Scholarships Honor Catalano Memory

The family of the late Eduardo Catalano has established a $1 million scholarship fund to underwrite the cost of tuition for at least two architecture students each year.

The renowned architect taught at NC State from 1951 to 1956 and remained a generous supporter of the College of Design over the years. Twice in the past decade he established large endowments in the college to fund annual visiting lecturers. One of those gifts was made in honor of his former employee and student, architecture professor Robert Paschal Burns, who died in an auto accident in 2005.

Dreams and Passions Alive

The current gift donated by Catalano’s children, Adrian and Alejandra, pairs one of his earlier donations with a new gift of $630,000 to create the Eduardo Catalano Architecture Scholarship Endowment. Dean Marvin Malecha thanked them for establishing the endowment so that their father’s “dreams and passions will flourish through future students at the college for generations to come.”

Catalano, a native of Argentina, was one of a team of modern architects recruited to the new School of Design in the late 1940s and early 1950s by founding Dean Henry Kamphoefner. Among the most celebrated designs of the period was the Catalano House, with its iconic hyperbolic parabaloid roof. The Raleigh residence was selected as the “House of the Decade” by House and Home magazine in 1955.

Other well-known Catalano designs include the U.S. embassies in Buenos Aires and Pretoria, South Africa, the Juilliard School of Music in New York (with Pietro Belluschi) and the student center at MIT. After leaving NC State, Catalano taught at MIT for 20 years and continued in practice until retiring in 1995.

Malecha credits Catalano with bringing about “an international reputation for excellence, an aspiration still alive in the College of Design today.”

Catalano received an honorary doctorate from NC State in 2007. He died last year at 92.