Richard Bergmann

Richard Bergmann, FAIA, whose career in architecture and landscape design left a profound mark on New Canaan, died in Venice, Florida, on July 4. The cause was heart failure, according to his wife Sandra Bergmann.

Richard Bergmann photo by Allan Mitchell

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1935, Bergmann spent two years of his childhood in Erfurt, Germany, and remembered seeing—from a sandbox in a public park—German tanks heading to Poland in 1939. He attended the University of Wisconsin for one year before joining the U.S. Army. His service from 1954 to 1957 included the testing of guided missiles at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, as well as a return to Germany where he witnessed the rebuilding after the War. The experience inspired him to earn a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the University of Illinois. 

Bergmann began his work as a young designer in the office of Max Urbahn, where he was part of the team responsible for NASA’s Vertical Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. With his fellow architects and engineers, he was honored in 2019 with the Florida AIA’s Test-of-Time Award for that monumental structure, which is still a vital part of the Space Center. 

He moved to New Canaan as part of the second wave of modernist architects drawn to the town. Bergmann said that writing a college term paper on New Canaan’s midcentury houses made him want to move to the town. In his words, “We came to see Philip Johnson’s all-glass house and stayed.” The Bergmanns became known for their preservation efforts on behalf of New Canaan’s modern architecture beginning in the 1990s when many of the houses were in danger of being demolished.

One of Bergmann’s residential designs, the Latham House, 1979, is included in the 2008 New Canaan Modern Homes Survey, which documents New Canaan’s internationally known midcentury-modern architecture. His own 1836 Greek Revival House on Park Street, once owned by famed editor Maxwell Perkins, was one of Bergmann’s best-known projects and became a case study for adaptive reuse. The house was transformed from what had become four apartments (with four kitchens) to an architectural office, a residence, and a much-published garden design —with stepped terraces—included in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens. Inside the house, period woodwork was painstakingly restored in several areas. The house is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

His architectural projects in New Canaan include the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society Annex (the large, barn-shaped addition), and expansions, additions, or renovations of St. Michael’s Church, the United Methodist Church, and Bob’s Sports. In Irwin Park, he created a children’s puzzle and maze, built into the landscape. He was the architect for Stew Leonard’s flagship store in Norwalk, and the Sharp House, designed for racing driver Bob Sharp, in Wilton. He also served as restoration architect for the Lockwood Mathews Mansion in Norwalk.

The Connecticut Chapter of the Society of American Landscape Architects recognized Bergmann with an open-space innovation award for the landscape design for the Noroton Presbyterian Church in Darien. His design for a wall-hanging of Christian crosses, executed in needlepoint by parishioners, also received honors from the national AIA in the category of religious art.

Bergmann studied restoration at the University of York in England, and later, at age 70, attended Cornell to take a site-planning course as a prerequisite for a license to practice landscape architecture. He was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1982. He also served as chairman of the international awards program for the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture in 1992. A board member of the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society for over 20 years, he was also Chairman of the Historic District Commission for more than 25 years. In 1994, he was the first recipient of the Connecticut AIA’s service award in historic preservation for work done throughout the state. 

In recent years, in addition to landscape architecture, he continued his work in the fine arts, especially in stainless-steel sculpture. His award-winning drawings and photos are in the Drawings and Prints Collection of the American Institute of Architecture Foundation.

“He was a Renaissance man,” said Chris Schipper, former president of the New Canaan Land Trust. “With his international background, military training, his architectural work, and later in life adding landscape architecture to all of that—he could do it all. And there was his complete workshop capability of fabricating. He was a founding member of GreenLink. We did a project to link Irwin Park and the Nature Center.” Schipper remembered Bergmann’s “blue eyes, big smile, and red cheeks,” and recalled, “he always had ideas, and he was great at making it work with what you have—and then he would do some of the work himself, building bridges for the walkways, doing the metal work or the carpentry.”

The Bergmanns lived and worked in Norwalk in the artists’ colony of Silvermine from 1966 to 1973, where he renovated the historic 1840 Hyatt-Guthrie barn as a studio. They made New Canaan their home from 1973 to 2018, when they moved to Venice, Florida. He is survived by his wife Sandra, who worked alongside him at their firm for more than fifty years. He is also survived by his sister, Doris Petersen, of Palo Alto, California, and a cousin, Trey Urbahn, of New Canaan. A memorial will take place in New Canaan in September.