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Alan Buchsbaum (1935-1987)
Born in Savannah, Georgia, Alan Buchsbaum was a talented, creative, and innovative architect and designer. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Bachelor of Architecture in 1961. Buchsbaum then went to New York where he would remain for the rest of his life. He worked for five years in several New York firms and then traveled around Europe and Asia when he came back in 1967 to start his own practice which he named the Design Coalition. It is his work under the auspices of this firm which would propel him to become the designer for many well-known and wealthy clients. In addition to being a designer, he was a photographer, food critic, and a gracious and generous friend.
His exposure to architecture from the perspective of technological institutions during the height of modernism helped shape his aesthetic sense as he was credited with being the originator of what has been called the high tech style, which incorporated new and industrial-related components, processes, and pop culture symbols in his residential designs. Highly sensitive to changing tastes and the needs of his clients, Buchsbaum created very livable rooms, spaces, furnishings, and buildings for his patrons, who included Diane Keaton, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Bette Midler, and Ellen Barkin.
At the time of his death Michael Sorkin, New York architect and architecture critic for the Village Voice, described Buchsbaum as,
