born Sept. 16, 1935, Quincy, Mass., U.S.
U.S. sculptor.
The son of a draftsman for a shipbuilding firm, he attended Phillips Andover Academy and Northeastern University. He moved to New York City in 1957 and soon was producing large-scale horizontal sculptures out of steel plates, slabs of granite, styrofoam planks, bricks, and cement blocks, using a grid system based on simple mathematical principles. His work from this period was often intended to be placed directly on the gallery or museum floor; its monumental austerity was central to the Minimalist movement. Beginning in the 1970s he also experimented with large-scale wood sculpture.