The refined design of Manhattan high-rise offices and refined designs with lush layouts for residential interiors helped define what is known as mid-century modern, especially the plan for the Time Life office. He was 98 years old.
His wife, Susan Russ, confirmed his death.
Luss trained as an architect, and although he built only one notable structure (his own hillside house in Ossining, New York), his interior design went far beyond mere arrangements of tables and chairs.
For the Time Life office at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, he brought orders to what could have been in the Mixed Chaos, given the enormous wide floor of glass and steel towers.
Using what he called the plenum system, he split the floor into grids. Each 3-foot-foot module served with electricity, fire control and lighting. Lightweight walls can be easily reconfigured using grids.
However, his interior was not an extreme cage. He decorated the walls with murals by artists like Joseph Albers and Fritz Graner. Even the lowest store clerks could walk along the rich, luxurious carpets and stare at Sixth Avenue like a royal family.
He also designed many office tables, chairs and other furniture. They had to be light and easy to move around. They also had to be comfortable and easy to clean without becoming barren. He relied on bright colors and comfortable fabrics to soften them.
“People who work spend more time in the office than they do at home,” he told the New York Herald Tribune in 1959.
Mr. Russ was best known for his interiors, but his 1955 home remains a favorite among fans of modernist architecture.
The five-acre hillside house above the eastern bank of the Hudson River is a minimalist, precisely essay with cypress and oak panels and floor-to-ceiling windows that blur the line between the interior and the outside forest.
Mr. Russ oversaw all the details of the project. He built a treehouse on the site, allowing him to live nearby during a nine-month construction project.
He later used the house to host Time Life executives and gave them a close-up sense of his approach to design. He sold it in 1959. He said he needed more space for his growing family, but some friends speculated that once the home is complete, new challenges would be needed.
Over his 70-year career, Luss worked for clients of all sizes. A giant of corporate entities like OwensCorning, hospital systems like Northwell Health, a wealthy family who hired him to equip a penthouse apartment near the United Nations.
Completed in 1969, the apartment was rich in contrasting materials, including Verde antique stone walls, thickly woven tapestries and rich oak details.
“A very unfamiliar, very luxurious material is placed, and the tension between the hard, cold echo surface and the soft, warm and quiet one wrote in 1969.
Gerald Russ was born on October 7, 1926 in Groversville, a city in western New York, to a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. His mother, Anna (Saiger) Rath, came from what is now Russia and managed the house.
From an early age, he worked on design. Over the weekend he hiked through nearby Adirondack hills, sketching trees and birds along the way. He then collected shards of glass from a local window maker and built a crystal tower on the garage workbench that his father had built next to him.
He joined the Army after graduating from high school and underwent architecture training in Denver. After his honorable discharge, he signed up with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He later transferred to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and recently launched an interior design program.
He graduated in 1949 with a degree in interior design. Unlike many of his classmates who were aiming to join a large design company in the role of juniors, he quickly looked for a small company that could become a lead designer.
One such company, Design for Business, was led by a Platt graduate who gave him a two-week tryout. Within a few years he became vice president.
Seventeen years later with the design of Business for Business, Lass started his own company. At first he ran it with his colleague Eli Kaplan. He was later the only principal.
His first marriage to Rhoda Kassof ended with a divorce. His second wife, Anne Rangoff, died of cancer in 1975. He married Susan Seschler in 2004.
With her, he was survived by his second marriage, three children, Jay Russ, Jill Guns and Gay Dalek. and three grandchildren. Jan Russ, the son of his first marriage, passed away in 1996.
From the mid-1980s, Russ became interested in designing watches. This was inspired by the idea that a 24-hour daily cycle is a common denominator across world cultures.
He built dozens of clocks by hand. Many of them filled their homes in Dakota, a prestigious high-rise apartment along Central Park West.
Some of these watches were featured at the 2021 art exhibition at Las House along with contemporary works by half a dozen other artists.
When the writer working for the exhibition saw his home filled with work from many others and asked him what he was thinking, “This never looked good.”
