Before such design touches became more popular, architect Harry Ellenzweig believed in replacing the dull blank walls inside buildings with glass that invites those strolling through corridors to participate, at least visually, in the activity they are passing.
The stairwells in Harvard University’s Naito Laboratory and Bauer Center for Genomics Research provided a good example, Robert Campbell, the Globe’s architecture critic, said in 2002. “Transparency here goes as far as it can go,” Campbell wrote. “The stairs are enclosed in glass partitions, and even the railings are crisply shaped planes of glass, held in place by elegant stainless-steel connectors.”
Campbell added that Mr. Ellenzweig “creates elegantly detailed contemporary buildings. They go about the business of solving their problems and doing their jobs without calling undue attention to themselves. Yet they’re always handsome, and they always fit sympathetically into their surroundings.”
Mr. Ellenzweig, founding principal of the Cambridge firm now known as Ellenzweig Associates, died June 13 in his Belmont home. He was 83 and his health had been failing due to heart and other ailments.
“Harry Ellenzweig is one of the best and least appreciated architects in the Boston area,” Campbell wrote in 2002.
Several of Mr. Ellenzweig’s projects were honored by the American Institute of Architects or the Boston Society of Architects, including the Alewife and Aquarium MBTA stations, the Joslin Diabetes Center, and the Naito and Bauer designs. In the early 1990s, the Boston Society of Architects honored the Post Office Square project, for which Mr. Ellenzweig designed the park pavilions, with the Harleston Parker Medal, which recognizes the most beautiful building or structure built in the Boston area during the previous 10 years.
Many of his most notable designs were for research facilities at schools such as Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, where “the people are smart, and there’s the opportunity for a challenging intellectual dialogue,” Mr. Ellenzweig told the Globe in 2004. He added that “you need these facilities to attract and retain top scientists. They’re a mobile group, and if you don’t create an exciting environment, they’ll go elsewhere and take their grant money with them.”
Tunney Lee, a longtime friend and a retired professor of architecture and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Mr. Ellenzweig “thinks of people first.” Of the designs for academic buildings, Lee noted that Mr. Ellenzweig worked closely with scientists and “understood very well their requirements, not only their mechanical needs.”
Mr. Ellenzweig also created spaces for the general public that were just as intriguing. Praising the “stunning new Aquarium station,” Campbell wrote in 2005 that Mr. Ellenzweig “is the nearest thing we have in conservative Boston to a high-tech architect. He loves modern materials like steel, aluminum, glass, and even bare fluorescent tubes, and he loves the intricate detail, like that of an Erector Set (if anyone remembers those), with which such materials must be fitted together.”
With each design, however, Mr. Ellenzweig aspired to do more than simply create buildings that were attractive and supremely functional.
“He believed very passionately in the power of architecture to change the world and make the world a better place,” said Michael Lauber, president of Ellenzweig Associates.
The middle of three children, Mr. Ellenzweig grew up in the Bronx, N.Y., where his father worked in a brush factory.
Early on, he considered pursing what would become his life’s work, only to be told by a school guidance counselor “that Jewish boys could not be architects,” said his wife, Judy. “And so when Harry found that out he said, ‘Hmm, that’s a good reason to be an architect.’ ”
After a brief, unhappy stint at Columbia University, Mr. Ellenzweig found a welcoming home at North Carolina State University, where Buckminster Fuller was one of his professors. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in architecture, he traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant and worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York City.
He met Judith Salter, who had gone to Wellesley College and said she had always been “passionately interested in architecture.” Mr. Ellenzweig, she said, “was this very diamond-in-the-rough kind of marvelous person, very unlike anybody I’d known.”
They married in 1959 and moved to Colorado, where Mr. Ellenzweig designed for the Aspen Institute and others in Colorado before they moved to Boston. He worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and in the planning office at MIT, and then launched his own architecture firm in 1965 after landing a commission to design a house.
“Harry had an unusual combination of talents,” his wife said. “I think it’s unusual to be a good designer and also to be a good manager, in terms of managing a large office. He did it, and he did it well, but he hated the management part. And he always described it as doing day care.”
At the office, which evolved through different names en route to becoming Ellenzweig Associates, he “had a very strong personality and cared very passionately about his work and the work of the firm,” Lauber said. “He was very demanding, but at the same time extremely kind.”
With any of Mr. Ellenzweig’s designs, “you have a sense when you walk into the building that you know where you’re going,” said his daughter Lisa of Brookline. “He felt the building should be built for the occupants, and not just to be built. There are too many buildings built that you don’t have a sense of orientation, and that was important to him.”
For all the seriousness with which Mr. Ellenzweig approached work, “he had an amazing sense of humor,” said his other daughter, Sarah of Houston. “That’s a really important part of who he was. He had a very wry, dry sense of humor and a kind of mordant wit of sorts, a slightly ironic way of seeing things.”
A service will be announced for Mr. Ellenzweig, who in addition to his wife and two daughters leaves a sister, Marilyn Davis of Port Washington, N.Y., and three grandsons.
Beginning when he was a child, Mr. Ellenzweig “drew incessantly,” his wife said, and art remained a parallel passion through his years as an architect.
A few years ago, as he was finishing his last project, MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Mr. Ellenzweig began exhibiting his paintings and drawings at the Belmont Gallery of Art and at MIT’s Wolk Gallery.
“He used very particular pens that had the thinnest needle point you can imagine, and his drawings are incredibly detailed and intricate,” Sarah said.
In an artist’s statement for a 2008 show at the Belmont Gallery, Mr. Ellenzweig wrote that his “paintings and drawings reflect a vision informed by the architect’s eye, a passion for forms found in nature and images of cities — the shared heritage of real places in real time merging with an imagined and abstracted urban landscape.”
His art, he added, had another personal appeal.
“Architecture demands collaboration; interaction with clients, colleagues, consultants, community groups — work I found immensely rewarding and satisfying,” he wrote. “In my studio, on the other hand, in my other life, I talk only to myself, constrained solely by the limits of technique and vision.”
Bryan Marquard
can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.