Eugene Kohn, designer of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, has died

He was 92 years old. He was the co-founder of the Kohn Pedersen Fox studio which designed some of the most famous skyscrapers, including four of the ten tallest buildings in the world New York, 11 Mar. US architect Eugene Kohn, co-founder of the Kohn Pedersen Fox studio which designed some of the most famous skyscrapers, including four of the ten tallest buildings in the world, died on Thursday 9 March at his home in Montecito, California, at the age aged 92. The cause of his death was pancreatic cancer, as his wife Barbara Shattuck Kohn told the New York Times. Eugene Kohn (born in Philadelphia on December 12, 1930) with William Pedersen and Sheldon Fox founded the architectural studio in 1976 which, with its current over 650 employees – between the New York headquarters and the branches in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, London, Seoul and Shanghai – is today one of the most important international design groups, characterized by high professionalism and particular attention to the sustainability of buildings. The Kpf studio has designed more than 250 skyscrapers around the world, including the World Financial Center in Shanghai and the Lotte Super Tower in Seoul, which with its 123 floors and 555 meters in height is one of the tallest buildings on the planet . Among the projects designed by Kohn are also the headquarters of Unilever and Amazon in London, the headquarters of the World Bank in Washington, the international airport of Abu Dhabi, the International Commerce Center in Hong Kong (a 118-story tower houses offices and the Ritz Carlton hotel), the headquarters of Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Baruch College in Manhattan, the headquarters of IBM in Armonk and the Infinity Tower in Sao Paulo. Among the best known and most significant recent achievements of the Kpf studio are: the World Financial Center in Shanghai (1997-2008); the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo (2000-03); the Danube House in Prague (2001-03); the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas (2007-9); the Tour First in the Parisian suburb of La Défense (2007-11), the result of the radical restructuring and elevation of a pre-existing building from 1974; the United States Courthouse in Buffalo (2007-10); the Science Teaching and Student Services Center of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (2010).