News

July 21, 2008

Obituary: Paul Byard, Director of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia University, memorial service planned for Sept. 15, 2008

Paul Spencer Byard, FAIA, 68, Director of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia University from 1998 until 2008, and a partner in Platt Byard Dovell White of New York City, died last week at his home in Brooklyn, NY, of cancer.

Byard graduated from Yale College in 1961. He also received degrees from Clare College, Cambridge and from Harvard Law School, and an architectural degree from the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at Columbia in 1977. Byard joined the firm of James Stewart Polshek & Associates and became a partner in 1981. He joined Charles A. Platt Partners in 1989, which later became Platt & Byard, Architects. Ray H. Dovell joined the firm in 1990 and Samuel G. White followed in 2002.

He was the author of several notable books, including The Architecture of Additions, published by W.W. Norton in 1998 and re-issued in 2004, and of Architecture and Social Policy: Learning from the Twentieth Century, and The Public Interest in Old Architecture: The Theory and Practice of Historic Preservation.

Byard had worked on the renovations at Carnegie Hall, at the Cooper Union Foundation Building, the State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division Courthouse and the old Custom Building, as well as numerous contemporary buildings such as the New 42nd Street Studios, the Chanel 57 building and a mausoleum and columbarium at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. He was recently working on the renovation of the New York Historical Society building on Central Park West.

In Traditional Building magazine’s April 2008 profile of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Program, Byard had stated: “You have to separate out what is a rubric for a particular polemic, i.e. traditional building, and that which celebrates all sorts of old buildings. Of course we’re interested in old buildings, but we’re interested in them for the public interest in what they contribute. You have to understand what old architecture does for us. The idea is that it’s not what it looks like, it’s what it means.”

Byard also participated in a Traditional Building roundtable, “Raising Standards,” published in the February 2007 issue. which grew out of an ongoing debate regarding the proper direction for preservation and a review by Steven W. Semes of The Architecture of Additions.

The New York Landmarks Conservancy and Columbia University are co-sponsoring a public memorial service for Byard on September 15, 2008 at 4 p.m. at St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University. For more information, call 212-995-5260.