Arts and Letters

We are here to express our feelings of loss of a fellow member of the Academy-Institute, Josep Lluis Sert. But also to rejoice in his remarkable professional performance and in the endearing qualities he displayed as a friend.

Born in Barcelona, his breadth of concern led him first to become a painter, later an architect, city planner, educator, and patron. But most important of all, he was one of the co-founders and participants in the International Congresses of Modern Architecture or C.I.A.M. Sert, as those closer to him always called him, was the most successful and devoted follower of Le Corbusier, the great Swiss-French architect. As a member of C.I.A.M., in its formative years, he shared with others the figure of the rebel. But as the new movement matured, he assumed, as I saw him, the father-hero figure; and with it the responsibilities of codifying and disseminating the principles, theories, and values which were to establish the Modern Movement in Architecture, as we have come to know it. It was at the Athens Conference in 1933, that he participated in drafting the Manifesto. Later, during the years 1947-56, he was to serve as president of C.I.A.M.

As an architect, Sert's work ranged from the Spanish Pavilion, in 1937, housing Picasso's “Guernica,” to the Miró Museum in Barcelona and a house for Georges Braque, to extensive buildings for the campuses of Harvard and Boston Universities. As a city planner, he became, in 1939, a partner in Town Planning Associates, providing services to cities in Latin America. As an educator, he served as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Architecture for sixteen years. As a patron, he generously gave his support to professional causes and encouragement to younger architects.

It is touching to recall that in gratitude and respect for his former master, Sert was instrumental in awarding to Le Corbusier the commission to design his only building in the U.S.A., the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. In 1980, Sert was given the Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects; the highest award any architect can receive. He was indeed un homme engagé.

It was in those years, when I was sometimes asked to lecture at Harvard, that I would visit the Serts in Cambridge. Their house was small, like themselves, precisely designed, but with the mark both of Sert as Architect and Sert as Occupant. With all he had collected: altar paintings, Aztec jewelry, books, paintings given him by his friends Picasso, Miró, Braque, Leger, and Calder. It was a small museum, but also this collection was, in visual terms, an autobiography. Later in the 1970s, we were to see much of each other as he designed the Eastview, and I Rivercross, two contiguous apartment complexes on Roosevelt Island here in New York City.

In his design for housing complexes, here, at Harvard and Boston Universities, can be seen Sert's intense social awareness, his interest in people and how they live. His success is not limited to the problem-solving aspects of architectural service, but in satisfying psychosocial needs as well, celebrating this accommodation with exhilaration and style. Knowing his honesty as a man, we were not surprised to hear him admit that his earlier work, governed by the rigors of the revolutionary years, appeared to him, as he said, "sad and barren." For, by that time, he had taken a more humanistic view. Diversity, all-inclusiveness, and balance became his new concerns for architecture and urban design. Diversity of regional conditions, cultural traditions, the distinct personality of cities, and the individual expression of human life within. In place of earlier more purist notions of the city, he spoke of juxtaposing historic buildings with the new, the commonplace with excellence, high densities of the citizenry with sparse settlements, and high technology with the quaintly out of date.

Sert, among the first generation of modern architects—Wright, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, Aalta—was the last to survive. This generation remained true to the modern movement, which was understood by them all to be not a style, but a continual search, an attitude, a force, a sense of purpose, or as Sert himself said, "the task of working courageously toward what is coming": a faith in architecture by which one could "attempt a better life, a better world."

To me and to the present architect members of this Academy-Institute, who represent now the second generation, these men were giants. Sert was soft spoken and in stature, quite short, yet was a giant. His manner was firm yet amiable; dignified yet accessible; his roots in the Modern Movement firm, yet his eyes open to whomever might carry on the faith.

With Sert passes the last of a remarkable generation of architects, and to me and others of this company who knew him, a wonderful man, a great friend.