Randall Stout, an environmentally sensitive architect who earned a reputation for designing dynamically shaped regional museums, died of cell cancer on July 11 at the age of 56. Stout was an associate with Frank Gehrys before establishing his own firm in 1996 in Los Angeles. He explored the relationship between architecture and energy in holistic designs that were no less sculptural and humane for being ecologically responsible. Sustainability helped shape form.
He started his firm with a series of internationally admired commissions for energy plants, fire stations and sports centres in Germany. The structures had turbulent forms and canyonesque spaces, with sculptural solids juxtaposed against light-filled voids, and were often built on tight budgets using inexpensive, energy-smart materials.
In the U.S., he specialised in cultural projects, especially mid-size museums. His portfolio includes the cliff-like Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, perched on a bluff along the Tennessee River; the glacier-like Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia; the strikingly cantilevered Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, and the AGA art gallery at Alberta, Canada.
Besides museums, his commissions included vigorously angled, improbably avant-garde police stations in Southern California and rugged, eco-friendly houses in the mountains. With inexpensive material such as wood framing, standing-seam metal roofs and stucco he made one modest commission, the low-cost Dockweiler Beach Youth Center at Dockweiler State Beach in the Playa del Rey section of Los Angeles, into an informal monument whose roofscape of broken planes evokes the crashing waves just beyond it.
He found inspiration in the jagged natural forms and weather-worn walls of the canyons and mountains in which he frequently hiked. His structures could look as natural as the cliffs he climbed. He believed, as many great architects do, in architecture as a spiritual calling, not just a profession.
