American architect Henry N. Cobb, a founding partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, died on March 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
The Boston native began his career in New York in 1950 and went on to co-found I.M. Pei & Associates alongside late fellow architects I.M. Pei and Eason H. Leonard in 1955.
Cobb and his firm, which was renamed to Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989, lent expertise to a series of notable projects in his hometown, including the John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse and the Center for Government and International Studies at Harvard University. His most iconic contribution to architecture, and to the City of Boston, remains the 62-story John Hancock Tower, which was completed in 1976.
From 1980 to 1985, Cobb served as a studio professor of architecture and urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also chaired the school’s architecture department.
Cobb published Henry N. Cobb: Words & Works 1948-2018, a 548-page monograph that highlights his 70 years in design, in 2018.
During the course of his career, Cobb was honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Architecture, the Architectural League of New York President’s Medal, and the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Education. He has won five Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), as well as the AIA Twenty-five Year Award for the John Hancock Tower.
Cobb’s former colleague, the legendary I.M. Pei, passed away in late 2019 at the age of 102.
