Archives of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects Donated to Yale University

NEW HAVEN, CT.- The records of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects have been donated to the Yale University Library’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives by Bette-Ann Gwathmey, the widow of founding partner Charles Gwathmey who received his degree in architecture from Yale in 1962. The award-winning architecture firm has been acclaimed for its expressive residential designs and sensitive restorations of iconic modernist buildings.

Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects was founded by Gwathmey and Robert Siegel in New York in 1968. The firm has been widely celebrated for its residential work and institutional projects, such as Whig Hall at Princeton University and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Gwathmey’s 1992 addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York earned him accolades from architectural critic Paul Goldberger (Yale ’72), who declared Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark building had become “a better museum and a better work of architecture.” The firm received the American Institute of Architects’ Architecture Firm Award in 1982.

Comprising architectural drawings, photographs, sketches and correspondence from approximately 175 projects, the Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects archive will be accessible to students and scholars around the world. Among the projects documented is the design of Yale’s Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art and restoration of Paul Rudolph Hall, formerly known as the Art and Architecture building — a project that represents Gwathmey’s lifetime association with Yale. While a student there, Gwathmey worked under the tutelage of Paul Rudolph, the original architect of the building.

The Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects archive — along with the Eero Saarinen collection, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates records, and Robert A.M. Stern Architects records — is part of a large and growing collection of primary source material in Manuscripts and Archives documenting significant modern and contemporary architectural practices at the local, national, and international levels.