Danforth Toan ’40

Danforth Toan ’40, a well-known architect of college campuses, died January 16. Dan was a partner in the New York design firm Warner Burns Toan and Lunde, now WBTL Architects, and designed libraries and other buildings for Brown University, NYU, Columbia, Hofstra, Adelphi, Cornell, Duke, Toronto University and many others and taught architecture at Columbia for 12 years. Internationally, he designed hotels and resorts from Athens to the Caribbean and Central America and was on the design team that created Sadat City in Egypt. Toward the end of the “space race” he worked extensively with Grumman Aircraft on its design plans for NASA’s first manned space station. After graduating Dartmouth he served in the Coast Guard during WW II and was stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After the war he moved to Tappan, New York, where former Army base Camp Shanks was converted into housing for veterans attending graduate school on the GI Bill. There Dan became the architect of a postwar housing experiment that led to the creation of the Hickory Hill Cooperative in 1950. In this community 32 homes were cooperatively financed and built by its members (alongside professional contractors), and lots were drawn to determine who would live on which parcel. An English major at Dartmouth, Dan sang and played clarinet in the Barbary Coast, and remained an amateur jazz arranger and saxophonist throughout his life. Dan was predeceased by his brother Arthur ’36, Tu’37. He is survived by Jane, his wife of 69 years, four children, three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.