Robert Geddes, Philadelphia architect, teacher, and one of the designers of the Roundhouse, has died at 99
One of the architects of Philadelphia's controversial former police headquarters spent the last months of his life campaigning to see his building reused and revitalized.
Renowned architect and academic administrator Robert Geddes, 99, died of heart failure Monday, Feb. 13, in his retirement home outside Princeton.
He is best known in Philadelphia for his work on the Police Headquarters, popularly known as the Roundhouse, which his firm was contracted to design in the late 1950s.
Mr. Geddes began practicing during that decade, a time of seismic change in Philadelphia as reformers toppled the GOP machine that had run the city for almost a century and the industrial economy that had long sustained Philadelphia began to decline.
His firm, Geddes Brecher Qualls & Cunningham, was part of a larger movement in midcentury architecture that tried to embody the aspirations of postwar liberalism. Buildings like the Roundhouse, or Boston City Hall, were meant to be demonstrations of the state’s capacity to do good.
“He felt that architecture and urban planning had a ‘civic purpose’ — to build buildings and neighborhoods and cities for people to live in, work in, go to school in, love in and raise their kids in,” said his son, David. “He was a small ‘d’ democrat, a small ‘s’ socialist, and a progressive before the term came to be in vogue.”
Mr. Geddes became a vocal defender of the Roundhouse in his later years, condemning some of the changes made to the former Police Headquarters during Frank Rizzo’s tenure as police commissioner.
His firm had designed the first floor to be made of glass, as a symbol of transparency, and open to the public. That was not to be. Mr. Geddes also hated the fortress-like trappings that came to shroud a building marooned in a sea of surface parking lots, so different from the vibrant urban streetscapes he cherished.
As the city of Philadelphia seeks to determine what to do with the structure, now that the Police Department has relocated to the former Inquirer building at 400 N. Broad St., Mr. Geddes urged that it be reused and returned to the liberal tradition it was meant to be as part of.
“What was done in that basement, and on the streets, is horrible to contemplate … But the building didn’t cause it, although it certainly suffered and is suffering from that legacy,” he told The Inquirer in 2022. “The simplest thing to do is to find a developer who would open up the ground floor and use the offices for institutions concerned with human well-being.”
Mr. Geddes was born Robert Leon Goldberg in Philadelphia in 1923 but grew up in Atlantic City. He served in the Army Air Force on the home front from 1942 to 1945. He studied at the University of California, Berkley, Yale University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
He worked for architect Vincent Kling in Philadelphia — whose firm would design Penn Center, Dilworth Plaza, and LOVE Park — before cofounding Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham in 1953.
Geddes taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design from 1951 to 1965, part of the so-called Philadelphia School, which included famous architects like Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown.
“He believed in collaboration, not in the architect as hero,” said John Lobell, author of The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture and a former student of Geddes, who also served as his thesis adviser at Penn. “And he was interested in the social role of architecture.”
Lobell remembers Mr. Geddes bringing a psychiatrist named Humphry Osmond — noted for his work with psychedelic drugs, including trip-sitting for English author Aldous Huxley — to Penn to lecture on architecture’s effects on the human psyche. Lobell said Mr. Geddes put such insights to work designing buildings like a dormitory at the University of Delaware that centered shared spaces.
In Philadelphia, among Mr. Geddes’ firm’s designs was the Northeast Regional Library on Cottman Avenue, which The Inquirer’s architecture critic described in 2016 as having “almost regal calm, bringing civic grandeur to the highway” and its riotously cluttered surroundings.
In 1965, he was hired by Princeton University as dean of Architecture and Urban Planning. He worked in that capacity until 1982 and later taught at New York University.
Colleagues at Princeton described him as a kind and outgoing leader, who used his love of socializing to the advantage of his school. Mr. Geddes demonstrated an ability to adroitly maneuver in the world of academia, explaining the architecture school’s mission and importance to skeptical senior administrators.
“He was extraordinary,” said Alan Chimacoff, an architect who lives in Princeton and both studied under, and then worked with, Mr. Geddes. “There are several attributes that architecture deans should have, and he had them all.”
After leaving Princeton, Mr. Geddes flexed his interest in urban planning and vibrant street life. In the 1980s, he helped write a master plan for Center City Philadelphia that eventually resulted in legislative and regulatory changes to preserve what makes downtown great — its vibrant streetscapes, historic buildings, and short blocks — while cutting through red tape that hindered redevelopment.
His son David described several of the buildings Mr. Geddes designed for Princeton as among his favorites. The dining commons and the social science academic wing of the Institute for Advanced Study are highlights, both designed in a high modernist style. Other standouts include Harry C. Texler library at Muhlenberg College in Allentown and an expansion of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in the 1980s.
“It’s funny, over his career, he probably worked on 300 buildings, but there were only a very small number that he would talk about in any great detail,” David Geddes said.
An exception was the Roundhouse (a nickname the elder Geddes detested). Franklin Square had long been one of the most isolated of William Penn’s original parks, and he had dreamed of his building as part of an effort to bring its surroundings to life.
“He was a devoted Philadelphian,” David Geddes said. “His big desire was that [the Police Headquarters] could be a catalyst for invigorating an urban area right at the doorsteps of downtown that was always neglected.”
As the city considers what to do with the Roundhouse, even consulting with Geddes last year, he hoped again that it still could be.
Besides his son David, he is survived by his daughter Ann, who is also an architect; seven grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife Evelyn, whom he was married to for 73 years, died in 2020.
Services will be private.