Gordon Bunshaft, 81; Pioneer Architect

Gordon Bunshaft, a modernist architect who pioneered the “glass box” prototype for 20th-Century office buildings, has died. He was 81.

Bunshaft died Monday night in his Manhattan apartment of cardiovascular arrest, according to his associates in the New York architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

A designer for the firm from 1937 to 1979, Bunshaft was internationally recognized for such landmark buildings as Lever House on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, which introduced his cool, corporate style in 1950, the Banque Lambert in Brussels and the National Commercial Bank building and the international airport terminal in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

When Bunshaft’s airy, glazed Lever House was completed in 1952, critic Lewis Mumford led the chorus of praise, writing in the New Yorker: “An impeccable achievement. . . . It says all that can be said, delicately, accurately, elegantly, with surfaces of glass.”

The building was New York’s first major glass tower, aside from the United Nations Secretariat, and established Bunshaft’s international reputation. Architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock called Lever House “epoch-making.”

In 1983, ending a developer’s threat to replace it with a larger structure, Lever House was declared a New York City landmark, one of the first modern buildings to win the designation.

Bunshaft also designed the innovative Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, which was completed in 1974, using a different and heavier looking mix of glass, steel and stone. His other major institutional designs included the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which was completed in 1963, and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Tex., completed in 1971.

Considered an “establishment” architect because of his work for major corporations, Bunshaft in 1988 received the prestigious Pritzker Prize, considered the equivalent of architecture’s Nobel Prize.

Among those designs were the American Can Co. building in Greenwich, Conn., the Philip Morris factory in Richmond, Va., and the Pepsi Cola Building in Manhattan.

Born in Buffalo, Bunshaft earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He examined modern international architecture in Europe on a Rotch Traveling Fellowship and in North Africa on an MIT Traveling Fellowship.

He is survived by his wife, Nina.