Max Abramovitz

Max Abramovitz was born on May 23, 1908, in Chicago, Illinois, the child of Romanian Jewish immigrants. 

He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduated from their School of Architecture in 1929. In 1931, he received an M.S. from Columbia’s Architecture School. Abramovitz was the recipient of a two-year fellowship in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. After his return to the United States, he partnered with Wallace Harrison (1895-1981) to form the Harrison & Abramovitz firm (1945) in New York City. He died in his home in Pound Ridge, NY in 2004. 

Abramovitz was a world-renowned architect who helped build the skyline of cities across America after World War II. In addition to the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Building in Hartford (1961), some of his most famous work include The Avery Fisher Hall (1962) at Lincoln Center (now known as David Geffen Hall) and the Tour Gan in Paris (1974). In addition to various awards, Abramovitz won the Rome Prize for emerging architects in 1961. Abramovitz’s work was boldly modernist in style and used glass and metal with aplomb and sculptural character.