Graham Gund, whose sensitivity to urban context and historic preservation made him a leading architect in and around Boston in the 1980s, and who then rose to national prominence in the 1990s with a number of acclaimed buildings for art institutions and college campuses, died on June 6 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 84.
His wife, Ann Gund, said the cause was a heart attack.
Mr. Gund trained at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius, the Modernist architect who helped found the Bauhaus school in Germany. But he was later cast as a postmodernist for his embrace of color, decoration, historical references and whimsy.
He rejected both labels, insisting that he was simply interested in making his buildings fit within their time, community and place.
“I don’t think of it as modern, because I think that there’s something good in all periods of architecture, and I think there’s a consistent sort of strain of quality that runs through all the periods in our past,” he said of his work, in a 1990 interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “It’s trying to capture some of that classical attitude.”
His work was often described as cozy and inviting. Robert Campbell, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote in 1989 that Mr. Gund was “quite possibly the most playful architect of any importance in the history of the United States.”
That was especially true of his extensive work in the 1980s, when he offered a comfy Ralph Lauren antithesis to the muscular postmodernist sleekness of a Michael Graves or a Philip Johnson.
“I think architecture can be very supportive of one’s psyche,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “That’s the way it should be. It shouldn’t dominate, but it should support.”
Mr. Gund came from one of America’s wealthiest families — his father, George Gund II, was a real estate and banking investor — and early in his career he used that wealth to build a unique architectural practice.
Acting as a developer, he would buy distressed properties around Boston and rehabilitate them, at a time when demolition was still the name of the game.
In 1972, he took an underused courthouse in Cambridge designed by Charles Bulfinch in 1814 and turned it into a complex of arts spaces and offices, including his own.
He later did something similar with a fire-ravaged church in Boston; in his hands, it became a condominium complex called Church Court.
With both projects, he offered a master class in how to balance respect for the past with the needs of the present, in the process stripping away previous updates that marred the buildings’ underlying beauty.
Mr. Gund built from scratch. His 1976 Hyatt Regency Cambridge, a brick ziggurat on the Charles River, was a departure from the hotel chain’s signature sleek steel towers. A seemingly understated structure, it blends with its surroundings — until you step inside and see the soaring 100-foot atrium.
“He was very conscious of the nature of a place, whether it was a campus, a city, a neighborhood, what have you,” the critic Paul Goldberger said, “and doing something that looked like it was intended to be a part of that place and made for that place and no other place, as opposed to architects who have a certain kind of formal signature that they would drop in anywhere.”
Mr. Gund was an avid art collector, with what The Boston Globe called the most important collection of contemporary painting and sculpture in New England. (His sister Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is also a major collector.)
His taste in art, too, tended toward whimsy; along with pieces by renowned masters like the sculptor Richard Serra, he owned quirky, colorful works by Red Grooms and David Gilhooly, as well as those by up-and-coming regional artists.
“My role as a collector is directly linked to my work as an architect, which is integrally involved with the artistic notions of our time,” Mr. Gund wrote in an introductory essay for an exhibit of his collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1982.
As his practice grew, he took on more original projects, with a focus on academic and arts institutions. He turned an old Boston police station into a home for the Institute of Contemporary Art, and designed campus buildings at Mount Holyoke College, Penn State University and half a dozen other educational institutions.
Mr. Gund largely redesigned the campus of Kenyon College, his alma mater, replacing awkward postwar structures with buildings that complemented the school’s original Gothic core without copying it.
“I like working within the campus environment,” he told Kenyon Alumni Bulletin in 2011, “because it combines both architecture and planning. One building can have a significant effect on a campus. I try to restore the fabric of a campus, which often involves going back to the original vision.”
Graham de Condé Gund was born on Oct. 28, 1940, in Cleveland. His father was a major donor to the city’s art museum, where his mother, Jessica (Laidlaw) Gund, would take him as a child to encourage his artistic instincts.
After graduating with a degree in psychology from Kenyon in 1963, he received a master’s degree in architecture in 1968 and another in urban design in 1969, both from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He did not, as some rumors held, pay for Gund Hall, one of the school’s primary buildings; that was his father. Nor did he study there, he was always quick to add — it opened after he graduated.
While in graduate school, Mr. Gund bought a small, rundown house in Cambridge and then spent several years restoring it, largely by himself, packing it full of his art.
Mr. Gund married Ann Landreth in 1984. Along with her, he is survived by their son, Graydon; and four siblings, Gordon, Agnes, Geoffrey and Louise Gund. His brother George Gund III died in 2013.
Mr. Gund was a hands-on collector — no consulting curator for him — and he bought what he liked. The same ethos drove his design: He built what he liked.
“I think part of being an architect is getting involved in the whole fantasy of recreating your own existence through environmental means,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “Projecting yourself into someone else’s life, and fantasizing about it. How people are going to use something. How they’re going to live in a space.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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