Wright Auction

Modernist architect Gene Summers was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1926. He studied at Texas A&M University and Illinois Institute of Technology with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Summers started his illustrious career in 1950 by assisting Mies with landmark structures such as the Farnsworth House, Seagram Building, and the National Gallery of Berlin. Over time, Summers earned a reputation as Mies' right-hand man. Hired upon completion of the graduate program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Summers worked with Mies for sixteen years altogether.

In 1967, Summers became a partner at C.F. Murphy Associates, where he completed the McCormick Center of Chicago and Kemper Arena in Kansas City, among many other remarkable buildings. Summers relocated to California in 1973 and partnered with Phyllis Lambert, whom he had met during construction of the Seagram Building. Together, Summers and Lambert designed, developed, restored, and renovated various significant properties, most notably the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, on which they collaborated with the artist Jim Dine.

Summers began creating furniture and sculpture out of his home and studio located in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, and his apartment in Monaco during the mid-1980s. In just a few years, Summers designed more than 100 works in bronze, his influences ranging from Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. In 1988, a solo exhibition, Works in Bronze: Gene Summers, was held at Powell Kleinschmidt, Chicago. In 2011, Summers died in Sebastopol, California, at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind an important legacy that continues to influence the worlds of architecture and design.