Local history: Famed architect James Polshek (1930-2022) altered Akron skyline

The first building that James Polshek ever designed was a treehouse.

He constructed it at his childhood home on Rose Boulevard near West Exchange Street in Akron.

We can assume it was built in the usual manner with hammer, nails and lumber. We don’t know anything about its sturdiness, practicality or aesthetic appeal.

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But it certainly led to greater works.

The kid grew up to be a world-class architect who designed, renovated or restored a number of landmarks, including museums, concert halls, university buildings and a U.S. presidential library.

Along the way, he altered Akron’s skyline.

Polshek, the architect of the John S. Knight Center and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, died Sept. 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Polshek emphasized “the importance of places,” and believed that architects could “improve the world in small ways.”

“Creating something beautiful and lasting is my social responsibility,” he once told the Beacon Journal.

In that, he clearly succeeded.

Famed architect grew up in Akron

James Stewart Polshek was born Feb. 11, 1930, at Peoples Hospital, now Cleveland Clinic Akron General. His father, Alex, owned Epps Army Store at 2 S. Howard St. His mother, Pearl, was a homemaker.

The family attended Temple Israel and moved to South Rose Boulevard after a decade on Jefferson Avenue. Polshek and his younger sister, Judy, grew up at Highland Square during the Great Depression and World War II.

He was attending a matinee at the Highland Theater on Dec. 7, 1941, when a manager walked onstage to announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“In just a short time we had a victory garden, gasoline-rationing stickers on the windshield of our car, large balls of saved tin foil, and a new knowledge of the silhouettes of enemy aircraft,” he wrote in his memoir. “Gold stars started to appear in neighborhood windows.”

A product of Akron Public Schools, Polshek graduated from Buchtel High School in 1947 and enrolled at Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve, with a plan to study medicine.

He began to question his career path, though, after watching the 1949 construction of an unusual home for an advertising executive on Mentor Road in Akron’s Merriman Hills. Colorado architect Victor Hornbein, a former apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, had designed the flat-roofed dwelling with a windowless facade.

Neighbors were dismayed to see the modern home, but Polshek was transfixed.

“This house represented a challenge to the status quo,” he recalled. “But I saw the logic to it.”

He started sketching houses and took an architecture course.

“Then I found that I didn’t want to be a doctor; I wanted to be an architect,” he said.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1951, Polshek enrolled at Yale University to study architecture. In 1952, he married Ellyn Margolis, a Western Reserve classmate from Brookline, Massachusetts.

Polshek graduated from Yale in 1955 with a master’s degree in architecture and decided to practice in New York, explaining: “The competition is keener.”

He worked six months for I.M. Pei, the future architect of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Then Polshek earned a Fulbright scholarship to study architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Back in New York, he took a job with architect Ulrich Franzen. James and Ellyn Polshek soon welcomed two children: Peter in 1957 and Jennifer in 1960.

One of Polshek’s first projects was a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The homeowner, a chemist, introduced him to a Japanese executive who wondered if he would like to design a research lab.

Polshek traveled to Japan in 1961 to build the Teijin Institute for Biomedical Research near Tokyo. Executives were so pleased with the five-story concrete structure that they commissioned a textile science center near Osaka. In 1964, Architectural Forum heralded the institute as “one of the most significant new works in the world.”

Acclaimed projects of James Polshek

Polshek started his own firm in 1963.

Among his acclaimed projects were the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Center for the Arts, the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the Santa Fe Opera House in New Mexico, Queens Borough Public Library, Columbia University Law School’s Greene Hall, the Lycée Français de New York, the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

He served as dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation from 1972 to 1987 and continued as professor emeritus. His wife, Ellyn, worked in publishing, earned a law degree from Columbia and became a Manhattan assistant district attorney.

In the 1980s, Polshek’s firm was responsible for restoring and expanding New York’s Carnegie Hall as well as the Brooklyn Museum. In the 1990s, he renovated the Ed Sullivan Theater for “Late Show with David Letterman” on CBS.

“The true importance of architecture lies in its ability to solve human problems, not stylistic ones,” Polshek wrote in 1988. “A building is too permanent and too influential on public life and personal comfort to be created primarily as ‘public art.’ ”

In 1991, Time magazine heralded him as “one of the finest uncelebrated architects working today.”

Polshek visited Akron over the decades and had trouble recognizing it sometimes.

“Akron started to change before I left,” he told an Akron audience. “I was both ignorant and helpless to do anything about it. The first time I came back, urban renewal had made the downtown look like Dresden in 1944.”

One of Polshek’s prized possessions was a souvenir plate that showed the Akron skyline along with such places as the Akron Airdock, Stan Hywet Hall, Firestone Country Club and the All-American Soap Box Derby.

He once told The New York Times that he still considered himself a Midwesterner even though he left Ohio in 1947.

“I kind of cherish at least the idea of Midwestern candor and openness,” he said. “'But I couldn't live there.”

In the late 1980s, Polshek’s sister, Judy Goodman, mailed him Beacon Journal article about a plan to build the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron. Thirty architects were considered, but Polshek won the commission.

“To have the responsibility of designing what will be the country’s preeminent hall of fame and science museum and to be able to do it in my hometown is truly humbling,” he said. “The museum itself has to be an invention.”

He and his staff jokingly discussed making it look like Thomas Edison’s light bulb before Polshek recalled the curved walls of the Akron Airdock.

“I’m positive we can do something dramatic,” he said.

Two projects changed Akron skyline

In 1989, he unveiled plans for a 77,000-square-foot museum with a curved, steel wing, a giant wall with five stories of exhibits and an underground hall topped by a plaza.

“There’s really nothing like that sail anywhere else in the world,” Polshek said. “It’s distinctive enough that it may become the image people think of in the future when they think of Akron.”

Ground was broken in 1993 off South Broadway. President Bill Clinton stopped at the site during a 1994 visit.

Inventure Place, as it was called, cost $38 million and opened with great fanfare in July 1995. Large crowds attended the dedication ceremonies, and fireworks lit the night sky.

Polshek hoped the building would “act as a catalyst for continued renewal” in Akron.

Induction ceremonies and black-tie dinners were major events in the city, but the museum shut down in 2008 as attendance fell. Today, it is home to the National Inventors Hall of Fame STEM Middle School.

Polshek’s other major contribution to the skyline was the John S. Knight Center, originally conceived as the Akron Convention Center, at Mill and High streets.

The architect designed a 123,000-square-foot center, including 30,000 for an exhibit hall and 12,000 for a banquet room. The $33.6 million building’s key feature would be a glass rotunda with a spiral staircase and terrazzo floor.

“You have to disguise a convention center,” Polshek said. “It’s just a big box otherwise.”

Ground was broken in 1991, but controversy arose in 1993 when city leaders followed an engineer’s recommendation to remove a decorative pillar to accommodate a skywalk to a 700-car parking deck.

“This is truly outrageous!” Polshek fumed. “In 32 years of professional practice, never has a public building authority taken it upon itself to severely modify an approved design without consulting the architect.”

Polshek must have patched things up with the city, though, because he attended the grand opening in June 1994. All evening, he shook hands with people complimenting him on the building.

“People are conventionally polite,” he told the Beacon Journal. “But I think they mean it.”

Perhaps Polshek’s most famous building is the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. Yes, the same president who admired the architect’s work in Akron.

Dedicated in 2004, the $165 million, 17-acre complex features a bridge-shaped building overlooking the Arkansas River. It’s a nod to Clinton’s campaign pledge to build “a bridge to the 21st century.”

“It’s a rectangular building,” Polshek told reporters. “It doesn’t have swoops and it doesn’t flex its muscles and say, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ”

Polshek retired in 2005, but served as design counsel for his firm, which was renamed Ennead Architects in 2010.

Among many achievements, Polshek received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2018 and the Fulbright Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

In 2011, the Summit County Historical Society presented a Summit Award to Polshek. During his Akron visit, he toured some old haunts — including his Rose Boulevard home — and dined at Swensons.

James Polshek died of kidney disease Sept. 9 at his home in Manhattan. Survivors include his wife, Ellyn, son, Peter, daughter, Jennifer, sister, Judy and two grandchildren.

“James Polshek was an architect whose success was his art and his architecture was his legacy,” American Institute of Architects President Dan Hart eulogized. “For anyone who worked with him, or even just met him in passing, his humanity and warmth nearly eclipsed everything else — from his skill in rebuilding Columbia into a powerhouse to his talent in developing client relationships into true partnerships. He was a giant.”

And it all began with a treehouse in Akron.

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: How architect James Polshek altered the downtown Akron skyline