Edward Larrabee Barnes, a prolific architect in the Modernist mode who designed museums that exemplified architectural restraint, office towers that reflected pure form, and houses that accentuated physical context, died Tuesday of complications from a stroke at his Cupertino, Calif., home. He was 89.
Barnes, who was one in a generation of architects including I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson, studied at Harvard under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, German immigrants whose ideas helped mold architecture's International style. Barnes' contribution was to make pitched and gabled roofs part of the International stamp in a series of buildings distinguished by their compelling geometry.
Among his most important buildings are the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington. Much of his notable work resides in New York, such as the IBM headquarters in New York City and the State University of New York at Purchase, where he designed major buildings and, as master planner, assigned others to such world-class designers as Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Robert Venturi.
In Los Angeles, he was the architect behind the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood, which was praised for a self-effacing style that allowed the art within, rather than the architecture, to command center stage.
"His buildings are clean and rational without being imposing," author Ching-Yu Chang wrote in the book "Contemporary Architects." "He is, amidst gestures that tend towards the monumental, acutely concerned with context, and his buildings rarely appear cold or out of place."
Barnes grew up in Chicago, the son of Margaret Ayer Barnes, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel "Years of Grace." His father, Cecil, was a Harvard-trained lawyer. Barnes followed his father's path to Harvard, enrolling in 1934 as an English major before switching to the history of architecture. Barnes decided to become an architect after visiting houses in Massachusetts built by Gropius and Breuer.
After earning a master's degree in architecture from Harvard in 1942, he spent five years in the Navy as a lieutenant during World War II. After the war, he settled for a time in Los Angeles, where he worked for industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt airplane factories for the mass manufacture of low-cost housing.
In 1949, Barnes established his own architecture practice in New York City, run in collaboration with his wife, Mary, also an architect.
