Harold Cohen, who led the School from educational experiment to fully-fledged design and planning enterprise, dies at 96

Cohen was an educator, artist, designer, researcher, social reformer, and health activist who led the School through its transition from educational experiment to fully-fledged design and planning enterprise. He was full of energy and ideas, not afraid to speak his mind, and driven to make a difference in the world, especially Buffalo, the city he made his home.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Eastern European immigrant parents, Cohen was raised in a socially conscious Orthodox Jewish household. He was drawn to art at an early age despite discouragement from his father who thought it was no way to make a living. He was valedictorian at his Yeshiva and attended Pratt Institute before heading to Chicago where he studied at Northwestern University and the Institute for Design.

The Institute for Design (ID) was known in that post-war moment as “the New American Bauhaus,” a revival of the Weimar-era design school in Germany that was dedicated to a marriage of art and technology in service to social needs. It was led by luminaries Laszlo Maholy-Nagy and Serge Chermayeff and later Walter Gropius. After graduation, Cohen also taught at the school. But when the ID was incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology, the new head of the ID, Mies van der Rohe, marginalized Cohen’s basic design program. Cohen resigned.

He was subsequently recruited to create the Department of Design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale – later billed as “the Second American Bauhaus.” He built a faculty and a curriculum rooted in the same Bauhaus idea of design as a way of thinking and problem-solving that was applicable to most any creative human endeavor.

There, as throughout his career, Cohen’s philosophy was to find talented people and give them freedom to do whatever they did best. This included futurist R. Buckminster Fuller; pop art pioneer and futurist, John McHale; and internationally recognized painter and futurist, Magda Cordell McHale. Cohen pioneered the Experimental Freshman Year (EFY) at Carbondale, a program based on his conviction that the least academically talented students could thrive under the right circumstances.

After stepping down at Southern Illinois, he assumed a leadership role at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Maryland where his later investigations focused on the benefit better learning environments could provide for prisoners and troubled youth. Later, he founded the Experimental College there, based on principles similar to those of the EFY. His belief in the improvability of individuals and society never wavered.

In 1974 Buffalo called. The School of Architecture and Environmental Design faced a difficult transition. Its founding Dean, John P. Eberhard, had departed the previous year and several of his initial hires were already headed out the door. Cohen heard about the job opening through the McHales and put in his application. Cohen and UB President Robert Ketter hit it off and struck a deal. Cohen’s marching orders were simple: get the architecture program accredited. He went to work, restructuring faculty and curriculum.

Early in his tenure, Ketter told Cohen it was time to start thinking about the design of a new building on North Campus that would be the permanent home for the School. “I said, ‘no, I will not,” he told an interviewer in 2015. “‘I’m not in agriculture. I need to be in the city.’” Across more than three decades of debate and delay over where the School ought to be located, Cohen’s initial position ultimately prevailed.

Cohen was a ferocious advocate for the School – within the university and across the community. In 1976, a university-wide program review committee recommended that the School be phased out for lack of accreditation and failure to train “traditional architects who design houses and buildings.” In a scathing, blunt, and public rebuttal to the committee, Cohen basically told them they didn’t know what they were talking about. The purpose of the school was not merely to train architects for the profession as it existed but to educate the professionals who would create the architecture of the future. When a long list of cuts was announced later that year, the School was the only unit slated to add faculty.

His strategy for building the school hinged, in part, on luring well-known scholars to Buffalo. His courtship of “Bucky” Fuller floundered on his old friend’s demand for money and Fuller’s advanced age. He was already 80. Cohen also enticed John McHale to come to Buffalo and had a deal in place when McHale died suddenly at the age of 56. Cohen invited Magda McHale to join the school two years later.

Cohen’s biggest catch was star historian and critic Peter Reyner Banham who graced the school for four years at the end of the 1970s and brought Buffalo’s ensemble of concrete grain elevators and daylight factory buildings to international attention through his book A Concrete Atlantis. Perhaps even more important in the long term was Cohen’s recruitment of George Anselevicius from Harvard to be chair in architecture. It was Anselevicius who led the program to its initial accreditation in 1979, thus fulfilling Cohen’s initial promise to Ketter.

In 1977, Cohen convinced State Senator James D. Griffin, then a candidate for Mayor of Buffalo, to sponsor a planning process for the 600-block of Main Street downtown. The effort was dubbed the “Entertainment District Project,” and within Griffin’s first year as Mayor became the inspiration for the development of what is now known as Buffalo’s Theater District. It was also the prototype for dozens of community-based studio planning and design projects that made the city a classroom for the school throughout its history.

Cohen stepped down as Dean at the end of the 1983-84 academic year. But before he did he hired in one fell swoop new chairs for each of the School’s three departments: Donald Glickman, who had been his student at Southern Illinois, to be chair of Design Studies; David C. Perry, a rising political economist, as chair in Urban Planning; and Robert G. Shibley to be chair in architecture. Those appointments would shape the school for decades to come.

He created the Design Studies program in 1982. True to his Bauhaus philosophy, Cohen believed that design as a kind of meta-discipline of socially-conscious problem-solving and world-making was the necessary foundation of any academic unit that also aspired to teach architecture, planning, and any other species of design practice. After he stepped down as Dean, the program had supporters but no champion. Faculty were reassigned first to the Environmental Design program and later to Architecture.

In 1985, Cohen established the UB Health in Housing Institute (HIH), a collaboration of the School of Architecture and Planning and UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, which he and his wife, Mary D. Cohen co-directed until their retirement in 1991. Perhaps their most notable achievement was a project in the late 1980s to control infestations of the Chagas bug, which spread a debilitating disease across much of Central and South America. The two-year “WHO Project for the Control of Chagas Disease,” which included an insect trap designed by Harold and a publication written by Mary, was pilot-tested in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Cohen continued to produce his paintings and prints into his early nineties and exhibit them around the country and abroad. A chair he designed with his colleague, Davis Pratt, is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A major collection of his prints, paintings and sculptures resides at Buffalo's Burchfield Penney Art Center.

Harold and Mary Cohen, who passed away in 2020, were true partners and peers across a marriage of 69 years. They are survived by children Jano Cohen, Lore Devra Levin, and David Cohen, daughter-in-law Margaret Cohen, and grandchildren Jessica Cohen-Nowak and Adam Cohen-Nowak. A memorial for both Harold and Mary will be held in spring 2022.