Gordon Bunshaft

Gordon Bunshaft (May 9, 1909–August 6, 1990) was a 20th century architect educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bunshaft worked with Edward Durrell Stone, worked three months for industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whom he considered a phony, eventually becoming a partner in the New York office of the young firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.

Bunshaft was a modernist whose early influences included Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. His best-known design is the Lever House, built as a corporate headquarters for the soap company Lever Brothers. His design for the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank (1953), the first post-war 'transparent' bank on the east coast, is a modernist gem.

In the 1950s, Bunshaft was hired by the State Department's Office of Foreign Building Operations as a collaborator on the design for several US consulates in Germany.

Buildings

• 1951 - Lever House - New York, New York
• 1953 - Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank - New York, New York
• 1963 - Beinecke Library - Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
• 1965 - Banque Lambert - Brussels
• 1971 - Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library - Austin, Texas
• 1974 - Solow Building - 9 West 57th Street, New York, New York
• 1974 - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden - Washington, D.C.
• 1983 - National Commercial Bank - Jeddah, Saudi Arabia