a Fulbright scholarship brought him to Finland, and then he spent a year teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
His early career back in the United States included teaching at MIT, doing research on building materials for Weyerhaeuser in Seattle, and teaching at Cooper Union.
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When Mr. Spring worked at Princeton, he and Robert L. Geddes coauthored 'A Study of Education for Architectural Design,' known simply as 'The Princeton Project.' The 1967 report 'revolutionized architectural education by establishing comprehensive standards for design schools across the country,' City College said in its tribute.
Two years later,
In addition to his wife, Phyllis, and daughter Elin, Mr. Spring leaves a son, Jonathan of Sherborn; two other daughters, Suzy Welch of New York and Della of Boston; 11 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Plans for a memorial service have not been decided.
Even though he held top leadership posts during an academic career that lasted more than 35 years, 'he was mostly a quiet man, and when he did speak it was spot-on and often very funny,' Della said. 'He'd come out with a pithy comment, and he loved to laugh.'
Mr. Spring 'lived his values,' Elin said, and those went beyond the creativity of architecture and the discipline of being an administrator. 'He was a guitarist and a music lover, he was an art lover. He instilled in all of us the same patterns of cultural enrichment.'
Her father, she said, 'was also an avid sailor. The memories that bring me the most joy are the ones that recall his gentle manner and his adventurous spirit. I can just see him at the helm at the boat all the time, and how that filled him up. He had this great look when he was sailing.'
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Bryan Marquard can be reached at