This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.
Architect Marcel Beaudin’s beloved Community Sailing Center was a small operation on the Burlington waterfront when in 2002 it acquired an expensive floating contraption to protect boats along a section of shoreline particularly vulnerable to wind.
As a big storm blew in across Lake Champlain, Kate Neubauer, then the center’s executive director, watched in amazement as 72-year-old Marcel took a boat out on the water to check how the new wave attenuator was faring.
“We were standing on the shore because it was unsafe — large swells were coming in. And there was Marcel going out in the worst conditions ever, trying to minimize the damage,” Neubauer recalled with a chuckle.
Related
Obituary: Marcel Beaudin, 1929-2024
Those qualities of dogged determination and comfort with risk helped Marcel, who died on March 29 at the age of 95, leave behind a remarkable legacy. During his almost 70-year career, he completed roughly 1,000 modern and contemporary architectural projects and put his stamp on the Burlington waterfront, where he designed the city’s iconic boathouse and the Community Sailing Center.
An ardent fan of sailing, Marcel dedicated much of the last three decades of his life to the sailing center — cofounding it, creating its board, advocating for and designing its permanent home. He was determined that members of the community, no matter their resources or abilities, have an opportunity to enjoy the lake as he did.
Neubauer and her successor, Mark Naud, researched Marcel’s archive for an August 2 memorial service at the sailing center. “I pulled out a sketch that’s 20 years old. It doesn’t look a whole lot different than what’s there today,” Naud said. “He had a vision, and he quietly and calmly persevered until it was realized.”
Just weeks before his death — while in the hospital after suffering a stroke — Marcel was working on drawings for an improved boat hoist, according to his daughter, Rebecca. “He used to say he had an active mind,” she said. “He had a hard time sleeping because he’d be awake trying to solve design problems.”
A lifelong Vermonter who left only for college, Marcel was born into a family that had quarried and fabricated granite in Québec for generations until his parents came to Barre in 1927 to explore new granite-industry technology. They stayed, and Marcel was born in 1929.
He attended Spaulding High School and the Barre Evening Drawing School, where he learned drafting skills from seasoned artisans. In 1949, he and his first wife, Vera Fine, also of Barre, married at ages 20 and 19, respectively. By then, Marcel had moved to New York City to take a job as a junior designer of tombstones and mausoleums. He was intending to become a sculptor.
Instead, at an art gallery one day he struck up a conversation with the sculptor Peter Grippe, who offered to show him the studio in Long Island City where he worked. That studio belonged to Le Corbusier, the famous Swiss-French modern architect who was then designing the United Nations complex. Marcel was captivated.
“He never looked back,” said Rebecca, the middle of Marcel and Vera’s five children and their only daughter.
Marcel enrolled at the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, absorbing the lectures of visiting modern-architect icons including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. The faculty included Edward Larrabee Barnes, designer of Burlington’s demolition-bound Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Marcel worked for Barnes one college summer.
Even in New York, Marcel’s mind was on Vermont. For his senior thesis in 1955, he created a master plan for Burlington’s waterfront. Such a plan, he wrote, “would thwart misuses of the city’s lakefront and trees. It would not only anticipate the immediate needs for beaches and parks but also its future needs.” After he moved back to Vermont in 1956, the Burlington Free Press reprinted excerpts of his thesis in a four-part series.
Marcel worked with Vermont architect Julian Goodrich for two years before founding his solo practice in 1959. He designed his family’s first house, on Morgan Drive on Shelburne Point, in the spare International Style he was trained in.
It was a three-bedroom house for a seven-person family. “There was a lot of sharing,” Rebecca said. Sited on a 40-foot cliff with no fence, the elongated box had a flat roof and a glass curtain wall. A second-story balcony spanning the length of the house had no railing, but “no one ever fell off,” Rebecca recalled wryly.
Marcel would go on to design some 200 houses, many in Vermont. Devin Colman, now head of the University of Vermont’s graduate program in historic preservation, researched a number of the homes for his 2006 master’s thesis on modernist residential structures in Chittenden County. In 2020, as state architectural historian, Colman helped Marcel find a place for his archive at UVM’s Special Collections Library.
“He wasn’t necessarily rooted in one style his whole career,” Colman said. “His early works in the Mad River Valley are very International Style, but there was an evolution of his design vocabulary throughout his career.” A catalog from a 2005 retrospective exhibition of Marcel’s architecture at Burlington City Arts shows houses with windowed corner turrets, gabled roofs and thick entry columns, all defined by elegantly clean lines.
The clients Colman interviewed were “without fail all just so enamored with him,” he said. “His approach was really getting to know the client and what they needed, not trying to impose what he thought they needed.”
To have a Marcel house was a very big deal. Paul Beaudin
Marcel’s son Paul recalled, “We were constantly surrounded by Dad’s friends that totally idolized him. To have a Marcel house was a very big deal to these people.” And yet, “He was very humble and understated about his work,” Paul said.
“He’s got a legacy here in Vermont for some of the best houses in the state,” said architect Alex Halpern, president of the Burlington firm Freeman French Freeman.
Halpern worked briefly with Marcel just out of graduate school in 1995, assisting him on the Vermont Veterans Memorial Chapel in Randolph, a building Halpern said impresses for its “simple, monumental design and its flexibility.” Marcel became a career mentor for the younger architect; Halpern, a scuba diver, in turn helped Marcel set moorings and clean hulls at the sailing center.
Rebecca guessed that her father learned to sail as a child, on the lakes of his father’s native Québec, but he didn’t acquire his own first boat, Fireball, until 1973. He became a lifelong member of the Lake Champlain Yacht Club in Shelburne, where he recruited many supporters for the Community Sailing Center. In a poetic twist, he designed the floating 1988 Burlington Boathouse to evoke the original 1888 Lake Champlain Yacht Club boathouse, which floated on the same downtown waterfront site.
Marcel was divorced in 1977 and didn’t remarry until 1998, to Ruth Binch. Also in 1977, he bought an early J-24 sailing boat, a 24-footer that he thought would be the perfect size for his children. He and sons Paul, Jeb and Adam began competing in races around the country; Paul became a professional sailor.
Marcel’s eldest son, Marc, developed paranoid schizophrenia around the age of 20, but his father always made sure he was taken care of. “So many people with Marc’s illness get lost to their families and end up on the street. Marc never did,” Rebecca said. His father secured an apartment for Marc on lower Church Street and visited him weekly until the son’s death in 2017.
With his other sons, Marcel set his sights on winning the yacht club’s annual Ladies’ Cup five times, intending to break a club record that had stood for 120 years. He won his fifth at age 88 with three generations on board, including his two grandsons.
Paul said his father’s idea for a public sailing center arose after Paul opened a sail-making shop on Pine Street in 1990. For the regattas it hosted, the company had to rent a crane to get boats in the water at Perkins Pier. The two men walked the then-undeveloped waterfront looking for a site and spotted the abandoned Moran power plant’s sluiceway to the lake — a perfect place for a boat hoist.
His father “whipped out a piece of paper and a pencil from his shirt pocket” and began planning, Paul recalled. After learning about Boston’s Community Boating, the country’s oldest public sailing center, “he totally got the bug,” Paul said. “Once he started that, that became a bigger deal than his work.”
Marcel continued to draw architectural plans and build models after other architects had moved on to computer-aided design. But in 2010, he learned SketchUp, a 3D-modeling program, from his friend and fellow architect Fritz Horton in order to turn his sailing center designs into construction documents.
Horton met Marcel at the yacht club in the mid-1980s during a race when their boats passed so closely that their mast tops touched. It was a tense moment, Horton recalled, but “the wonderful characteristic about him was that he would approach any sort of adversity, mistake [or] broken-whatever that he was working on, and his immediate response was a chuckle. And it would absolutely reset the conversation.”
Horton, 80, a retired commercial and industrial architect, didn’t realize the extent of Marcel’s architectural work at first. “He was so quiet; he never boasted about himself. So he was not like most architects that I’ve met over the years,” he said.
But Marcel was assertive when it came to the sailing center, persisting through three mayors and attending every waterfront commission and city council meeting for years until his vision of a purpose-built home for the group became a reality in 2018.
“Marcel would constantly call [the city] every time he heard a whiff of a new plan,” Neubauer, the center’s former executive director, recalled. “The hours that man spent on the phone advocating was insane.”
Others might have become jaded, but, Rebecca said, “My dad always thought the best of people and their motivations. He wasn’t naïve, but he tended to be forgiving.”
“He disarmed,” Horton added, “and he had a wonderful smile. He just sparkled right until his last days.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘He Had a Vision’ | Marcel Beaudin, March 18, 1929-March 29, 2024”
Related Stories
Obituary: Marcel Beaudin, 1929-2024
This article appears in Dec 25, 2024 – Jan 7, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
