In passing: Kisho Kurokawa, architect
Kisho Kurokawa, an architect known for designs that merge traditional architecture and philosophy, died October 12. He was 73.
Kurokawa died of heart failure, said Keiko Yamazaki, spokeswoman at the Tokyo Women’s Medical University Hospital, where he was hospitalized with an intestinal ailment.
Kurokawa led a style known as the Metabolism Movement, advocating a shift from “machine principle” to “life principle” in his work and architectural designs based on themes including ecology, recycling and intermediate space.
His major works include the National Ethnological Museum in Tokyo, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Kurokawa’s design of the Kuala Lumpur airport won the 2003/2004 Dedalo-Minosse International Prize and was certified as a sustainable airport by the United Nations’ Green Globe 21 in 2003.
WASHINGTON
William Crowe, retired admiral
William Crowe, a submarine officer who rose to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and served as ambassador to Great Britain, has died. He was 82.
The retired admiral died early Thursday at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the Navy announced. No cause of death was released.
Crowe volunteered for duty in Vietnam at age 44. Years later, as only the third admiral to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Crowe presided over the military conflict with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the Navy’s protection of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war and a groundbreaking series of meetings with his Soviet counterpart as the Cold War thawed in the late 1980s.
President Reagan named Crowe the 11th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1985. He turned down President George H.W. Bush’s offer of a third two-year term and retired from the military in 1989.
In 1992, he endorsed Democrat Bill Clinton for the presidency instead of Bush, saying he was upset with Republican campaign attacks on Clinton for not serving in Vietnam.
Two years later, President Clinton appointed him ambassador to the Court of St. James, where he served until 1997.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands
Jan Wolkers, writer, sculptor
Novelist, poet and sculptor Jan Wolkers, whose sex-charged books helped shake off the shackles of postwar conservatism in the Netherlands, died at his home on the North Sea island of Texel, his publisher said. He was 81.
Wolkers died Friday. His best-known book was “Turkish Delight,” about a stormy relationship between a sculptor and his girlfriend who break up and are reunited shortly before she dies of a brain tumor.
It was published in 1969 and has been translated into a dozen languages. In 1973, it was made into a film, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Rutger Hauer, that was nominated for an Oscar and voted Best Dutch Film of the 20th century.
Considered one of the four best postwar Dutch writers, Wolkers won but declined the country’s highest literary honors.
Wolkers studied painting in Leiden at the end of World War II and sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam from 1949-53. He started writing in 1957, said his publisher, De Bezige Bij.
As a sculptor, Wolkers created Amsterdam’s Auschwitz Monument – a bed of shattered mirrors covered with glass in a small park. A memorial ceremony for victims of the Holocaust is held at the site annually.
NEW YORK
Teresa Brewer, jazz singer
Singer Teresa Brewer, who topped the charts in the 1950s with such hits as “Till I Waltz Again with You” and performed with jazz legends Count Basie and Duke Ellington, died Wednesday. She was 76.
Brewer died at her home in New Rochelle of a neuromuscular disease, said family spokesman Bill Munroe.
Brewer had scores of hits in the 1950s and a burgeoning film career but pared down her public life to raise her children. She re-emerged a decade later to perform with jazz greats Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis.
Brewer had close to 40 songs that topped the charts, Munroe said, including “Dancin’ with Someone,” “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,” “Ricochet” and “Let Me Go Lover.”