Not long after Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced in 2006 that he wanted to build a new, “architecturally magnificent” City Hall on the South Boston waterfront, Henry Wood added his voice to the chorus of those who wanted to keep the existing building — the imposing cement fortress that dominates Government Center.
Granted, Mr. Wood had a vested interest. In the early 1960s, he joined up with City Hall’s designers, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, with whom he would form the architectural firm Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood. Working with them, Mr. Wood became the project manager as City Hall and City Hall Plaza were built.
“As the architect responsible for the construction phase four decades ago, I would shed a tear if they were to go,” Mr. Wood wrote in a 2007 Globe op-ed piece, and he joked that getting rid of the building wouldn’t be easy. “To demolish the sturdy City Hall, something on the order of an atomic blast would be required.”
Mr. Wood, whose creative reach with architectural projects extended from Boston and Cambridge to Bangladesh and Thailand, died of pneumonia Jan. 27 in his Boston home. He was 87.
Among his firm’s other notable buildings and projects were the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, and the Back Bay Station, Boston Five Cents Bank, and Hynes Memorial Convention Center expansion in Boston. He also had a role in creating academic buildings at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale universities, and the US embassies in Bangladesh and Thailand.
Mr. Wood remained self-effacing, however, despite a list of projects that goes on and on and career honors such as 1984’s Architecture Firm Award, presented by the American Institute of Architects to a US firm that consistently produces distinguished architecture for at least 10 years.
“I was not a primary designer. I was the one, you might say, that made sure the buildings didn’t fall down and the firm didn’t go belly up,” he said with a chuckle in a podcast that is posted on the culturenow.org website. “But I was involved in design all along with them. Kallmann and McKinnell are both fantastic designers.”
The construction of Boston’s City Hall was his proudest moment as an architect, though Mr. Wood knew the Brutalist architecture inspired passionate responses, good and bad. “Not everyone, as is well known, feels able to cozy up to Boston City Hall, an unforgettable building of great power but one that can be alienating,” Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell wrote in 1988.
If the rest of Mr. Wood’s career transpired in the long shadow cast by City Hall, constructed when he was in his 30s, much of everything else in his life was measured against his decision to buy Clingstone, a tattered mansion. True to its name, Clingstone clutches an outcrop of rocks in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. “Perhaps the most important event in my life was the purchase in 1961 of a 23-room shingled, inside and out, house on its own tiny island facing Newport,” he wrote in 2011. “It was badly vandalized, so we only paid $3,600 for it.”
“I fear that my two wives knew it was my true love,” Mr. Wood, whose two marriages ended in divorce, wrote of Clingstone for the 50th anniversary report of his Harvard College class.
The older of two siblings, Henry Austin Wood III grew up in Belmont, the son of Henry Jr., an investment firm executive who served as deputy treasurer of Harvard College, and the former Dagmar Lundholm Wood, a daughter of immigrants from Sweden.
Mr. Wood graduated in 1947 from Belmont Hill School. In 1951, he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he studied physics and architecture, including taking a course from Joseph Hudnut, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “After graduation, I was unsure of my professional direction, so I followed my major in physics to Eastman Kodak for three years,” he wrote in 2001. “But memories of Hudnut’s general education course in architecture kept surfacing.”
Drafted into the Army and stationed in the Marshall Islands, “I served two years working in radioactive fallout, going to Bikini/Eniwetok to see 10 to 12 atomic blasts,” he wrote.
Harvard welcomed him back for graduate work in two disciplines, and at first he sent a letter accepting the offer to study physics. After staying up all night on the Eniwetok Atoll, he changed his mind and decided to attend the Graduate School of Design instead.
Upon receiving a master’s, he worked for the Samuel Glaser and Campbell and Aldrich architectural firms, before the City Hall project brought him to Kallmann and McKinnell.
In 1962, he married Joan Klawans, an architect, and they had three sons. One day in the early 1960s before they married, they rowed out to Clingstone, just off Jamestown, R.I., while seeking a picnic spot. A sign on the house said: “For Sale, See Any Broker.” They did, and soon he owned the home, which was built in the early 1900s by a distant cousin, J.S. Lovering Wharton.
Over the years, Mr. Wood and his sons — and a rotating cast of guests — restored the 10,000-square-foot house, adding composting toilets, a windmill and solar panels, and furnishings such as windows and doorknobs that he scavenged from other projects.
His marriage to Klawans ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, in 1988, to Diane Sargent.
“They say that as we age, we grow happier. I agree, having survived serious depressions,” Mr. Wood wrote for his 60th Harvard class report, when he was in his early 80s.
He told his family he had struggled with depression since his teens, and was diagnosed with manic-depression bipolar disorder in his late 20s. Medications helped, as did his career, his work on Clingstone, and designing his condo 25 stories above Boston Common, overlooking the city and the Charles River.
Previously, he lived for many years in the South End, including in a Rutland Square house. Mr. Wood was a founder of the South End Landmarks Commission and served on the Boston Landmarks Commission.
Mr. Wood was an “incredibly warm, open-hearted person. He somehow was able to bring people together with that spirit and that openness,” said his son Joshua Rose-Wood, an architect in Boston.
A fan of public transportation for the chance encounters it afforded, Mr. Wood “loved being with people and talking with whoever he was sitting next to on the subway,” his son said. After Mr. Wood died, his son paged through his address book, looking for numbers of those to contact. Next to one woman’s name, Mr. Wood had added a note: “purple hair, bus from Providence.”
A service has been held for Mr. Wood, who in addition to his son Joshua leaves his sons Paul of Jamaica Plain and Daniel of Providence; his sister, Anna Wood Murray of Oxford, England; and five grandchildren.
“When half my present age, I said that I wanted to get more eccentric as I aged,” Mr. Wood wrote in 2011 for a Harvard class report. “I have succeeded, and plan to spend the rest of my days close to my kids and their kids. They are my closest souls in the world.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.