John H. Beyer, the last surviving founder of Beyer Blinder Belle, a New York-based architecture firm whose commitment to historic preservation and adaptive reuse helped safeguard the city’s past over the last half century, even as developers raced to push the city into the future, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
A representative from Beyer Blinder Belle confirmed the death, which came 10 days after the death of Mr. Beyer’s wife, Wendy Beyer.
Mr. Beyer (rhymes with “spire”) and his business partners, Richard Blinder and John Belle, met in the early 1960s while working for Victor Gruen, an Austrian-American architect known for pioneering the shopping mall. (Mr. Blinder died in 2006 and Mr. Belle in 2016.)
The three bonded over their shared concern that the postwar trend of large-scale urban renewal was destroying the fabric that made cities worth living in.
They drew particular inspiration from the work of Jane Jacobs, the journalist whose 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” had inspired a groundswell of nationwide activism supporting historic preservation. And in 1968, when they started their firm, the partners chose Greenwich Village, the Manhattan neighborhood that Ms. Jacobs had put at the center of her book, as the location for their first office.
The admiration was mutual: Ms. Jacobs often praised the firm for putting her ideas into action.
“They were looking at the fabric of the community,” she told The New York Times in 1998. “That was very welcome and very exciting, that there were professionals who were, at last, doing that.”
Over the subsequent decades, Beyer Blinder Belle became one of New York’s most sought-after firms for sensitive renovation and expansion projects. In their hands, what had been eyesores became civic jewels.
For the tens of thousands of commuters and tourists who pass through Grand Central Terminal every day, it may be hard to imagine the station’s past life as a dark, grimy, crime-ridden carapace.
But that’s what it was, until Beyer Blinder Belle won the commission to restore it. In the main concourse, Mr. Beyer, who oversaw the project, directed the cleaning of layers of soot hiding the famed celestial ceiling, as well as the addition of a grand staircase on the eastern end and the removal of a giant billboard advertising Kodak cameras that had long blocked light from entering the space.
When the work was finished, in 1998, the news media hailed the project as a masterpiece of thoughtful preservation.
“As sparkling as it must have been on opening day in 1913,” David Dunlap of The New York Times wrote, “the terminal has gained sweeping vistas and useful pathways that its original designers could only have imagined.”
It wasn’t the only Beyer Blinder Belle effort that helped define Manhattan’s modern cityscape. Other renovation projects included the Met Breuer building (the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art), which Mr. Beyer oversaw; the main building of the New York Public Library; the Frick Collection (with Selldorf Architects); and commercial projects, like the flagship store for Henri Bendel, for which the firm refitted a stately rowhouse on Fifth Avenue.
The firm also designed a number of new buildings, mostly high-rise residential, and oversaw restoration projects in Washington, D.C., including Union Station and the visitor center at the Washington Monument.
Just months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the body charged with rebuilding at the World Trade Center site, hired Beyer Blinder Belle to develop a set of site plans.
All three partners were attached to the project, but Mr. Beyer was the lead designer. He had been just a block away from the Twin Towers when the first plane struck, and he often spoke of the task of rebuilding as the most important thing his firm had ever done.
The effort, resulting in six schemes, brought international scrutiny to a firm used to having a low profile. Although the architects had been asked to provide what amounted to technical guidance, critics attacked them as incapable of meeting the moment with an awe-inspiring design.
In interviews and public statements, Mr. Beyer tried to explain the nuances of the firm’s assignment, even as he maintained that the partners were open to critique.
“We ask only that the public understand what ‘planning’ means: the relationships among terrain, infrastructure, building mass, building use and open space,” he and Mr. Belle wrote in a letter to The Times. “The six initial proposals were not architectural designs per se, but rather studies of these basic issues. Their value lay in prompting a lively discussion.”
The development corporation announced a new competition, drawing up a short list of world-renowned architects who submitted a brace of bold, if sometimes impractical, proposals. In 2003, Studio Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the winner.
But Beyer Blinder Belle had the last laugh. As the development progressed during the 2000s, it became increasingly clear that whatever gloss Mr. Libeskind had brought to the site, the plan’s basic form and functions followed the firm’s guiding principles, as critics conceded.
John Henry Beyer was born on Feb. 13, 1933, in Hackensack, N.J., and grew up in nearby Teaneck. His father, Henry, was a jeweler at Harry Winston, and his mother, Mildred (Blank) Beyer, oversaw the home.
Mr. Beyer graduated from Denison University, in Ohio, in 1954 with a degree in art, and received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1961. He went to work for Mr. Gruen soon after graduation.
Mr. Beyer’s first marriage, to Virginia Van Horn, ended in divorce. He married Wendy Hammill in 1983.
Mr. Beyer is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Liz and Sophie Beyer; three children from his second, Kay Childs and Henry and Charles Beyer; and nine grandchildren. His daughter Katherine Van Horn Beyer died in 1990.
After Mr. Belle and Mr. Blinder died, Mr. Beyer remained engaged at the firm.
“Planning, restoration and the design of new buildings in historic settings are the fundamental underpinnings of our firm,” he said in a statement on Beyer Blinder Belle’s website. “With every project, whatever its focus, I’m always thinking of all three.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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