Donald C. Freeman

Donald Craig Freeman, the Cambridge architect, died 8 May at age 97. He is survived by his wife Mary Beth Danenbarger; a son Peter Freeman; three stepchildren, Wright Danenbarger, Margaret Royston, Winnie Danenbarger; and four grandchildren, Lucy and Georgia Royston, and Henry and Charlie Prentiss.

Long a resident of Cambridge and Brookline, recently Hingham, Don was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929, the middle of three children, an older sister Joann Shwayder, a concert pianist, and a younger brother Michael, a linguist. His father, Michael was a medical doctor, and his mother, Edith, was for more than two decades the Curator of Music at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Harvard Class of 1950, then a Masters in Architecture and Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he was a teaching assistant to Walter Gropius, Don was an architect his entire life, working early on at TAC, of which Gropius was a founding partner, and then in 1956-57 with Hugh Stubbins and Associates to work on the Kongresshalle building in the Tiergarten, Berlin. But it was the loose partnership that followed later in an office shared by quite different practices that reflected both the spirit in the 60s, and Don’s interest in new ways of thinking and new approaches in which different practices could work closely together to find creative solutions, an office that even included the illustrator and folk singer Eric von Schmidt.

By the late 60s there were two formal partnerships made: Freeman Hardenbergh Associates, specifically for architecture; and the Cambridge Design Group, again an effort to link other practices, this time mostly with photographers, filmmakers, and animators.

Finally, it was Don’s preference to work alone that won out, and while there were always projects for graphic and exhibition design, it was architecture that remained at the core of his practice, primarily residential buildings.

But not only architecture: in 1970 he published with MIT Press the comprehensive field guide Boston Architecture, what went into several editions.

And always teaching, for many years, at Harvard both at the GSD and at the Carpenter Center for Visual and Environmental Studies. And always Venice, what was for him a special place and a passion, becoming involved with the Boston chapter of Save Venice, and its Chair for 2009-2011.

A memorial will be held in late June in Cambridge.