Daniel Rowen, an Architect Who Favored Modernism, Dies at 56 : obituary by The New York Times

architect/artist: Daniel Rowen
obituary title: Daniel Rowen, an Architect Who Favored Modernism, Dies at 56
obituary compilation no: T-11
format: Text
date: November 23, 2009
appeared in: The New York Times
writer: Fred A Bernstein

photo by:

courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/arts/design/23rowen.html?scp=5&sq=architect%20obituary&st=cse

Obituary Details:

Daniel Rowen, an Architect Who Favored Modernism, Dies at 56

Daniel Rowen, a highly regarded architect whose modernist designs for houses, apartments and commercial spaces attracted a number of prominent clients, died on Nov. 17 in Manhattan. He was 56.

The cause was neuroendocrine cancer, his wife, Coco Myers, said.

For more than a decade Mr. Rowen was the principal of Daniel Rowen Architect, which had offices in Manhattan and, beginning in 2003, East Hampton, N.Y., where he lived.

His high-profile projects included the sprawling headquarters for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in the vast Starrett-Lehigh Building, on 26th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues in Manhattan. Mr. Rowen preserved the openness of the loftlike space while creating elegant work environments within it.

Mr. Rowen was a protégé of the modernist architect Charles Gwathmey, who died in August. In 1984 he formed a partnership with Frank Lupo, who had also worked under Mr. Gwathmey. Mr. Lupo recalled one of Mr. Rowen’s favorite projects: a Park Avenue apartment that was entirely white and practically devoid of furniture. “The clients wanted a Zen environment in the middle of Manhattan, wiped clean of any domesticity,” Mr. Lupo said.

One area of the home, with a low glass-top table, was designated Space No. 1; another, with a raised sculpture platform, was Space No. 2; a third area, with white pallets in a closet, was Space No. 3. “This is not the apartment to hunker down in with a long book on a cold winter night,” Mr. Rowen said in an interview with The New York Times in 1996, “but it probably is a good place to listen to music.”

Daniel Jared Rowen was born in Washington, the youngest of three children of Hobart Rowen, who became the chief economics correspondent of The Washington Post, and Alice Stadler Rowen. He attended architecture school at Yale, then worked for Gwathmey Siegel & Associates before he and Mr. Lupo started their firm, New York Architects.

The partners’ first project was an office for the art dealer Larry Gagosian. For Mr. Rowen that began a decades-long relationship with Mr. Gagosian that culminated this year with two projects for him on Madison Avenue: a large addition to his uptown gallery and a new Gagosian store.

In 1999 an apartment designed by Mr. Rowen and Mr. Lupo was included in “The Un-Private House,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art. The apartment, dating to the 1980s, had electronics that were ahead of their time, the museum’s catalog said.

Mr. Rowen also created a minimalist office for the hotelier Ian Schrager as well as a luxurious apartment, in collaboration with Philippe Starck, for Mr. Schrager’s family on Central Park West. “He was working on an addition to my house on Long Island when he died,” Mr. Schrager said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Another Rowen-Lupo project was an austere white office on Lexington Avenue for Osho International, a company that owned the copyright to works by an Indian mystic. Mr. Rowen described one feature, of translucent glass, acid-etched on one side and polished like a mirror on the other, as a “soft, glowing wall.”

He married Ms. Myers, a writer and editor, in 1993, after they met on a blind date. The wedding was the subject of a “Vows” column in The Times, which began: “Few people believed that Daniel Rowen would ever marry. A talkative, analytical architect in his late 30s who races vintage cars, he has for the past five years been the host of a men-only party in celebration of bachelorhood.”

The couple had three children, Max, Harrison and Jensen. They also survive him, as do his sister, Judith Vereker of London, and his brother, James, of Milwaukee.

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