Gevork Hartoonian

27 September 1946-20 December 2024

Gevork Hartoonian arrived in Sydney from New York City in 2000, to take up a Lecturer position at the University of Sydney. He had been deeply immersed in the study, and practice, of architecture from the commencement of his initial undergraduate studies at the National University of Iran in 1968. Born into the longstanding Armenian community resident in Vanak Village, then a rural enclave on the outskirts of Tehran, Hartoonian early on showed the intellect and iconoclasm that remained undimmed to his final years. His iconoclasm he attributed to growing up without a father: his intellect was a gift that saw him enrolled in the elite Alborz High School, a selective institution with an outsized influence on Iranian intellectual life.

After graduating from the National University of Iran with an M.Arch in Architecture and Urban Design in 1974, he was attracted to the legacy of Louis Kahn as an exemplar of building technique and universal aspirations. This led him to enrol in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, completing his PhD under Peter McCleary in 1982. The title reveals the shift from a particular Third-Worldism to a more integrative, indeed pervasive, view of modernity: Housing Technology: A critical evaluation of the concept of appropriate technology. This formed the basis of his lifelong interest in technology in architecture as being equally imbued with political intent, alongside such more overtly political concerns such as urban design or historical precedent.

His breakthrough book, Ontology of Construction: On nihilism of technology in theories of Modern architecture, was published in 1994, with Korean and Thai editions following in 2010 and 2017. It marked the start of a period of extraordinary productivity. Eight single-authored books followed in regular succession, with the last, Mies Contra Le Corbusier: The frame inevitable, published in 2024. All were deeply architectural, with the notion of tectonics, understood as how the necessities of architectural construction are elevated to embody intent, being an abiding theme.

These books represented only a fraction of Hartoonian’s contribution to architectural scholarship and teaching. He was deeply collegiate, and he edited a further four volumes of collected essays from his vast network of colleague historians. He would conceive these thematically, and then encourage contributions to the benefit of all. In addition he taught courses, convened symposia, and dealt with the responsibilities of the Professorship in Architecture at the University of Canberra which he held from 2012 to 2020. His prior teaching record was extensive. It included appointments at Hammons School of Architecture, Missouri, his time at Sydney University and his initial appointment to Canberra in 2003. In addition he taught at the Pratt Institute and Columbia University in New York City, amongst other institutions. He drew inspiration from other scholars, and nurtured enduring friendships with Kenneth Frampton (whose seminal book on Modern architecture was the subject of Hartoonian’s 2022 volume Reading Kenneth Frampton) and Jean-Louis Cohen.

By Harry Margalit