Life

Howard Dearstyne studied at Columbia University from 1921 and graduated with a BA in 1925. ^[1] He then studied medicine for a year, came into contact with the art collector Albert C. Barnes and became interested in art. After a trip to Europe, he studied architecture at the Columbia School of Architecture from 1926 . In 1928, on his second trip to Europe, he stayed at the Bauhaus in Dessau , where he studied with Mies van der Rohe , Wassily Kandinsky and Ludwig Hilberseimer and others. He completed his studies at the Bauhaus in 1932, went with the politically forced move to Berlin and stayed in Germany for a year as a private student with Mies even after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933.

After returning to the United States, he worked as an architect and designer for Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux , then for Raymond Loewy and Antonin Raymond , and became a member of the American Institute of Architects . In 1941, on Mies' recommendation, he was appointed lecturer in architecture at Black Mountain College . In 1941/42 he was an assistant to A. Lawrence Kocher , with whom he published The Architectural Center: An Organization to Coordinate Building Research, Planning, Design, and Construction in 1943 . Further lectureships took him to Lawrence College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art . This was followed by a long lectureship at the College of William & Mary from 1946 to 1957 , and from 1957 he was brought by Mies as an associate professor of architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology .

Since 1946, Dearstyne worked with Kocher at Colonial Williamsburg , where as architectural historians they made an inventory of fifty Colonial Revival buildings and published individual reports. He translated a book by Kazimir Malevich into English and, with Hilla Rebay, Kandinsky's Point and Line to Surface . His life's work, a book about the Bauhaus, was published posthumously in 1986.

Dearstyne exhibited his own photos, was a Guggenheim Fellow , was involved in the American Society of Architectural Historians and was co-editor of the magazine Inland Architect .