James Marston Fitch

James Marston Fitch (1909–2000) was an architect and a preservationist, one of the founders of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in 1964. He was a member of the faculty there from 1954 to 1977, and received an honorary Litt.D. in 1980. The Schools has established a lecture series in his honor, and endowed a named professorship, currently held by Andrew Dolkart.

After leaving the Columbia faculty, he become director of historic preservation at the private architecture and planning firm, Beyer Blinder Belle. He led the fight that prevented the construction of an expressway through Soho, to save the buildings at what is now the South Street Seaport, and, in the 1990s, he supervised the renovation of Grand Central Terminal.

The James Marston Fitch Foundation, established in his honor in 1988, awards $25,000-dollar research grants for historic preservation.

The activist Jane Jacobs considered that Fitch "was the principal character in making the preservation of historic buildings practical and feasible and popular."

Books

 * American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It (1947, updated 1999)
 * Walter Gropius (1960)
 * Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty (1961)
 * Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (1982)

Essays

 * Physical and Metaphysical in Architectural Criticism
 * Murder at the Modern (1997)