Photographs: Europe 1930–1932
Barnett Sumner Gruzen, architect
November 14, 2002 to January 19, 2003
In 1944, my uncle, the architect B. Sumner Gruzen, asked me to make prints of photographs he had taken while on a 1930 Rotch Travel Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was fifteen, a fledgling photographer using our kitchen at night as my darkroom. I made about 100 prints which documented his two years in Europe. No one knows where those prints are, but the negatives have stayed with me for fifty-eight years. George S. Zimbel Montreal 2002 |
Barnett Sumner Gruzen, F.A.I.A. Barnett Sumner Gruzen was born on July 25, 1903 in the little village
of Dankera, near Riga Latvia. His family settled in Chelsea, Massachusetts
in 1907. |
| At the time of his death in 1974, his firm had won the coveted American Institute of Architects award for distinguished achievements in architecture and urban design. The firm’s projects included the design of universities, hospitals, and government buildings such as the U.S. Mission to the U.N. and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as well as an impressive array of innovative structures in downtown Manhattan. |
