DESIGN FOR LIVING - CHARLES CENTER

“It’s like that movie Big Fish, you can’t believe all this happened in the life of a single person,” says Tom Gamper of SM+P Architects. “But with George, it did.”

- Ron Cassie

Pictured at far right with Archibald Rogers, Francis Taliaferro, and Charles Lamb, founders of the groundbreaking architecture firm RTKL, George Kostritsky died of COVID-19 complications in July, shortly after his 98th birthday.

A gifted urban planner, the last of the original RTKL partners (now the global firm CallisonRTKL), Kostritsky left an impact on cities across the country, most notably his beloved adopted hometown. At the behest of the Greater Baltimore Committee, he arrived in 1957 to help with nascent plans to revitalize downtown, which was already suffering the consequences of suburban flight. A big-picture thinker, Kostritsky soon became the lead planner of the pioneering 33-acre Charles Center project, which eventually included the rehabilitation or construction of a dozen buildings and series of plazas and interconnected stairways that remain a modernist landmark. In the process, Kostritsky created and obtained U.S. patents for the unique sugar cube-shaped streetlamps that brighten Charles Center’s public spaces to this day. None other than acclaimed urbanist, activist, and author Jane Jacobs, who penned The Life and Death of Great American Cities, visited Baltimore and praised the early example of adaptive re-use “in the very heart of downtown . . . for precisely the things that belong in the heart of downtown.”