James Rossant papers, 1950s-1990s

James Stephan Rossant was born in 1928 in New York City. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1946, then attended Columbia University for one year before receiving his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Florida in 1950. He enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, with the support of recent graduate Paul Rudolph, and received his Masters in City and Regional Planning in 1953. In 1956, following a brief tenure at the office of Gino Valle in Udine, Rossant began a long tenure in the firm of Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey, becoming a partner in 1967. Later the same year, he co-founded the successor firm of Conklin & Rossant (later Conklin Rossant Architects or CRA) with William J Conklin; this partnership lasted until 1995, when Rossant and Conklin each founded eponymous sole proprietorships.

Among the significant architectural projects in which he participated are the planning of the "new town" of Reston, Virginia and its first Village Center; the unrealized plans for a National Capital Center in Dodoma, Tanzania; and the Myriad Botanical Garden in Oklahoma City. Rossant was particularly active in his home city, with noteworthy New York projects including planning and design concepts for the Lower Manhattan Plan (including unrealized early versions of Battery Park City), the influential Butterfield House apartments, the Metro North Riverview housing and school complex, Brooklyn's Cadman Towers, and his own SoHo townhouse, among others. Throughout much of the same period he was also active as a teacher at several institutions, including a long affiliation with Pratt Institute, and as a member of the Arts Commission of the City of New York, among other organizations. His parallel production of imaginary cities, realized in drawings and paintings including the "Cities in the Sky" series, received attention through a number of gallery exhibitions and a segment on the CNN television program "Future Watch."

While his work included houses, apartment buildings, religious buildings and other smaller-scale institutional commissions, the architectural press and Rossant's own reflections on his work emphasize his contributions as a master-planner of larger-scale urban compositions. The collection's holdings of his work in this category offer excellent distillations of wider trends in postwar North American Modernist practice. Most famously, in the "new town" of Reston, Virginia, designed in the early 1960s, Rossant and his collaborators combined a Modernist architectural language with garden-city principles, an enthusiasm for European plazas, and the street-oriented, high-density urban townhouse living championed by Jane Jacobs and other critics of orthodox Modernist planning. Similar concerns are reflected in various built and unbuilt designs from the 1960s and 1970s, including the Lower Manhattan studies, Metro North Riverview, the Bronx's Lavanburg Community, Baltimore's Old Town, postal-worker towns in Florida, and the Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia. The collection also offers windows into other trends in Modernist urbanism, particularly the use of large-scale climate-controlling envelopes, seen in a competition entry for Regina; the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City; and most dramatically, a set of geodesic domes (in the manner of Richard Buckminster Fuller) enclosing downtown Poughkeepsie.

By the 1980s, likely reflecting a shift in available funding streams and commissions, Conklin and Rossant's planning work was more often for private residential communities on suburban sites. These lesser-known projects (such as the Admiralty, Eagle Chase, the Hamlet on Spring Pond, and the Villas Lucania) often retain the Reston-era interest in "clusters" of townhouse-type housing units. Around the same time, two unbuilt projects in African cities – the "Island City" expansion in Lagos, Nigeria and the civic and commercial centers for Dodoma, Tanzania – indicate a further shift towards an urbanism of figural outdoor spaces, linked together as an unfolding series of pedestrian experiences; these might also be seen as reflecting the influence of landmark Postmodern works like Rowe & Koetter's Collage City (1978), Rob Krier's Stadtraum (1975), and Charles Moore's Kresge College (circa 1966-1974). Several of the later building-scale projects (such as the Jericho Jewish Center, the Mason Pavilion, and the "Tempietto" addition to Rossant's own house) similarly appear to engage with Postmodern design tendencies.

In 1955, James Rossant married the gourmet Colette Palacci, later a teacher, restaurateur, and prolific cookbook author. They would remain wed until James Rossant's death; details of their life together can be found in Colette Rossant's series of culinary memoirs, particularly The World in My Kitchen: The Adventures of a (Mostly) French Woman in America (New York: Atria Books, 2007). They had four children: the educator Marianne Rossant, the architect and novelist Cécile Niemitz-Rossant, the culinary journalist Juliette Rossant, and the architect Tomas Rossant (today a design partner with Ennead Architects, successor to the firm of James Rossant's New York peer James Stewart Polshek). In 2007, James Rossant approached Avery Drawings & Archives concerning the possibility of donating his architectural papers and drawings in order to "assure their future." Following his death in 2009, the collection was transferred to Avery.