Tunney Lee Death | Obituary – Tunney Lee ACDC’s original founders Tunney Lee sadly Passed Away as the result from cancer. MIT professor, an architect, and an urban planner, Tunney Lee impact extends beyond Chinatown and he helps build and preserve the Chinese legacy. His legacy will exist in the first documented and written history of Chinatown.
“He could tell you about the history of the building, what organizations had been in the building, the families who lived there,” said Shauna Lo, a former board member of the Chinese Historical Society of New England. “He could tell you the histories of all the people and what they did for a living.”
A historian who was still at work on an extensive project to preserve the heritage of his childhood neighborhood, Mr. Lee died Thursday of complications from cancer treatment. He was 88 and lived in Cambridge.
He also had been deputy commissioner of the state Division of Capital Planning and Operations during the administration of Governor Michael S. Dukakis.
“I loved worked with him. He was a wonderful person,” said Dukakis, who over the years had lunch regularly with Mr. Lee and a small group.
“He was thoughtful, sensitive, committed, hard-working — I could go on and on,” Dukakis added. “He was great public servant.”
At MIT, Mr. Lee was a mentor to scores of architects, teaching them to look beyond the creativity that went into designing buildings.
“Architecture is a lifelong process. Design is an attitude of mind as well as a product,” he wrote when he was the founding chairman of the department of architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Mr. Lee “influenced a whole generation of architects who were studying planning and architecture,” said Randall Imai, one of his former students who is now a principal at Imai Keller Moore Architects in Watertown.
May he rest in peace.
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