Robert Kuehn, 1942-2006
As I was heading home yesterday I saw CHAPA’s Aaron Gornstein, looking grim and distant. He told me, to my shock, that Bob Kuehn of Keen Development had died of a sudden heart attack. “And I saw him just this morning,” Aaron said mournfully.
At Bob’s gala 60th birthday party — held, fittingly enough, in Upstairs on the Square, a Harvard Square restaurant housed in a historic rehab building — were displayed two blown-up photographs: one of a tall slim young man, pink-cheeked and bright-faced, labeled New Construction; beside it another of the same man thirty-five years later, gray-bearded, broader of beam, clothing in rumpled woolly disarray, similarly smiling, labeled Historic Rehab. For that was Bob’s passion, the rehab of historic buildings, their transformation from abandoned anachronisms into adaptively reused jewels. If Bob had been a hindu deity, his avatar would have been a filigreed weathered brick.
In the early Seventies, when Bob was starting his career after being trained (Yale, twice) as an architect and urban planner, most people thought of ’subsidized housing’ (as it was then called) as a shoebox into which an inert tenant was dropped, and through which subsidy was pumped. They were people storage, no more. Bob was one of those who changed our thinking, demanding in every one of his properties that the building’s character, its exoskeletal personality, be respected.
Affordability was for him a device, a financing tool that he deftly used, the occupancy certainly a worthwhile use and good public policy — Bob compiled an impressive resume of service on umpteen advisory groups, panels, and commissions — but regardless of use, for Bob it was always about the buildings. It was as if he were more winemaker than developer, seeking to express each building’s unique terroir. His unit mixes used to drive me to distraction, since they always overflowed any standardized input grid I designed. He seemed to take it as a point of puckish pride that every apartment should have a different square footage and hence a different rent. After all, would you dress all your children in identical clothing?
He never tired of showcasing the buildings, and spoke of them fondly, as if relating his children’s accomplishments, always by their historical name — Baker Chocolate, Kennedy Biscuit (where the Fig Newton was invented), Audubon. I have a feeling he saw lenders, investors, owners, and residents all as ephemera from the building’s perspective, flickering through a scrolling calendar of days like leaves outside the force field of H. G. Wells’ Time Machine traveler, our buzzing activities simply an economic energy field from which the buildings could draw sustenance and life.
Fittingly, his office was in an ivy-covered
When I posted about Max Kargman, Bob added his own appreciation: as with most of his commentaries, it was wryly ursine, faintly self-deprecating, respectful of history, and witty.
Too soon you left us, Bob. Too soon.
UPDATE: The Boston Globe’s obituary is here. A memorial service for Bob is being held Wednesday, June 21, in the courtyard of
