International Architect and Harvard Professor Huson Jackson, 1913–2006

Summary: Huson Jackson, FAIA—longtime partner of Josep Lluis Sert in the iconic Sert, Jackson & Associates of Cambridge, Mass., and professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard from 1953 to 1970—passed over October 1 at the age of 93. Jackson led the first generation of American architects who embraced the European International Style in the 1930s and made it at home in the U.S.

Jackson studied at Stanford University and the University of Chicago, where he received his BPhil degree in 1934. He began architectural studies at Washington University in St. Louis while working in the studio of Charles Eames. He then entered Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he earned an MArch in 1939. Jackson studied with Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and others who brought the ideas of Modernism to North America. Two of his partners in practice, Josep Lluis Sert and Joseph Zalewski, had both worked in Le Corbusier's atelier in the 1940s.

During World War II, Jackson practiced in partnership with Carl Koch and Joseph Richardson doing residential work in the Boston area. He began his own architecture practice in partnership with Harold and Judith Edelman and Seymour Howard in New York City in 1946. During this period, he also taught architecture at Columbia University and Pratt Institute and wrote New York Architecture 1650–1952, a guidebook prepared for the 1952 AIA convention in New York City.

Beloved, award-winning projects
Harvard appointed Jackson as a professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design in 1953, and he taught there until 1970. It was in 1958 that he and Sert, the Harvard GSD dean at the time and 1981 AIA Gold Medal recipient, founded Sert, Jackson & Associates. Their commissions included many university and institutional buildings—among the best known are for Harvard, Boston University, MIT, Princeton, and Ontario’s Guelph University—as well as many multifamily housing projects in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Their Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona received an AIA Honor Award in 1979, as well as the 2002 AIA Twenty-five Year Award.

Sert, Jackson & Associates received the AIA Firm Award in 1977, as well as many AIA awards for individual projects, including national Honor Awards for:

• Peabody Terrace, married student housing complex at Harvard (1965)
• Undergraduate Science Center at Harvard (1979)
• Housing at Roosevelt Island (1981).

Le Corbusier chose Sert, Jackson & Associates as collaborating architects for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, his only building in the U.S.

Beloved, award-winning architect
Jackson was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 1975 and served as president of the Boston Society of Architects.

At the time of his death, Jackson lived in Lincoln, Mass. He is survived by his wife, Polly Faulkner Jackson; two sons, Rex Jackson, and architect Tony Jackson; as well as stepdaughters Helen Brown and Phillida Rosnick and stepson Robert Brown. “He was a much beloved man and teacher and lived a long and colorful life,” says Tony Jackson, AIA. “He never lost his physical powers and was vigorously active until very recently.”