Harry Cobb

Henry Nichols Cobb, FAIA, longtime partner of I M Pei, died in early March of this year. 

Having worked for and admired him, I thought I’d post a personal memory. 

When I arrived in Manhattan after college looking for work, I took my resume to the Pei Cobb Freed offices in Midtown. I didn’t get past the receptionist.

Years later, after I won a national award, I got a call from Mr. Cobb. He said that my work had beautiful “mise en scene” and that he would like me to come by to discuss a project. After looking up “mise en scene” (nice compliment) and getting my best suit out of storage, I met Mr. Cobb. He was quiet and mannerly and quickly put me at ease. He was obviously steeped in the history of architectural drawing, and in the process of producing good architectural illustrations. Mr. Cobb was also sure of what he wanted and what he didn’t want—in other words, a pleasure to work with. Eventually I worked on a number of projects for him.

… a couple of examples…

Dusk view of the centerpiece of Canary Wharf.

Interior rendering of a corporate headquarters in Spain.

I’ll leave the last, and appropriately elegant, word to Mr. Cobb.

“If the truth be told, perspectivists have a wickedly tough row to hoe. They are the servants of servants—unless the client happens to want a pretty picture but is too cheap to hire an architect, in which case they are just servants. So why should the tenth anniversary of the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists be the occasion for anything more than a sympathetic shrug and a condescending nod? Here’s why.

“In the age of cyberspace, perspectivists may be the last true romantics. And how could it be otherwise? For they alone celebrate in their art that supreme distillation of romance, the vanishing point. Has there ever been an invention of the human mind so irresistibly alluring, so mysteriously seductive, so real yet elusive, in sum so essentially and ineluctably romantic as is the vanishing point? Not the least of its romantic qualities is its name. As anyone who has ever constructed a perspective drawing knows, this passionately imagined, infinitely distant point in space is actually nothing more than the point of convergence for a few straight lines inscribed on a flat surface. But to call it such would deprive it of all its romance.

“Let us then salute the one art that finds its origin in the vanishing point; and let us salute also those who, following in the great tradition, today dedicate themselves to the practice of that art. Through their skillfully rendered representations of architectural visions, they remind us, as we now more than ever need to be reminded, that we are all at heart romantics."

Henry N Cobb, FAIA (in “Architecture in Perspective 10” exhibition catalog, 1995)