Art Gensler, who built one of the world’s largest architecture firms, dies at 85
By Harrison Smith,
Courtesy of Gensler
M. Arthur Gensler Jr., who grew his three-person design business into one of the world’s largest architecture firms, designing airport terminals, mega-skyscrapers and office interiors that aimed to make the workplace more pleasant and productive, died May 10 at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 85.
The cause was complications from lung disease, said Kimberly Beals, a spokeswoman for his namesake firm, Gensler.
Mr. Gensler had $200 in the bank when he founded M. Arthur Gensler Jr. & Associates in 1965 with his wife, Drue, and a single draftsman, James Follett. Renting space in the back of another architect’s office in San Francisco, they cleaned their own toilets, swept their own floors and used a beaded curtain as the drafting room door.
“Starting out, my goal was to have six employees and do garage remodels,” Mr. Gensler said in a 2018 interview with the Nob Hill Gazette, a San Francisco magazine. His earliest projects included signing up tenants and designing interiors for two newly constructed San Francisco towers, the Alcoa Building and the 52-story Bank of America headquarters, which reigned for a few years as the tallest building west of the Mississippi River.
At the time, there were only two other San Francisco firms focused on interior design, a field that relatively few architects considered lucrative or significant. You simply had to station a couple of glass tables in the lobby, the thinking went, and surround them with leather-cushioned Barcelona chairs; setting up a workspace merely required arranging office desks in rows and deciding on a paint color for the reception area.
Mr. Gensler, who went by Art, helped elevate and professionalize the field, championing an “inside-out” approach that emphasized the needs of people who actually lived, worked or shopped inside a building, rather than designing for those who might see it only from the outside. “A common failing in architecture firms is that they want to build the grand museum and get awards for themselves,” architecture writer Stanley Abercrombie told the New York Times in 1994. “Gensler wants to please the client and figure out what the client needs to run his business.”
Mr. Gensler ultimately broadened his ambitions to design entire buildings and offer planning and consulting services, producing a fusion of architecture and interior design that helped his company become a global juggernaut, with 5,000 employees at 50 offices. The company’s 2019 revenue exceeded $1.5 billion, following a decade of projects that included designing the airy interior of The Washington Post’s headquarters at One Franklin Square and the vast complex known as CityCenter, an $8.5 billion city within a city on the Las Vegas Strip.
Although Gensler retains close ties to San Francisco, where it designed the Golden State Warriors’ futuristic arena and a light-filled west wing for the Moscone Convention Center, the firm has also worked on major projects overseas, including the 128-story Shanghai Tower in China. Completed in 2014, the building spirals upward to a height of 2,073 feet, taller than every skyscraper but the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Blackstation
Courtesy of Gensler
The Gensler-designed Shanghai Tower is the world’s second-tallest building.
Mr. Gensler insisted that such projects were the result of large teams — a “constellation of stars” — at his firm, rather than individual “starchitects.” For his part, he said he was “not a good artist” and played down his design talent, although he was awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s President’s Award in 2012 for helping “pioneer green building.”
A gregarious New York native with a lanky 6-foot-4 frame, he had a special talent for meeting and courting prospective clients, including while taking the ferry home to Tiburon, Calif. After bumping into Gap co-founder Don Fisher on a La Jolla beach — he later recalled the retailer asking, “You’re an architect, aren’t you?” — Mr. Gensler and his firm designed the second Gap store, which opened in San Jose in 1970. In a 2014 oral history for the University of California at Berkeley, he said that his firm later designed 3,000 stores for Gap and its sister brands, including Banana Republic and Old Navy.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Gensler met Steve Jobs at a design conference, leading to work designing the interior of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. When Jobs began planning the first Apple stores in 2000, he called Mr. Gensler, whose team started building full-scale models inside a warehouse that was guarded for secrecy. Each Thursday afternoon, he was visited there by Apple’s detail-oriented co-founder.
“It was just him and me, every week for five months. We’d build a store, and he’d shred it, tear it apart,” Mr. Gensler recalled in a 2014 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. The process resulted in a prototype for the first wave of sleek, minimalist Apple stores, and marked a rare instance when Mr. Gensler was working with a client one-on-one.
“I’m not the guy perfecting the detail on the curtain wall. We’ve got good people for that,” he said. “I’m good at understanding what clients want. That’s the fun of it for me.”
Dino Vournas
AP
Mr. Gensler, second from right, describes the amenities of the proposed San Francisco headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, left, in 2005.
Millard Arthur Gensler Jr. was born in Brooklyn on July 12, 1935. He grew up in West Hartford, Conn., and graduated from high school in the Long Island village of Garden City. His mother worked for a phone company, and his father sold ceiling tiles.
As a boy, Mr. Gensler played with Erector sets and Lincoln Logs and cut out architecture articles from Time and Life magazines. He later studied architecture at Cornell University, where he starred on the soccer team and met Drucilla “Drue” Cortell, a Middlebury College student, at a holiday party. They married in 1957.
Mr. Gensler received a bachelor’s degree the next year and worked for design firms in Jamaica and New York before moving to the Bay Area in 1962. He was working for architect William Wurster when he decided to strike out on his own, and sought guidance from a University of San Francisco business professor as the company expanded. “He came in twice a week to teach us how to run a business,” Mr. Gensler told the trade publication Building Design and Construction. “He even gave us homework.”
With his wife, who died in 2017, he founded the Gensler Family Foundation to support geriatric research, the arts and higher education. He and his family recently donated $10 million to endow and support Cornell’s New York-based architecture program.
Survivors include four sons, David of Sebastopol, Calif., Robert of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Douglas of Winchester, Mass., and Kenneth of Carlsbad, Calif.; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
Although Mr. Gensler stepped down as chief executive in 2005 and chairman in 2010, he continued to come into the office most days, closely following projects that included the transformation of Terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport. His firm had already redone the terminal in 1983 before returning to reinvent it in 2011, flooding the ticket counters with natural light and adding laptop workstations, egg chairs and artwork, including fiber sculptures that hang from the ceiling like psychedelic jellyfish.
“I’ve never looked at anything we did as so precious that it’s irreplaceable,” he told the Chronicle in 2014, after the opening of another Gensler-designed terminal at the airport. “My ideal building would be one where after 30 years, poof, it disappears and we can start all over again.”
Courtesy of Gensler
Mr. Gensler in an undated photo.
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