Thierry Despont, the Legendary Architect and Designer, Has Died

Thierry Despont, the AD100 Corridor of Fame architect and designer, handed away on Sunday, August 13, in Southhampton. He was 75.

Although he was born in Limoges, France, and educated on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Despont shall be remembered largely for his work in New York Metropolis, the place he interfaced with a few of the metropolis’s most iconic buildings. In 1986, Despont was charged with the $60 million refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty for its centennial, a two-year endeavor that concerned greater than 400 scientists, engineers, and craftspeople. Twenty years later, he would tackle the Woolworth Constructing, changing swaths of its higher flooring into lavish flats. Later got here the Cartier Mansion on Fifth Avenue and the Palm Court docket on the Plaza Lodge. And extra just lately, he devised the luxurious interiors for one of many metropolis’s latest landmarks: 53 W 53.

Exterior of New York, his commissions had been no much less prestigious. In Los Angeles he was introduced in to work his magic on the Getty Middle, countering Richard Meier’s white-hot modernism with traditional, historicist particulars. And in Pittsburgh his workplace led the renovation of the historic Clayton mansion, the grand former dwelling of the Frick household.

His singular understanding of luxurious earned him collaborations with a few of the world’s preeminent hospitality teams, from The Ritz in Paris to Casa Cipriani in Manhattan. To not point out houses of the properly heeled: He designed residences for Invoice Gates, Calvin Klein, Jayne Wrightsman, Annette and Oscar de la Renta, Conrad Black, and Peggy and Millard “Mickey” Drexler, who labored with Despont for greater than 20 years on a variety of properties.

Along with being the designer of selection for titans of trade, Despont was a real polymath: a collector, fly-fisher, painter, sculptor, and draftsman. He was an admirer of Jackson Pollock as a lot as Palladio. Although he was famously personal, he may often be noticed in Tribeca, the neighborhood the place he based his workplace in 1980. Despont believed that an architect’s function was to behave as “the guardian of reminiscences,” a perfect that shone by way of in his research and constructed work. Drexler, his longtime shopper, known as him “pretty much as good because it will get”: “If it’s a renovation, he maintains the integrity of the constructing and improves upon the unique. In any of his tasks, he has unbelievable imaginative and prescient however will get all the main points that most individuals by no means see.”