The trigger was pancreatic most cancers, stated his son Brian Kohn.
As president of the agency, broadly often called KPF, Mr. Kohn centered on establishing and managing relationships with purchasers. In a 1986 profile, Paul Goldberger, then the structure critic for the New York Occasions, described Mr. Kohn as probably the most efficient salesmen within the structure enterprise.
He usually began shows not with renderings of buildings however with photographs of KPF’s softball group, as if suggesting that the younger agency could be enjoyable to work with. Interviewing for an airport job in Philadelphia, he introduced that his mom, a Philadelphian, could be offended if he wasn’t picked.
Time was treasured to Mr. Kohn, whom Goldberger described as “relaxed and informal on the floor, intense and pushed beneath it.” Earlier than he boarded a aircraft, he would study from a pleasant gate agent who else was in firstclass, then request a seat subsequent to the passenger most certainly to wish an architect.
“I make sure that I’m not pushy or annoying however I domesticate relationships like some folks domesticate orchids or bonsai — fastidiously and with the long run in thoughts,” he famous in “The World By Design,” his 2019 memoir written with Clifford Pearson.
His efforts paid off. Mr. Kohn persuaded among the nation’s largest firms — together with Procter & Gamble, Gannett and IBM — all of which have been searching for new headquarters — to decide on it over extra established corporations like Pei Cobb Freed & Companions and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The outcomes have been, respectively, a beloved addition to the Cincinnati skyline, a hilltown-like compound in McLean, Va., and a zigzag formed constructing in Armonk, N.Y. (The IBM headquarters was designed in order that it couldn’t be expanded — IBM’s chairman and chief government, Louis Gerstner, stated he wished each a part of the corporate to develop besides its administrative ranks.)
In Washington, the agency was finest recognized for its World Bank headquarters. Accomplished in 1997, it was one of many first glass-fronted buildings in a metropolis the place most massive buildings have been both classical (prewar) or fabricated from concrete (postwar). KPF’s constructing featured a 28-foot waterfall in an atrium behind a clear facade. Design-wise, it was additionally a leap ahead for the agency, which a number of years earlier had accomplished the awkwardly ornamented AARP headquarters within the District of Columbia.)
As KPF moved to the entrance rank of American structure, Mr. Kohn spoke in regards to the significance of staying in his lane of experience, with co-founder Invoice Pedersen taking the lead on the design aspect and Sheldon Fox (“essentially the most organized particular person I’ve ever met”) managing operations.
“I used to be essentially the most outgoing of the three and the most important threat taker,” he wrote in his memoir. “Consequently, I took on the position of president and chief.” It helped that he appeared seasoned, sporting a helmet of white hair even in early center age.
Arthur Eugene Kohn, referred to as Gene since childhood, was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 12, 1930. His father was a medical researcher who misplaced his enterprise through the Despair.
His mom ran a costume store out of the household’s modest home, utilizing Eugene’s bed room as a altering room for purchasers. (She additionally painted and, when she turned 100 in 2002, the Guggenheim Museum, run by Mr. Kohn’s good friend Thomas Krens, mounted a show of 100 of her works.)
On the College of Pennsylvania College of Design, he took lessons taught by the seminal mid-century architects Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph and obtained a bachelor’s diploma in 1953. After three years within the Navy, he accomplished a grasp’s diploma at Penn in 1957 and labored at Philadelphia corporations earlier than transferring to New York in 1964.
He finally turned president of John Carl Warnecke & Associates, a California agency with a New York workplace, however he felt he didn’t have any actual energy. Its founder, a bon vivant who as soon as dated the widowed first woman Jacqueline Kennedy, held all of the strings, and pulled them in ways in which Mr. Kohn usually disliked.
In 1975 he left to start out his personal agency, Kohn and Associates, whereas making an attempt to recruit his Warnecke colleagues Pedersen and Fox. They established Kohn Pedersen Fox on July 4, 1976. Mr. Kohn later instructed Goldberger, “We had no enterprise. We had no enterprise card, no brochure, nothing. It was somewhat loopy.”
However Mr. Kohn was scrappy. After he learn that the ABC broadcast community deliberate to show an previous armory on W. 66th Avenue in Manhattan right into a manufacturing facility, he referred to as the media firm, turning his agency’s newness into a bonus: KPF, he stated, may begin work on the job instantly. It did, and over the subsequent 20 years, with Mr. Kohn managing the connection, the agency accomplished 17 initiatives for ABC, together with a corporate campus round 66th Avenue.
In 1985, at a convention in San Francisco, Mr. Kohn heard an economist warn attendees, “In case you’re not international by 1990, half of you may be out of enterprise.” Mr. Kohn started pondering of how to increase past america.
4 years later, KPF opened an workplace in London, the place it was already engaged on a Fleet Avenue headquarters for Goldman Sachs. That constructing, which opened in 1991, was a success with critics, as was the agency’s 53-story DZ Bank Headquarters in Frankfurt, accomplished in 1993. By the tip of the early Nineties, KPF’s London workplace was competing with one of the best of the British corporations for jobs, and infrequently profitable.
However the agency’s true golden age started with a mixed-use improvement over a prepare station in Nagoya, Japan, accomplished in 2000 and often called JR Central Towers. With a foothold in Asia, the agency went on to open workplaces in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Seoul.
In 2003, the agency accomplished a mixed-use advanced in Tokyo referred to as Roppongi Hills, a type of Japanese-inflected Rockefeller Heart, with a 54-story tower at its coronary heart. Earlier than that venture had even damaged floor, its developer, Minoru Mori, received the appropriate to construct what could be referred to as the Shanghai World Monetary Heart in that metropolis’s Pudong district.
Mr. Pedersen designed a 1,600-foot-tall tower with a big spherical opening on the high, harking back to a standard Chinese language moon gate. However to the mayor of Shanghai and others, the circle was disturbingly much like the rising solar of the Japanese flag. After a sequence of emergency conferences, the circle turned a trapezoid.
South Korea was one other land of alternative for KPF. Its initiatives there included a Rodin museum, Samsung’s headquarters, a 1,400-acre-development referred to as New Songdo City, and the 1,800-foot Lotte World Tower. Lotte was one of many 10 tallest buildings on this planet, together with three KPF towers in China: the Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzhen; the CITIC (or China Zun) Tower in Beijing; and the Chow Tai Fook Finance Centre in Guangzhou.
By 2010, he stated, about 80 or 90 % of the agency’s work was outdoors america. But throughout that interval KPF was stated to be the only largest employer of architects in New York Metropolis, with some 450 folks in its workplace overlooking Bryant Park.
U.S. commissions picked up through the 2010s. KPF was chosen by the Associated Firms to do the grasp plan for its huge Hudson Yards improvement on the west aspect of Manhattan, and to design three of Hudson Yards’ largest buildings.
Across the identical time, it started work on One Vanderbilt, a 1,400-foot tower adjoining to Grand Central Terminal. In Los Angeles, KPF could also be best-known for its odd renovation of the Petersen Automotive Museum, which lined a crimson stucco field in swoopy stainless-steel “stripes” suggesting pace. It is without doubt one of the few KPF initiatives for which Mr. Kohn took credit score as a designer.
His largest setback got here in 2009, when Lee Polisano, the top of KPF’s London’s workplace, introduced that he was leaving the agency and taking his workers with him. Mr. Kohn, then nearly 80, moved to London and labored feverishly to maintain workers and purchasers from following Polisano. About his profitable efforts, he wrote: “Some fights make you stronger.”
Mr. Kohn’s marriages to Barbara Schwartz and Diane Barnes resulted in divorce. In 2002, he wed Barbara Shattuck, an funding banker. Along with his spouse, with whom he shared properties in Montecito, Manhattan and Washington, Conn., survivors embody three kids from his first marriage, Brian Kohn of Fairfield, Conn., Steven Kohn of Westport, Conn., and Laurie Parkinson of Larchmont, N.Y.; and 9 grandchildren.
Mr. Kohn relinquished the presidency of KPF in 2003 and remained the agency’s chairman till earlier this 12 months. “I’ll be most joyful and proud after they don’t want me,” he stated of his youthful companions. “And most disillusioned.”
