Richard Giegengack; Designed Prominent D.C. Buildings

Richard A. Giegengack, 65, an architect who designed several significant Washington area buildings, including Metropolitan Square on 15th Street in downtown Washington, died Jan. 11 of prostate cancer at the Washington Home and Community Hospice. He was a resident of the District.

When he was a partner in the Washington office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Mr. Giegengack played a key role in the 1976 bicentennial master plan for the Mall and Constitution Gardens, as well as the Northeast Corridor Improvement Project, which involved major renovations and restorations of eight National Historic Landmark railroad stations between Boston and Washington. For Providence, R.I., he designed and built a new railroad station.

In the 1980s, Mr. Giegengack helped persuade Congress and then-Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole to rescue Washington's badly deteriorated Union Station and restore the building to the splendor of architect Daniel Burnham's beaux-arts vision. He also urged that the venerable building, designated at the time as the National Visitor Center, be restored to its original purpose. Although another architectural firm completed the restoration of what Mr. Giegengack called "the mother station," it relied on his master plan.

His other Washington area buildings include the American Center for Physics, a striking white building on 24 acres of greenery in College Park; the Demonet project at Connecticut Avenue and M Street NW, a combination of restoration and new construction; and Jefferson Court, an office complex constructed in 1985 at the foot of the Georgetown hill between Thomas Jefferson and 30th streets NW.

In 1985, Washington Post architecture writer Benjamin Forgey described Jefferson Court as "one of the nicest new buildings in town, a massive structure combining boldness and strength with a certain delicacy of detail."

Washington architect David Childs said there was no signature Giegengack style, in part because his longtime friend and former SOM partner was acutely sensitive to context, appropriateness and the nature of the surroundings.

"Like [Eero] Saarinen, who was a major influence on his work, he always started with the program and then would respond to it in unique ways," Childs said. "It's hard to track a style but not hard to track that attitude."

He had an abiding interest in historic preservation, so there was a bit of irony in the fact that one of his most significant Washington buildings, Metropolitan Square, raised preservationist hackles when it was constructed in the early 1980s. The location -- 15th and F streets NW, site of the Old Ebbitt Grill -- was occupied by the historic Rhodes Tavern, which had to be razed for the huge office-retail complex that developer Oliver T. Carr Jr. wanted to build across from the Treasury Department.

Mr. Giegengack was convinced that the historic integrity of the tavern, the oldest commercial building downtown, had been lost years earlier, and J. Carter Brown, the influential chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, agreed. Brown called the tavern "the missing tooth in the smile of 15th Street."

The Post labeled Metropolitan Square "a sophisticated addition to the city."

Richard Augustus Giegengack was born in New York City and received a bachelor's degree in 1963 and a master's degree in architecture in 1968, both from Yale University.

He worked for ICON in Washington and for Peter J.B. Vercelli ARIBA in New Haven, Conn., before joining SOM's Washington office in 1973. He also worked in the firm's New York office and served as a design partner in the SOM office in London. In 1993, he opened his own Washington-based architectural firm.

Since 1994, he had been working on the restoration, preservation and enhancement of a legendary Adirondack retreat purchased in 1920 by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and now owned by Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. Known as Camp Topridge, the 105-acre compound, including 40 buildings, is surrounded by New York's 6 million-acre Adirondack Park.

Mr. Giegengack worked to stay true to the Adirondack style of rustic architecture as he renovated or rebuilt buildings and designed new ones. As described in the January-February 2007 issue of Veranda magazine, he painstakingly rebuilt several architecturally significant structures, including the Honeymoon Cabin and adjacent Honeymoon Bridge, 10 guest cabins, a new boathouse with room for six boats and an open-air chapel. He also designed a treehouse to be used as guest quarters and a whimsical thatched structure called Hagrid's Hut, named for the character in the Harry Potter books.

Survivors include four sisters and two brothers.