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Architect of Fountain Place who shaped Dallas, dies at 93

Henry N. Cobb, longtime partner of I.M. Pei, built a series of Dallas skyscrapers

It was just a year ago last May that I.M. Pei died at the age of 102. Few architects had done more to create modern Dallas than Pei, whose works here include Dallas City Hall and the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. But one who could make a legitimate claim to be considered alongside Pei was his own partner, Henry N. Cobb, who died this week at 93.

Cobb’s projects here include three of the city’s most elegant towers, One Dallas Center (1979), Energy Plaza (1983), and the rocket-shaped Fountain Place (1986), easily the most dynamic skyscraper on the city’s formidable skyline.

All were projects completed in partnership with Pei, but the truth was that within their firm, they operated as virtual independents, and the character of their projects was dramatically different: While Pei developed an architecture of solid volumes accented by light and shadow, Cobb’s work, and especially his skyscrapers, was characterized by sheer planes of ethereal weightlessness.

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Fountain Place (foreground) in downtown Dallas, as seen from Museum Tower on October 23, 2012.
Fountain Place (foreground) in downtown Dallas, as seen from Museum Tower on October 23, 2012. (Kye R. Lee / Staff Photographer)
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The two met at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where Pei was teaching and Cobb, a Boston native who was known as Harry, was his student. The two became friends, and in 1950, Pei asked Cobb to join him working as house architects for the developer William Zeckendorf. “Excellence is not alone, it is sure to attract neighbors,” Cobb said of his partner, toasting Pei with a Chinese proverb on his 50th birthday.

Working for Zeckendorf gave Pei and Cobb immediate access to the kind of major commissions that were mere fantasies for most young architects. Cobb’s debut as a principal architect lacked nothing for scale: Place Ville Marie, completed in 1962, was a 4-million-square-foot urban development project in downtown Montreal anchored by what would be the tallest building in Canada. The 47-story tower was cruciform in plan, and levitated up in the air, to create pedestrian spaces below. Cobb described it as a union of Le Corbusier in its planning and Mies in its crisp façade planes.

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In an unlikely twist, Place Ville Marie would have a significant impact on Dallas. On the project’s design team was the planner Vincent Ponte, who incorporated an underground pedestrian network into the development. It was an idea that made sense, at least theoretically, in Montreal, given its cold winters.

But Ponte then brought that same vision to Dallas, launching it here in August 1969. The plan was to gradually introduce the network into the city as downtown developed, with new buildings plugging in as they were constructed. It was never fully implemented, however, the result being that it draws traffic off the streets where it exists, without providing the connectivity it promised.

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The building for which Cobb is best known (at least outside of Dallas) was also something of a failure — initially. Even before it was constructed, Cobb’s John Hancock Tower on Boston’s historic Copley Square was the subject of intense controversy; according to critics, a glassy modern intrusion that reflected poorly (in both the literal and figurative senses) on its distinguished neighbors.

Those objections were compounded by a construction disaster: windows falling from the sky. It was already maligned, and now the entire curtain wall — all 10,334 glass panels — had to be replaced. The press was devastating and nearly sunk the firm.

The partnership survived, and time has also been kind to the Hancock, which is now considered among the finest skyscrapers of the modern period. “The architecture of a tall tower is 99% logic and 1% art — but don’t you dare take away that 1%,” Cobb once quipped. The Hancock, a shimmery slab of gridded glass with notched edges, suggests that ratio should be skewed somewhat more in the direction of art. In 2011, it was given the American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-five Year Award, the organization’s highest mark of excellence.

I.M. Pei (from left), Bill Criswell, Sharon Criswell and Henry N. Cobb (who was known as...
I.M. Pei (from left), Bill Criswell, Sharon Criswell and Henry N. Cobb (who was known as Harry Cobb) with a model of Fountain Place in Oct. 1983.(Lon Cooper / Staff photographer)

Fountain Place is the progeny of Hancock in its folds, planarity and clarity of expression. Cobb described it as a “metamorphic tower,” meaning that its form changes as it rises from base to top. It shifts, as well, as one moves around it, an ever-shifting prism that becomes thinner and then thicker, from one angle a broad arrow and from another a slim rocket.

According to a memoir published last year, Henry N. Cobb: Words & Works 1948-2018, it was conceived as a work of “subtraction,” formed, unlike a typical skyscraper, by a sculptural process of “carving away rather than by building up.”

In his 1986 review of the building, Dallas Morning News critic David Dillon called it “the ultimate minimalist skyscraper” and “a work of art.”

Cobb shaped minds as well as buildings; in 1980, while maintaining his partnership in the Pei office, he stepped back and took over as chair of their alma mater, the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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In 1998, he completed the widely lauded United States Courthouse in Boston, a red-brick complex of dignified authority. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the critic Ada Louise Huxtable described Cobb as “an almost painfully thoughtful designer whose every deliberate move is the result of a measured intellectual effort,” and celebrated the building for redefining the courthouse as a “useful and accessible place.”

Today, it stands as a rebuke to the recently proposed order that suggests only classical architecture is an acceptable style for federal buildings.

More recent projects include a series of pristine towers, including a Fountain Place-like spike in Istanbul and a translucent glass box composition in Lower Manhattan that is the headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

These projects, and those that predate them, assure Cobb’s continuing reputation as one of the great masters of the modernist skyscraper. Dallas is fortunate to have one of his finest works.