Architect and preservationist Graham Gund, one of Nantucket Preservation Trust’s founders, died on June 6. He was 84 years old.
Mr. Gund was a leading architect whose designs shaped Boston’s skyline, and whose work for colleges and art institutions earned national acclaim. A longtime seasonal resident of Nantucket, Mr. Gund was concerned by an increasing trend of demolitions and gut renovations of historic structures on the island. In 1997, he co-founded the Nantucket Preservation Trust with Max Berry. The New York Times covered the story our organization’s founding. (“Nantucket Worries That Its Past Is Being Renovated Away”)
Mr. Gund was born in Ohio and educated at Keyon College. He pursued postgraduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design and received a Master of Architecture and Master or Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Mr. Gund worked under Walter Gropius at The Architects Collaborative before starting his own practice, The Gund Partnership, in 1971. The Gund Partnership has won more than 130 awards for design excellence.
Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, said of Mr. Gund’s work: “Graham’s designs are invariably assertions of the view that a work of architecture is an element in a larger entity, part both of the literal community of buildings that are its physical neighbors, and of the conceptual community of buildings that are its architectural peers. For Graham, the idea of place is so powerfully real that it always sets the tone. His great skill as an architect is to interpret that tone in consistently resourceful ways.”
In addition to founding the Nantucket Preservation Trust, Mr. Gund was a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art. He founded and chaired the Boston Foundation for Architecture, was on the Board of Historic New England, was an overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was a member of the National Committee on Design of the distinguished College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects, a trustee for the National Building Museum, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
We are grateful to Mr. Gund for his dedication to historic preservation on Nantucket, and throughout the United States. Our work to preserve Nantucket’s architectural and cultural history is continually inspired by his legacy.