EDWARD LARRABEE BARNES, who set up his office in New York in 1949, was a true follower of the Harvard Graduate School of design style which emerged in the 1930s under the inspired leadership of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Its eminently purist forms of the European Modern Movement influenced many besides Barnes, including his near contemporary, I. M. Pei, and led to an architecture of restraint that was sensitive both to locality and to materials.

Edward Larrabee Barnes was born in Chicago in 1915 and grew up there. His mother was a writer and his father a lawyer. He entered Harvard in 1938, qualified in 1942, and served in the Navy during the Second World War, after which he worked for a designer in Los Angeles. After that he set up his own practice with his wife, also an architect, and it was then, in the 1950s and 1960s, that he produced his first work, mainly houses and school designs. Later, he would rank those designs among his best.

From the beginning, he was never tempted to stray from the clean and rational approach, nor to join the Post-Modernist fashion parade of the 1970s and 1980s as, for instance, Philip Johnson did with his Neo-Classical building for AT&T.

Barnes did some fine work for museums: the Scaife Gallery at the Carnegie Insititute in Pittsburgh (1974), the Dallas Museum of Art (1984) and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York (1990). These were important commissions. Yet there were also commercial ones, among which IBM’s huge office block on Madison Avenue in New York (1983) was, with its extraordinary form and serrated glass roofline, certainly remarkable. A project on Lexington Avenue, which was built in 1986, was offices again, and with its neighbour, the Citicorp building by Hugh Stubbins, they make a pair of striking architectural examples of excellence.

An imaginative house for Paul Heyer in New York is equally good on a residential scale, while Barnes may well have succeeded best of all with his Museum of Art at Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1985), where the single sweep of a big white wall is in itself a picture of sculpture.

Art was perhaps the area where he always excelled in his work. He displayed this early on at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (1971), described by one critic as a “white box free of any intrusive architectural ego statement” — a pointed and accurate reference to those who seek novelty for novelty’s sake. In his wide range of activities, which include a fascinating relief mural in the entrance of the Grace Watson Hall building in New York (1969), his natural modesty and reserve never failed to be expressed.

He is survived by his wife and their son, also an architect.

Edward Larrabee Barnes, architect, was born in 1915. He died on September 21, 2004, aged 89.