The Albert Szabo and Brenda Dyer Szabo Collection

Albert Szabo (1925-2003) was born in Brooklyn, NY. He served in the US Air Force during World War II, then attended Brooklyn College where he majored in fine arts. After Brooklyn College he apprenticed at Marcel Breuer’s studio. He next studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago, under Serge Chermayeff, and subsequently earned his M.Arch. at Harvard’s Department of Architecture, then chaired by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in Germany. During his student years at Harvard, as President of the GSD Student Council in 1950-1951, he organized a symposium on architectural education that brought together an unusual gathering of personalities involved in architectural education at the time: Walter Gropius, William Wurster (the dean at MIT), Catherine Bauer, Sigfried Giedion, and George Howe (then dean at Yale). In 1952 he established an architectural practice with his wife Brenda Dyer Szabo. The two met when they were students at the GSD. Immediately after graduation Albert Szabo taught for two years at the Institute of Design in Chicago, before returning to Harvard where he taught since 1954 when he was invited by Josep Lluis Sert to join the Faculty of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design. In 1964 Szabo became chair of the newly created Department of Architectural Sciences, a forerunner of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), a department he co-founded in 1968 with Eduard Sekler, a colleague at the GSD. The Department of Visual and Environmental Studies was housed at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and introduced undergraduate students at Harvard and Radcliffe to the practice of visual arts. Szabo later became the Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Art Emeritus in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and professor of Architecture Emeritus at the Graduate School of Design.

From 1974 to 1976 Albert Szabo conducted field research in Afghanistan while teaching architecture as the Senior Fulbright Hayes Lecturer in Architecture at Kabul University. His research focused initially on the study of four villages in Afghanistan, designed to document the variety of Afghan domestic village architecture. He worked in close collaboration with anthropologist Thomas J. Barfield. The research soon expanded in documenting a broader context and was later published in 1991 in the book titled “Afghanistan: an Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architecture.” The atlas (awarded a citation as outstanding academic book in art and architecture by the American Library Association) examines the morphology of Afghan domestic architecture both in their architectural and ethnographic contexts, exploring the hierarchy of physical and cultural influences responsible for its form and aggregation. The research involved photography, measured drawings, and information acquired from the inhabitants. The Atlas documents 29 structure types and 15 variants, with a total of 44 distinct nomadic, seasonal, and sedentary structures with specific distribution maps for each building type. The types and their distribution are derived from previously published maps or descriptions, or modified by personal observations or those of researchers consulted during Szabo’s stay in Afghanistan. In 1979 Szabo started a seminar on indigenous architecture at the GSD, and he was also a frequent advisor to the US Agency for International Development. Szabo retired from teaching in 1996, after 42 years at Harvard. Szabo died December 17, 2003 in Cambridge.