Notes & Comments April 2021
Richard Driehaus, 1942–2021
On a supporter of our efforts.
We note with sorrow the passing of Richard Driehaus, a longtime benefactor of The New Criterion. Richard was the genius behind “momentum investing,” a strategy whose fruits enabled him to become one of America’s most important cultural philanthropists. He was especially interested in architecture, an amphibious art form with one foot in the realm of aesthetics, the other in the realm of civic reality. Unlike many of our most celebrated starchitects and their enablers, Richard understood that the measure of good architecture is the human body, not the ego of the architect. He supported a wide range of classically oriented architectural enterprises, most conspicuously through the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, for classical architecture, which he established in 2003, in part as an alternative to the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which has tended to specialize in celebrating the trendier precincts of architectural ambition. Richard’s generosity supported a great deal of The New Criterion’s architectural criticism over the last decade. We are deeply grateful for his support, moral and intellectual as well as material, and we mourn his loss.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 39 Number 8, on page 3
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