Arthur Hawkins Keyes Jr.

The architect Arthur H. Keyes, born and raised in Rutland, Vermont, has died aged 95. Mr. Keyes' designs were a direct influence of the modernist architectural movement, and through his firm Keyes Condon Florance, which he founded in 1956, he designed government buildings in a post-World War II period exemplified by bureaucratic expansion in Washington D.C. His works reflected the influences of the Bauhaus movement and Frank Lloyd Wright, in a manner that both expressed these influences and the bureaucracies that held sway in the nation's capital. Among the designs his firm executed were the National Gallery of Art-West Wing Building renovation, the Georgetown Waterfront Study of 1974, the Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria, and the Hydrospace Research Corporation. He passed away on June 7, 2012, of complications of pneumonia. He is survived by his son, Arthur S. Keyes, and daughter, Janet Keyes, and four grandchildren.

A seminal moment in his design vision came when Mr. Keyes moved to Mr. Wright's Taliesin East to study in the studio and fields of the American master of prairie-style architecture. Mr. Keyes' Vermont upbringing, founded in pragmatism, clashed with the cult-like living he found under Mr. Wright. In 1939, he was drawn to the modernist teachings at Harvard University. Known for its own American foundationalism, the University had oddly named Marcel Breuer, of Bauhaus fame, to head its Harvard School of Design. There Mr. Keyes formed his own vision and graduated with a Master's in Architecture in 1941. That vision would immediately be re-oriented by the U.S. Navy via the ship design work he was ordered to undertake, beginning in the first days of WWII. Notably, he was part of the team that designed the sea worthy to land craft, known as the Amphibious Assault Vehicle.

Following the War, Mr. Keyes bought a plot on 31st, Washington, DC, NW that was unbuildable if one were to design a traditional house, but he saw the difficult site as an opportunity to make a spatial statement, thinning a foundation and expanding a living room to create a sky view of the capital, all above the living quarters. As House and Garden put it, in 1954, he had turned the conventional house "upside down." Mr. Keyes then found land overlooking the Potomac River off of River Road, on which he cantilevered his "Country House" via steel I-beams, projected out at 45 degree angle, laid into a concrete foundation. Two clear architectural inspirations infused every form in the house: Prairie-Style Architecture and Bauhaus.

Mr. Keyes also saw potential in a series of sand dunes found in the northern Outer Banks of North Carolina, unconnected by road, and squeezed by the ocean to the East and a sound to the West, where he developed fifty modernist inspired summer homes via a series of strictly adhered to layouts, elevations and materials; the development, found just north of the hamlet known as Duck, was named Sea Ridge by Mr. Keyes. The development opened the Outer Banks to further developments northward, in what could be called the nation's ultimate and most extensive cul-de-sac: to this day, there is no bridge north to the mainland.

Mr. Keyes graduated from Princeton University followed by his eldest son, and two of his grandchildren.