AIA gives gold to the late Barnes

Edward Larrabee Barnes, a restrained American Modernist architect who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard and is credited as an early exemplar of environmentally sensitive design, has been posthumously awarded the 2007 gold medal of the American Institute of Architects. Barnes died in 2004 at his home in Cupertino at age 89.

“With characteristically quiet determination, Edward Barnes produced a large body of distinguished built work -- some of them too-little celebrated -- during his more than 40 years of practice,” Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners said Thursday. “Although Barnes was modest, perhaps to a fault, and often seemed to operate ‘below the radar’ of critical acclaim, his influence has nonetheless been broad and deep.”

Identified with the Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts, an arrangement of shingled cottages on Deer Island, Maine, Barnes also designed the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood.

The medal is the AIA’s highest honor.

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