Thomas S. Marvel, Architect of the Tropical, Dies at 80
Thomas S. Marvel, an architect whose regional style of modernism left an imprint on dozens of public buildings, churches and houses across the Caribbean, died on Tuesday at his home in San Juan, P.R. He was 80.
The cause was prostate cancer, his son Jonathan said.
Mr. Marvel first went to Puerto Rico in 1959 to build low-cost housing for the International Basic Economy Corporation, a company founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller to improve developing nations. At the end of his three-month assignment, he decided to stay.
Using local materials whenever possible, including cement mined from local limestone mountains, he designed stylish buildings sensitive to their tropical island settings. He preferred natural ventilation to air-conditioning; he also liked to use natural light and incorporate gardens into his structures.
Some of his more notable projects included the American embassies in Costa Rica and Guatemala; the United States Court House and Federal Building in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands; and, in Puerto Rico, where he did most of his work, a Carmelite convent in Trujillo Alto, the municipal building and theater in Bayamón, and several buildings for campuses of the University of Puerto Rico.
Thomas Stahl Marvel was born on March 15, 1935, in Newburgh, N.Y., where his father practiced as an architect, and grew up in the nearby village of Washingtonville.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 1956, he enrolled in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In 1958 he left Harvard to work with R. Buckminster Fuller, the uncle of his wife, the former Lucilla Fuller, who survives him. In addition to her and his son Jonathan, a partner in Marvel Architects in Manhattan, he is survived by two other sons, Deacon, an architect in Boston, and Thomas; his sisters, Susan Norris and Josephine Hull, known as Jo; and seven grandchildren.
After working on affordable housing projects in Iran and Puerto Rico, Mr. Marvel returned to Harvard to complete his master’s degree in architecture, which he received in 1962. Touring the world on a traveling fellowship, he was deeply impressed, during a brief stay in Japan, by the blurring of boundaries between interior and exterior space. He applied this approach to two houses he built for his family in San Juan, with overhanging eaves, interior patios and furniture made from local mahogany, all reflecting his design aesthetic.
In 1990 the Society of Architects and Landscape Architects of Puerto Rico gave him the Henry Klumb Award, its highest honor.
Mr. Marvel was the author of “The Architecture of the Parish Churches of Puerto Rico,” written with María Luisa Moreno, and “Antonin Nechodoma, 1877-1928: The Prairie School in the Caribbean.”
Thomas S. Marvel, Architect of the Tropical, Dies at 80
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