Obituary

Lee F. Hodgden, professor emeritus of architecture who taught at Cornell for 34 years, died in his Ithaca home Aug. 24. He was 78.

Hodgden had a long and varied career as an architect as well as an architectural educator. He worked as a young man with visionary architectural inventor Buckminster Fuller, promoter of the geodesic dome. The association inspired Hodgden's lifelong interest in the complex geometry of architectural structure. Active until his death, Hodgden recently completed a new structural system and built a model of it.

Hodgden served in the U.S. military during World War II. While in Japan as part of the U.S. occupation there, he became fascinated with Japanese architecture. When he returned to the United States, after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas in 1946, he decided to pursue an advanced degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he studied under renowned Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, earning his M.Arch. degree in 1949.

During a year's teaching stint at North Carolina State College, he also was associated with the architecture practice of Mathew Nowicki, where he first met Fuller. In 1954 he received a Fulbright grant to study public housing in Finland, where he reconnected with Aalto and became the first American to join the Finnish master's practice.

He then returned to the United States to teach at the University of Texas and there became associated with a group of pioneering architectural educators known familiarly as "the Texas Rangers." The group included Colin Rowe, Werner Seligmann, Bernhard Hoesli and John Shaw, all of whom went on to join Cornell's architecture faculty. Hodgden came to Cornell in 1961, following two years at the University of Oregon, where he had begun a lifelong association with pre-eminent British architectural educator Alvin Boyarsky.

During his academic career at Cornell, Hodgden was known as an exciting and inspiring teacher, and many of his students went on to become well-known architects. "The students assigned to his section always considered themselves lucky, exulting, 'I got Lee!'" one former student recently reminisced.

Hodgden became an emeritus professor at Cornell in 1995.

He is survived by his wife, Laurel; daughter, Kyllikki Inman; granddaughter, Katelyn Inman; and brothers Burton and Hugh "Jerry" Hodgden.