Gunnar birkerts biography

Gunnar Birkerts (1925- ) has an international practice and a reputation for dramatic expressionist buildings. His only work in the Upper Peninsula, the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, is typically sculptural and striking.

Biography

Birkerts was born in Riga, Latvia, on January 17, 1925.

He attended Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, where he obtained a degree in architecture and engineering in 1949,¹ and in 1950-1951 Birkerts worked at Perkins and Will, an architectural firm in Chicago. From 1951-1954, he worked for Eero Saarinen and Associates in Bloomfield Hills, MI, until he was taken on as lead designer by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates in Birmingham, MI, from 1955-1959.

In 1959 Birkerts started his own firm along with Franc Straub in Birmingham, MI. Birkerts and Straub became Gunnar Birkerts and Associates in 1962.² Around the same time as starting his own firm, Birkerts became a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan.

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