NEW YORK.- The Washington Port has reported that Bates Lowry, a leading art and architectural historian who was founding director of the National Building Museum and oversaw its birth in the 1980s, died at 80. Dr. Lowry, a longtime Boston resident, had moved to New York the week before his death. Dr. Lowry spent years in academia, holding teaching positions at colleges from Massachusetts to California. He also wrote books on subjects ranging from Renaissance art to the early photographic craft known as the daguerreotype. On many projects he worked with his wife, art researcher and mathematician Isabel Barrett Lowry . His professional profile grew in the mid-1960s after he raised money to salvage and restore art damaged by extensive flooding in Florence. Recruited in 1968 as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dr. Lowry spent less than a year in the job because of differences with key museum officials about expansion plans; many of his ideas later were implemented. In 1980, Congress chartered the National Building Museum, and Dr. Lowry came to Washington to turn what had been the old Pension Building near Judiciary Square into a museum and research center about American architecture, construction and urban planning. The building was a decaying structure dating from the 1880s, and Dr. Lowry spent his first five years lobbying politicians to fund the rehabilitation. The museum now has about 320,000 visitors annually.

When the museum opened in 1985, Dr. Lowry told The Washington Post: "Americans have been more apt to study the great palaces of Europe than our own architecture. This museum will try to see to it that at an early stage in their education, Americans know what our important buildings are, and what a record those buildings are of their own society." The first large exhibit was the well-received "Building a National Image: Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789-1912." The show explored the significance of federal building design from the earliest days of the country.

Dr. Lowry left the museum in 1987 and returned to his research and writing. A Cincinnati native, he attended the University of Cincinnati. While he was in France and Germany during WWII, his interest in art history took hold. Back in the United States, he graduated from the University of Chicago, where he also received a master’s degree and a doctorate, both in art history. He wrote his doctoral dissertation about the architectural history of the Louvre museum, which he visited on a French government fellowship. He then held teaching positions at the University of Chicago, the University of California at Riverside, New York University and Pomona College in California. While Art Department chairman at Brown University in the 1960s, he was president of the Committee for the Rescue of Italian Art, for which he raised money after the floods in Florence. Impressed with his organizational skills, Rene D’Harnoncourt, the legendarily smooth director of the Museum of Modern Art, hired the largely unknown Dr. Lowry to succeed him. Within weeks, D’Harnoncourt died after being hit by a car. Within a year, Dr. Lowry resigned, citing "personal considerations." He became Art Department chairman at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He and Isabel Lowry founded the Dunlap Society to develop teaching materials, such as slides and fact sheets, to promote American art and architectural history for schools and universities. The business was named for the early American art historian William Dunlap.