During his 43 years as a professor of architecture and associate dean at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture, Bruno Ast was a working architect who designed various small urban projects and notably also designed a memorial to the 1970 shooting victims at Kent State University in Ohio.
“Bruno somehow managed to navigate the dysfunctional and political world of academia, run a small practice and gain the respect of the contractors that built for him,” said Joel Putnam, a former graduate assistant of Ast’s at UIC who now works for Capri Investment Group, the firm that is redeveloping the former James R. Thompson Center in the Loop. “He was truly an architect’s architect.”
Ast, 88, died of natural causes Sept. 28 at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, said his wife of 61 years, architect Gunduz Dagdelen. Ast, who had been dealing with dementia, was a longtime Old Town resident.
Born in 1937 in Hutovo, Yugoslavia, Ast left Yugoslavia at the start of World War II when his family fled to Austria. In 1949, his family immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Kewanee, Illinois. After graduating from Kewanee High School, Ast attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture.
At U. of I., Ast met his future wife, and after their schooling, the couple lived for a year in St. Louis, where Ast worked for the Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum architectural firm. After that, Ast and Dagdelen moved to Chicago, where Ast worked as a senior architect for well-known firms, Harry Weese and Associates and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
In 1969, Ast joined the faculty of UIC’s School of Architecture, where he taught classes, served as the director of undergraduate studies and, from 1996 until 1998, worked as associate dean.
“Bruno expected dedication and excellence in his classroom, and some students were not up to the task,” said Cary Tisch, who was among a group of students who formed a fun group called the “Loyal Order of the I Beam” as a way to demonstrate seriousness of purpose. “While we did vex Bruno from time to time, he came to understand, appreciate and respect the group, as he already did the individuals, and we would have many happy gatherings over the years to celebrate our professional bonds and personal connections.”
Putnam called Ast an important mentor.
“There are few people that one comes across who have such a significant impact on one’s life trajectory and for me, Bruno was one of those,” he said. “His friendship and kind heart opened doors and set me on the path I am on today, from the trenches at Skidmore to helping lead the revitalization of the Thompson Center. I would not be where I am without his generosity and spirit.”
In 1986, Ast won a competition to design a memorial at Kent State to commemorate the 1970 massacre, during which 28 National Guard soldiers shot student demonstrators who were protesting the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War, killing four students and wounding nine others. The university had allowed 15 years to pass before deciding a memorial was appropriate.
A student walks past part of the May 4 Memorial for four Kent State students killed in 1970 in 2007. Chicago architect Bruno Ast designed the memorial. (Tony Dejak/AP)
Ast’s original $1.2 million design was judged by Kent State’s trustees to be far too costly. So he returned with a significantly scaled-down $225,000 design, which ultimately was built. The memorial, on 2.5 acres adjacent to the parking lot where the students were killed, consisted of a granite plaza with four pylons similar in shape to elongated gravestones and five granite disks imbedded in the ground, along with a bench and more than 58,000 daffodils, signifying the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The memorial was dedicated in 1990.
“This was the kind of thing every architect would give his right arm for,” Ast told the Tribune in 1990. “Not only were 13 students killed or wounded, but you go around and find professors there don’t want to talk about it because of the fissures it opened. Probably the most moving moment for me was in 1986 when (Kent State sociology professor) Dr. Jerry Lewis took me for a nickel tour of the campus. I listened to him talking to me on the site where one of the students fell — I actually burst into tears.”
Ast acknowledged that he was disappointed when the university declined to fund his original $1.2 million design, but said he remained proud of the scaled-down version.
“My memorial is to those who died as well as to those who lived,” he told the Tribune. “You also have to look at this with the view of one guy — one Chinese student standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square last spring.”
Ast returned to Kent State in 1995 for the 25-year anniversary of the killings.
“Society must have a memory,” he told the Tribune at that time, explaining that memorials such as the one at Kent State “help us remember” and “say the past is not to be the future.”
In 1970, Ast and Dagdelen started their own small architectural firm, Ast + Dagdelen. The couple specialized in the rehabilitation and recycling of older buildings, and they lectured on the topic for groups such as the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
“Good renovation is sympathetic to the original building,” Ast told the Tribune in 1976. “Not everything has to be new, but not everything is worth saving, either. The claw-footed bathtub can be re-enameled, but the state of the doorframes may make them worthless. Every part of the building has to be examined on an individual basis.”
Among the projects that Ast and Dagdelen worked on included the early-1980s conversion of an Old Town church to three town homes.
“Bruno and Gunduz’s architectural practice focused primarily on the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of vintage urban properties, and nobody did it better,” Tisch said. “In addition to being a very creative designer, Bruno was a builder who intimately understood what it would take to construct his designs, making them beautiful, practical and achievable, both for the clients and the builders. This distinguished him from many other architects who create wonderful designs, but whose designs are difficult and excessively expensive to actually build, if they can be realized at all.”
Tisch added that “it is impossible to talk about Bruno without mentioning Gunduz and their extraordinary partnership, both in the practice of architecture and in life.”
“She is her own force of nature, and together they were indomitable,” Tisch said.
After retiring, Ast enjoyed building all sorts of items out of wood in his basement workshop, his wife said.
In addition to his wife, Ast is survived by a daughter, Fatima Ast; a brother, John; and two grandchildren.
A memorial service is being planned for spring.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/20/architect-bruno-ast-obituary/
