Graham de Condé Gund (MArch ’68, MAUD ’69), FAIA, architect, arts patron-collector, and philanthropist, died on June 6, 2025. He was 84. It is widely known that he was one of the warmest, gentlest, and most generous architects anywhere.
Those adjectives don’t always align with the kind of accomplishment achieved by Graham Gund. He had a gift for persuading clients, collaborators, and contractors toward his point of view. Twenty-five years ago, my partner Doug Reed led our firm’s work on Gund’s family residence in Cambridge. Doug, who is like Graham highly intuitive, experienced occasional differences of opinion with Graham over ideas, materials, and details. But they left every meeting with accord and respect.
Doug and I reflected on this on the day we learned of Graham’s passing. Just two years ago, we’d completed some adjustments to the garden, now mature, and Doug was recalling Graham’s joy at the growth of the trees over a quarter century, and he was decisive about removals and radical pruning required to maintain the original design intent. That same year, I enjoyed a summer evening there with the Gunds and a handful of guests. After dinner, Graham brought out a mounted illustrative landscape plan and sweetly reminisced about his satisfaction working with the firm over the years—and for his deep appreciation for the resulting garden.
The firm known today as Gund Partnership (formerly Graham Gund Architects) began early in its founder’s career. After receiving his MArch and MAUD degrees at the GSD, Gund crossed Harvard Square to work for Walter Gropius, founder of The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Gropius died that same year, perhaps foreshadowing that Gund would open his own firm just two years later. The architectural writer Paul Goldberger, who authored the firm’s 1999 monograph, notes that Gund was a devout modernist who had the energy and commitment to build big. Indeed, one of the earliest realized ground-up projects from Graham Gund Architects was the 1976 brick ziggurat Hyatt Regency Hotel on the Charles River in Cambridge—an ambitious translation of the Pritzker family’s penchant for shaping the identity of their hotels through the drama of a grand atrium.
As an architect–developer in the 1970s, Gund applied his resources to preserving historic buildings that had fallen into ruin. In 1972, he saved the 1814 Cambridge Courthouse by Charles Bullfinch from demolition, renewing it with mixed-use spaces of unusual grace and beauty, including space for his own practice, where Gund Partnership remains more than 50 years later. In this project and in the Church Court Condominiums (1983) in Boston, his rescuing of historic resources aligned with a commitment to adaptation through the juxtaposition of historic and contemporary building languages. Gund’s work in this period led the famed Yale historian Vincent Scully to call him “a convinced preservationist” in his forward to the 1999 monograph.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Gund’s work became animated by an interest in surface pattern and composition. Boston Globe critic Robert Campbell wrote in 1989 that Mr. Gund was “quite possibly the most playful architect of any importance” in American history. “Playful” isn’t exactly right, and Gund himself rejected the term. A more useful way of thinking about this interest learns from Gund’s profound love of sculpture and painting and composition. Gund’s own introduction in the Goldberger monograph is the only proof we need that it was his dedication to fine art that animated his architectural expression.
Gund spends nearly all that text describing his “passion for art and . . . a fascination with the artistic notions of our time.” He relates his devotion to the shapes of Ellsworth Kelly; the lines and colors of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Hans Hofmann; the agitated compositions of Frank Stella’s mid-period work; and the scale and gesture achieved in projects by Christo and Jean Claude. These are just a few of the artists he collected. But his interpretations of this work seem to become part of a personal manifesto that aims to “erode the edge between art and architecture” toward a heightened “engagement of the person in the experience of the place created.”
While his life in architecture in those years was driven by an artistic sensibility, so too was his collecting—paired with immense philanthropy in the arts. Gund and his wife Ann raised the bar in the arts community with their decades of lead gifts to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), decades of giving and building at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and the Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut, decades of support for the American Repertory Theater, and many more institutions, including the leading public broadcasting organization GBH. He helped bring Ellsworth Kelly’s colorful Boston Panels to the Joseph Moakley Courthouse in Boston and contributed to collections at the US Mission at the United Nations. He was a trustee of the MFA, the National Building Museum, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and founder and trustee of the Boston Foundation for Architecture.
Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this beneficence is Gund Partnership’s work on dozens of projects at Kenyon College, where Gund received his undergraduate degree in psychology in 1963. Beginning in 1999, the firm completed spaces for classrooms and study centers, dining, housing, recreation and athletics, and the arts. In all, Gund’s architectural contributions to Kenyon’s campus totals 18 projects, which comprise 45 individual buildings; another two are currently under construction. Most prominent in this one-of-a-kind dedication to improving campus life and the quality of education at Kenyon is the Graham Gund Gallery (2011), which houses 80 works donated by the Gunds, including objects by Picasso, Frank Stella, Kiki Smith, Paul Manship, and Christo and Jean-Claude. A massive Richard Serra tower stands next to the gallery—also a gift from Ann and Graham Gund.
Kenyon President Julie Kornfeld said this upon Gund’s passing: “It is impossible to capture in words the mark Graham made on Kenyon. It is, however, visible everywhere on campus—from the ambition of our campus master plan, to the brilliant and subtle details of the buildings he lovingly designed and restored, to the masterful works of art he created homes and sites for, to the breathtaking view corridors he spotted and preserved.”
The idea of a single firm producing the programmatic and expressive identity of a campus harkens to an era long gone, when architects such as Ralph Adams Cram (Princeton University, Sweet Briar College), McKim, Mead & White (Harvard Business School), William Welles Bosworth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Horace Trumbauer and Julian F. Abele (Duke University) produced entire campus precincts. What makes Kenyon College distinct among these is that the architect’s design services were accompanied by hefty philanthropic contributions to set it all on course toward a promising future.
A coda
The GSD’s George Gund Hall, completed in 1972 by architect John Andrews, was named for Graham’s father, George Gund II (A.B. ’09); he also graduated, simultaneously, in the first class of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (eventually Harvard Business School). Later in life, after amassing great wealth, George Gund II served as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, from 1954 to 1960, and became a major American philanthropist. He endowed two professorships at Harvard. George Gund’s grand fortune was left in trusts that were to be managed by his children. It was the siblings that determined, after their father’s death, that a lead gift to the school that had recently granted Graham his degrees in architecture and urban design would enable the GSD project to succeed in the face of the early 1970s economic recession. That legacy of generosity is what Graham and Ann, and the entire Gund family, have always stood for.