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Boston Globe

Graham Gund, architect and philanthropist shaped Boston's skyline and museums, dies at 84

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'My role as a collector is directly linked to my work as an architect, which is integrally involved with the artistic notions of our time,' he wrote in the introductory essay for the catalog of the 1982 MFA exhibit 'A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund Collection.' Advertisement Mr. Gund, who left his most sweeping visual and philanthropic legacy in Ohio 'Graham was a pillar of the MFA and a true believer in the role of public art museums,' Matthew Teitelbaum, the Ann and Graham Gund director of the MFA wrote to museum trustees and advisers after Mr. Gund died. Advertisement 'He was about light, scale, material, movement, entrance and exit, and the feeling you get when you are embraced in a building,' Teitelbaum added. Mr. Gund and his wife, Ann, both honorary trustees, endowed the MFA director's position and the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. In addition, Mr. Gund was the museum's longest-serving trustee, joining the board in 1973. Through his board work and donations of artworks, Mr. Gund guided the visual experiences of MFA patrons much in the way he helped define Greater Boston's skyline with the buildings he designed. Those included the Hyatt Regency hotel, along the Cambridge side of the Charles River, and 75 State Street, a 31-story office tower in downtown Boston that is topped with windows framed in gold leaf. 'It fits neatly, even gracefully, into the complicated web of little streets, and as such proves that it is not true that tall new buildings must always be at odds with older central business districts,' Mr. Gund was always keenly sensitive to the surroundings of the buildings he designed, and to the history of the buildings he renovated. In an interview, Goldberger said Mr. Gund 'was motivated by a desire to do right' by the locations where buildings would stand. 'His starting point was not just a shape in his head,' said Goldberger, who as a Kenyon College trustee saw Advertisement As president of Gund Partnership, the firm he founded more than 50 years ago, Mr. Gund designed, developed, and oversaw the planning and creation of buildings and projects across the country — from Locally, he had served as a trustee, director, chairman, or board member of institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Boston Society of Architects, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Foundation for Architecture, which he founded. He also had been a member or trustee of, or had served on, the National Committee on Design, the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects, and the National Building Museum and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In a 2004 Globe interview, Mr. Gund called Boston his favorite city. 'It has everything: a sense of neighborhood, a wonderful scale,' he said. But he retained an abiding affection for all his creations, wherever they rose from plans to prominence. 'I'd like to live in 'em all,' Advertisement Born in Cleveland on Oct. 28, 1940, Graham de Condé Gund was part of one of the wealthiest families in the nation. His father, Young Graham was a bookkeeper and teller. 'It was kind of slow,' he told the Globe in 1985. 'I kept wishing there would be a robbery or something to liven things up.' His mother, Jessica Roesler Gund, sensed his artistic talent when he was young, and died when he was 12. Mr. Gund was then sent to boarding school, where a roommate died young of cancer. 'Very early on, when faced with any difficulty, I looked for ways to organize and transform everything, from my room to the surrounding landscape,' Mr. Gund told the Globe. 'It was a way to make things right. I would create this perfect environment in which to exist. I think all art grows out of some kind of struggle.' He graduated from Westminster School in Connecticut and headed to Kenyon. His bachelor's degree was in psychology, which necessitated taking art courses at the Rhode Island School of Design to prepare for the Harvard Graduate School of Design, from which he graduated with a master's in architecture and a master's in urban design. Before founding his own firm, Mr. Gund worked for The Architects Collaborative, a legendary Cambridge firm where Walter Gropius, the modernist who founded the Bauhaus school in Germany, was a mentor. Mr. Gund's affluence allowed him to accumulate his impressive art collection and to be both architect and developer with new buildings, such as the Hyatt, and rehabilitation projects, such as the Charles Bulfinch-designed courthouse in Cambridge that he turned into a home for offices for business such as his firm. Advertisement He wore his wealth lightly, though. When he met 'He's so meticulous with his architecture, as he is with friends,' she said, and that included waiting seven years after they met before asking her to dinner. Mr. Gund was 'a very steady, thorough, thoughtful person. He never did anything radically or quickly.' In addition to Ann and their son, Graydon of New York City, Mr. Gund leaves two sisters, Agnes of New York and Louise of Berkeley, Calif.; and two brothers, Gordon of Princeton, N.J., and Geoffrey of New York. A celebration of Mr. Gund's life will be announced. 'He was so driven to pursue his craft, which financially he certainly didn't have to do, and that shows how much faithfulness he had to his craft and to the importance of work,' said his friend David Rockefeller, a philanthropist and life trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 'He worked so hard all his life and did it so beautifully.' Bryan Marquard can be reached at