A gifted urban planner and the last of the founding partners of RTKL – now global architecture, planning and design firm CallisonRTKL – George Kostritsky left his mark on the design of cities throughout the U.S.
“Urban planning is embedded in CallisonRTKL’s DNA,” says CallisonRTKL President and CEO Kelly Farrell. “Our deep understanding of urban environments began with George Kostritsky.”
George met eventual co-founders Archibald Rogers, Francis Taliaferro and Charles Lamb—then known as architectural firm Rogers, Taliaferro and Lamb – while doing planning work for the Charles Center project; a major urban redevelopment in Baltimore’s business district. The three architects were impressed by the methodology that George brought to the project as well as his approach to redesigning downtowns. In 1961, they asked George to join them as a partner. Months later, the firm shortened their name to RTKL (it was said that their receptionist simply got tired of reciting the firm’s full name) and moved from Annapolis to Baltimore. Soon, the young firm was designing the Charles Center’s public spaces.
With the addition of George, RTKL transformed from an architecture firm into an architectural, urban planning and design firm and applied its planning experience from the Charles Center to projects in Albany, New York; Hartford, Connecticut; Eugene, Oregon and Charlotte, North Carolina.
“George hired many of our earliest partners, including Harold Adams, FAIA, who served as RTKL’s managing architect and then as president over the course of 36 years,” adds Farrell. “The master plan projects in our portfolio today span the globe – from Beijing to Abu Dhabi to Brasilia. George’s legacy is unmatched.”
In 1968, under the auspices of RTKL, George submitted patent applications for both a streetlamp and its luminaire for Charles Center. You can still see them downtown today– some 50 years later.
“My dad was always sketching,” says George’s daughter Juliet Kostritsky, a lawyer and professor at Case Western University’s School of Law in Cleveland. “One day, he went down into our basement and used his electric saw to build a wooden model of the Charles Center South Office Tower. When he came upstairs, he was so excited to show it to us. I don’t remember a lot from when I was a kid, but that I remember like it was yesterday.”
The streetlamps were to make another appearance in the Fountain Square project in Cincinnati, Ohio. The 1971 renovation in the center of the city reoriented the fountain and expanded the plaza. The square soon became an important public gathering place and won the AIA’s first National Award in Urban Design in 1973.
George Eugene Kostritsky was born on July 13, 1922 in Shanghai, where his Russian immigrant parents had found safe harbor after a harrowing trek across Siberia to flee the Bolsheviks. When George was four, the family moved to San Francisco where he was raised and attended Polytechnic High School.
Fluent in Russian, he joined the Navy during World War II and served as a Russian interpreter in North Carolina. He married Margaret (Penny) Long Kostritsky in 1943 and moved back to San Francisco soon after. George earned a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master’s degree in Planning and Urban Design from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1952. His thesis, “The Neighborhood Concept: An Evaluation,” studied the “the neighborhood unit theory and its applicability to urban areas, focusing not of the adequacy of the physical features for resolving physical problems but on its adequacy for serving social needs.”
George began his career in architecture and planning with Mayer & Whittlesey in New York. He moved with his family to Baltimore in 1957 at the behest of David Wallace, who led a team in the redevelopment of Charles Center in Baltimore where he met his future RTKL partners. In Baltimore, the couple became close friends with writer and activist Jane Jacobs and were both included in Jacobs’ seminal book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” published in 1961. George was an AIA member in Maryland and the District of Columbia from 1963 to 1976.
In the late 1970’s, George became an urban design consultant for the United Nations Planning and Urban Design in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He retired in 1995, having taught architecture at Harvard University, the University of Oregon and Howard University.
George died in Baltimore on July 30, 2020 from coronavirus complications. His wife Margaret passed away in 1991. In addition to his daughter Juliet Kostritsky, George is survived by Sheila Hoffman of Baltimore, his companion since 1995; son Gyorgy, of Timonium, Maryland; son-in-law, Bradford Gellert of Cleveland; and grandson, Christopher Gellert of Paris.