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Kent Cress Bloomer

Kent Cress Bloomer of Guilford, sculptor, author, professor of architectural design at the Yale School of Architecture for 53 years and director of undergraduate studies in architecture for 20, passed away in his home on Oct. 22 at the age of 88.

Bloomer was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on May 31, 1935, to Harold Franklin Bloomer and Allene Cress Bloomer. He grew up in Riverside. He attended St. Luke’s School in New Canaan and studied physics and architecture at MIT before transferring to study sculpture at the Yale School of Art and Architecture when Josef Albers of the Bauhaus was head of Yale’s Department of Design, earning a BFA in 1959 and an MFA in 1961.

Kent began his long teaching career at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Architecture, where he taught “Basic Design” from 1961 to 1966. In Pittsburgh, his sculptures won top awards in shows of the Associated Artists and the International. They were also exhibited in museums across the country from the New York Museum of Modern Art to the Los Angeles County Museum. In 1965 he founded the Kent Bloomer Studio when he was awarded the commission to design the bas-relief for Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom Temple, his first public display transitioning from stand-alone sculptures to architectural ornament which was to become his life-long pursuit. In 1966, when he was recruited to Yale by Charles Moore, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, he moved his studio to Guilford and later to the Erector Square building in New Haven.

At Yale, in 1978, he began teaching Ornament Theory and Design which evolved into a seminar he taught until his retirement in 2019. His contribution to architectural education was recognized with the school’s festschrift publication, Kent Bloomer Nature as Ornament.

Bloomer’s public ornament is visible throughout the United States, including the roof of the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library, a window wall in the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the luminaires in New York City’s Central Park, and gothic lights, display cases, gates, and more on the Yale campus. In 2018 his “Puzzle Ball” and “Dragon Gate” were constructed for the Bridge School in Shanghai.

In addition to his studio production, Bloomer is the principal author of Body, Memory, and Architecture, written with Charles Moore, and the author of The Nature of Ornament plus nine chapters in books and 32 articles in journals on subjects involving ornament. His latest manuscript, written with concert pianist Karin Nagano and completed in 2023, is a comparison of figures of ornament in music with figures of ornament in architecture.

Bloomer’s hilarious cartoons of student antics were printed in school publications throughout his student years. He was a gifted musician as well, playing Dixieland jazz drums in bands as a teenager as well as the piano, and later the Hammond B3 organ in his home. He was also an avid life-long sailor, racing in New England waters during his childhood, sailing with his family, and later transitioning from sailboats to his beloved wooden double-ender, Barnacle, on which he cruised for 20 summers with his wife.

Bloomer leaves his wife of 64 years, Leonor “Nona” Golay Bloomer; his son, Mark Clifford Bloomer, Mark’s children, Katelin Qiao Bloomer and Jasper Tian Bloomer; daughter May (Jack) Hoyt, and May’s children, Skylar Cress Bartels and Wiley Wakeman Bartels.

A memorial service is planned for May 2024 with a Dixieland band playing dirge music. The Hawley Lincoln Memorial, Guilford, is in charge of arrangements. Interment in the Leete’s Island Cemetery will be private. Memorial gifts can be made online at architecture.yale.edu/give or mailed to Kent Bloomer Scholarship, Yale School of Architecture, PO Box 208242, New Haven, CT 06520.