Charles Gwathmey, 71, Modernist Pioneer
By Helen S. Rattray
(Aug. 13, 2009) Charles Gwathmey, who died in Manhattan on Aug. 3 at the age of 71, was three years out of the Yale School of Architecture when he drove out to the South Fork from New York looking for land where he might build a house for his parents, Robert and Rosalie Gwathmey.
Two years later, at a cost of $7,500 for a flat lot on Bluff Road, Amagansett, and $35,000 for construction, the 1,200-square-foot house, which became a Modernist icon, was done.
Over the years, Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, the firm he and a friend, Robert Siegel, founded in 1968, designed scores of notable houses and public buildings, renovated and built schools and museums, and developed a reputation as one of the most renowned architectural firms in the country.
Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic, called the houses Mr. Gwathmey did on the South Fork “his architectural lodestone.”
Mr. Goldberger, who has a house in East Hampton, said, “His influence on the East End is almost beyond calculating, not only because there were so many ‘real’ Gwathmey houses, but also because of the quantity of houses that were created by other architects in a similar mode. . . . His decision to retain his parents’ house for his own use after their death, restoring it magnificently, further anchored his connection to the community.”
 The East Hampton Star
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Charles Gwathmey was an only child, born on June 19, 1938, in Charlotte, N.C. He grew up in Manhattan, where he went to the High School of Music and Art. His father was well known as a social realist painter; his mother had been a photographer until changing careers to become a textile designer.
In a “Guestwords” piece Mr. Gwathmey wrote for The East Hampton Star in 1989, not long after his father’s death, he said, “I was . . . the direct beneficiary of a most extraordinary upbringing, that was both an example and a lesson in compassion, commitment, and devotion to art, ideals, fellow man, and family.”
Mr. Gwathmey told people he had wanted to be an architect from the time he was 11, when his father walked him through Yale University. The family also traveled in Europe that year.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, however, before going to Yale, where he received a master’s degree in architecture, and he took pride in being chosen in later life to renovate and enlarge the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which had been designed by Paul Rudolph, one of Mr. Gwathmey’s teachers.
The recipient of awards at Yale and the winner of a Fulbright scholarship, Mr. Gwathmey spent two years after graduation in Europe, where he studied the work of Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s dedication to a human scale in the structures he designed was a lasting influence.
Two relatively recent projects among the many cultural buildings designed by Gwathmey and Siegel in New York are a condominium tower at Astor Place and the renovation of and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Both were criticized as well as praised. In Mr. Goldberger’s view, the result of Gwathmey Siegel’s work at the Guggenheim made it “a better museum and a better work of architecture.”
Here on the South Fork, the many Gwathmey-Siegel residential projects grew much more lavish than his parents’ house. A few were the de Menil house off Further Lane, now owned by Larry Gagosian, the art dealer, two houses in Bridgehampton for the Steel family, and a compound of buildings in East Hampton, which included a barn moved to the site, for Steven Spielberg.
As contemporary architecture turned toward desconstruction and postmodernism, Mr. Gwathmey never veered away from his vision of classic Modernism. He was part of a group known as the New York Five, with Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier, whose work also has a notable presence on the South Fork.
Mr. Gwathmey taught at different times at the Ivy League colleges and at Cooper Union, where his father had been a teacher for decades. He established the Robert Gwathmey chair in art and architecture at Cooper Union after his father’s death. He also helped his wife, Bette-Ann Gwathmey, raise millions for pediatric cancer research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in memory of Robert Steel, Ms. Gwathmey’s son and his stepson, who died of childhood cancer at the age of 18.
A colleague throughout Mr. Gwathmey’s long career, John Caramagna of East Hampton, said that although Mr. Gwathmey had been treated for lung cancer a few years ago, the assumption was that it was successful. Mr. Cara_magna said he had been shocked by Mr. Gwathmey’s hospitalization in early July and his death of esophageal cancer.
Mr. Caramagna was at work in an old “rubble” basement of a Manhattan brownstone when he met the young architect who had designed its conversion. “Charles brought in his drawings,” he said, of the house Mr. Gwathmey planned for his parents. “All the local builders, carpenters, they couldn’t even understand it,” Mr. Caramagna said.
Mr. Caramagna came to the South Fork to build the Bluff Road house and has been here ever since, working on every Gwathmey house and renovation. “Any success I’ve had I owe to him,” Mr. Caramagna said.
“We were just little boys when we came out here,” he said, describing how Mr. Gwathmey got right in to help do the work. He called Mr. Gwathmey “a great humanitarian, a reflection of his father. He really was the brother I never had.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Gwathmey is survived by a daughter, Annie Gwathmey of Los Angeles, and a stepson, Eric Steel of New York. Courtney Steel, another of Ms. Gwathmey’s children, was killed as a teenager in a hit-and-run accident in Manhattan. Emily Gwathmey of Los Angeles, from whom Mr. Gwathmey was divorced, also survives.
The family is planning to have a memorial event in New York on a date not yet established.