Robert Ernest was an architect of rare promise and remarkable early
success, whose award-winning career was cut short by cancer at age 28 in
1962. Despite the brevity of Ernest's life, his education and practice
were intertwined with some of the most important figures in
architecture, including his interactions with Louis I. Kahn and Paul
Rudolph.
Ernest's exceptional architectural designs, though honored during his
lifetime with three Progressive Architecture Awards and one Record
Houses Award, have never been documented in a comprehensive manner, and
are now almost completely lost to disciplinary history. Yet the
materials in the architect's personal and professional archives--upon
which this book is almost entirely based--clearly indicate that Ernest
was a remarkably talented and unusually gifted architectural designer,
whose future promise and potential were inestimable.
Ernest's two built works, both realized before he had turned 28, his one
work built after his death, as well as the remarkably innovative
unrealized projects documented in his archives, indicate that had Ernest
lived to a normal lifespan, he would have without question been one of
the most important architects of his generation, with the potential to
design precedent-setting buildings equal to those realized by the most
recognized architects in the sixty years after his death.
