Harry Ellenzweig

Harry Ellenzweig, the founding principal of Ellenzweig Architecture | Planning practiced architecture in Cambridge for almost 50 years. Mr. Ellenzweig died on June 13, 2014. His work focused on innovative designs for academic institutions, largely in the sciences, and on a wide range of public projects. Mr. Ellenzweig enjoyed a reputation for balancing formal aspects of design with concern for user experience, and for successfully mediating between technological demands and aesthetic principles. His most recent project was MIT’s new Center for Integrative Cancer Research.

Under his leadership, his firm received over 80 design awards, including national Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects for the Post Office Square Parking Garage and Park Structures, Alewife Station, and the Joslin Diabetes Center. The Post Office Square project was also awarded the Harleston Parker Medal for the most significant architecture in Boston.

Harry Ellenzweig’s initial commissions at MIT and Harvard led to academic buildings at other leading institutions across the country – Johns Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, as well as Dartmouth, Bryn Mawr and Bowdoin Colleges. Among his most celebrated projects are: the Medical Education Center at Harvard Medical School, pediatric research facilities for Children’s Hospitals of Boston and Philadelphia, an addition to the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, the Tang Center at MIT, as well as the Naito Chemistry and Bauer Life Sciences Buildings at Harvard.

In addition to Post Office Square in Boston, Mr. Ellenzweig’s notable public projects are represented by the Alewife, Central, Kendall, Massachusetts Avenue and Aquarium Stations for the MBTA. He also directed the community liaison and planning for the MBTA Southwest Corridor Project, which included a training program in the design professions for inner city high school students.

Mr. Ellenzweig received a Bachelor of Architecture from North Carolina State University and was a Fellow the American Institute of Architects. He was the recipient of a Fullbright Traveling Fellowship/Italian Government Grant, 1956-57. His work has been published in Architecture, Architectural Record, Space and Society, and Progressive Architecture as well as in a recent L’Arca Editione monograph titled Architecture for Discovery. In 2002 the Wolk Gallery at MIT exhibited his many projects for the Institute, and at Harvard he was made an honorary member of the Chemistry Department in recognition of his long collaboration.

Harry Ellenzweig was also a painter. His work is included in several museums and private collections. For the catalog of a show of his drawings, Harry talked about the range of his work saying, “Architecture, for me, is an art as compelling as drawing or painting. It’s also my profession, my identity, the lens through which I see the world. I don’t think of painting as ‘the road not taken’, but I would say that I have very much enjoyed the balance of the private world of the studio with the public face of architecture.”

Harry Ellenzweig is survived by his wife Judy, his daughters Lisa and Sarah Ellenzweig, his sister Marilyn Davis, his son-in-law Scott McGill and three grandsons, Charles, Alexander and Julian McGill. A memorial service will be held in the fall.