Eduard Franz Sekler, 96

In 1953, after receiving his architectural degree in his native city of Vienna and his Ph.D. in art history from the University of London’s Warburg Institute, Eduard Sekler came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar. Based at the Fogg Museum, he studied schools of design that brought him into contact with such architects and designers as Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, and Mies van der Rohe. Two years later, in 1955, the architect and dean Josep Lluís Sert invited him to join the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From his first book on Christopher Wren, Professor Sekler proved himself to be a distinguished historian of architecture. For the next 52 years, he published numerous works and more than 200 influential articles on design and the built environment, especially in its visual, principally urban, forms. He was an expert on such modern architects and city planners as Walter Gropius, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and Josef Hoffmann. Trained both as an architect and a historian of architecture, Sekler saw, and believed deeply, that scholarship and practice constitute a continuum. Read More.