J. Max Bond

J. Max Bond Jr., long the most influential African-American architect in New York and one of a few black architects of national prominence, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 73 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Bond was an educator as well as an influential architect.

Mr. Bond also designed the Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park in Upper Manhattan. The cause was cancer, said Steven M. Davis, a partner of Mr. Bond’s in the firm Davis Brody Bond Aedas.

At his death, Mr. Bond was the partner in charge of the museum portion of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. Davis Brody Bond is also the associate architect for the memorial.

But Mr. Bond’s reputation did not rest solely — or even principally — on design. He was known as an educator, at City College and Columbia University; an exemplar to younger minority architects; and a prickly voice of conscience within his profession on issues of racial and economic justice. “Architecture inevitably involves all the larger issues of society,” he said in a 2003 interview.

Gordon J. Davis, the founding chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center, said Mr. Bond had a “steel spine and rock-hard determination — qualities always masked by a handsome gentlemanly exterior, a gracious and extraordinarily collegial persona, and so many of the characteristics that are hallmarks of a great and wonderful teacher and mentor.”

From boyhood curiosity about a staircase in a Tuskegee Institute dormitory, through a trip to Tunisia that opened his eyes to North African construction, Mr. Bond developed a love of architecture. But at Harvard, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and a master’s degree in 1958, he was counseled by a faculty member to forego his architectural aspirations because of his race. He persevered, despite the barriers in what was an almost all-white profession.

His early career took him to France, where he worked with André Wogenscky; to New York, where he was at Gruzen & Partners and Pedersen & Tilney; and to Ghana, where he worked for the government from 1964 to 1967. There, in the northern part of the country, he designed the Bolgatanga Regional Library, four buildings under the broad shade of a tabletop-like roof intended, along with natural ventilation, to eliminate the need for air-conditioning.

Mr. Bond led the Architects Renewal Committee of Harlem before founding the firm Bond Ryder & Associates in 1970, with Donald P. Ryder. Foremost among its projects were the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, which includes Dr. King’s tomb; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama.

When Mr. Ryder retired in 1990 the firm merged with Davis, Brody & Associates.

There, Mr. Bond was partner in charge of the Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park for Columbia University in Upper Manhattan, which included the redevelopment of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated. In 1992, Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic of The New York Times, said the design “gives new meaning to the term civil engineering: it seeks to balance by formal means the competing stakes in the land the building will occupy.”

That is not to say Mr. Bond’s work was universally admired. In 2001 his modernist addition to the Harvard Club of New York, at 27 West 44th Street, was harshly criticized by some club members as unsympathetic and inappropriate.

Mr. Bond’s family included the prominent 20th-century educator Horace Mann Bond and the civil-rights leader Julian Bond. His father, J. Max Bond Sr., was president of the University of Liberia in the early 1950s. His mother, Ruth C. Bond, also an educator, was renowned for quilts she designed in the mid-1930s.

Mr. Bond’s wife, Jean Carey Bond, survives him, as do their children, Ruth M. Bond of San Francisco and Carey Julian Bond of Manhattan; three grandchildren; a sister, Jane Clement Bond of Manhattan; and a brother, George Clement Bond of Teaneck, N.J.

Mr. Bond served on the New York City Planning Commission from 1980 to 1986. He was chairman of the architecture division at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning from 1980 to 1984 and dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies at City College from 1985 to 1992.

Despite these insider’s credentials, Mr. Bond never lost an outsider’s perspective, applying it critically in 2003 to early plans that called for public spaces high up in the new skyscrapers at the World Trade Center site.

“It’s always been difficult for young blacks, for young Hispanics, for anyone who looks aberrant to get access to the upper realms of Wall Street towers,” Mr. Bond said. “For a city of immigrants, the public realm is more than ever now the street.”

Source:: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/arts/design/19bond.html?_r=0]