CHICAGO — Walter A. Netsch, Jr., the maverick, strong-willed Chicago architect whose geometrically complex buildings, including the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and the U.S. Air Force Academy chapel in Colorado, departed from glass-box orthodoxy and both delighted and frustrated their users, died Sunday at his home in Chicago.
Netsch, 88, drew widespread notice as the husband of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dawn Clark Netsch. At the time, it was said, Netsch might become Illinois’ first “first husband.”
He spent nearly all of his career in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he concentrated on prominent institutional projects, including his often-criticized master plan and buildings for the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois.
There, in particular, Mr. Netsch’s buildings and urban spaces proved difficult to use and were vilified or even destroyed. Yet many scholars now argue that his body of work represents a significant break from the boxy modernism of the 1950s and 1960s and anticipated the unorthodox, computer-generated shapes of such contemporary architects as Peter Eisenman of New York City and Frank Gehry of Los Angeles.
“He was one of those creative figures of the 1960s who broke the mold and paved the way for a younger generation to follow,” said John Zukowsky, former chief architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and now chief curator of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.
Netsch was born in Chicago on Feb. 23, 1920. He received his degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943, served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1947 when it was completing work at Oak Ridge, Tenn., the nuclear age city planned and built for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
When Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was commissioned in 1960 to design the Air Force Academy, Netsch first demonstrated that he would not dogmatically follow the boxy International Style embraced by most architects at the time, including those in his own firm. His soaring, spiky, tetrahedral academy chapel was a church that looked like a church and signaled Netsch as the maverick he would remain until his death.
Initially labeled a temple to the military-industrial complex, the Air Force Academy chapel eventually became highly regarded. In 1995, the American institute of Architects gave it the Twenty-Five Year Award, which is conferred annually to a 25- to 35-year-old project of enduring significance.
Not long after designing the chapel, Netsch in effect began running his own design operation within the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill office. “He always thought of himself as a rebel within the system,” said Bruegmann, the editor of the book, “Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the United States Air Force Academy.”
“Everybody else was doing boxes. He was doing these elaborate chrysanthemums.”
