José Luis Sert (born July 1, 1902, Barcelona—died March 15, 1983, Barcelona) was a Spanish-born American architect noted for his work incity planning and urban development.

After graduation from the School ofArchitecture,Barcelona (1929), Sert worked withLe Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret inParis. From 1929 to 1937 he had his own architectural office in Barcelona; works from the period include apartment houses in Barcelona, weekend houses in Garraf, and a master plan for the city of Barcelona. He designed the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair (1937) in collaboration withJoan Miró,Alexander Calder, andPablo Picasso.

With the fall ofSpain’s Republican government in 1939, Sert moved to theUnited States and from 1941 to 1956 was a partner inTown Planning Associates, aNew York City firm that engaged in city planning and urban design for a number of new or existing South American cities, including Bogotá and other Colombian cities, Chimbote in Peru, Ciudad dos Motores inBrazil, and Havana. Sert’s master plans for these sites were notable for theirintegration of natural landscape features into the urban building scheme. Sert made prominent use of patios and other aspects of Mediterraneanarchitecture in his innovative designs for large groupings of houses. From 1947 to 1956 Sert was president of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). He became a U.S. citizen in 1951. In 1953 he was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Design and professor of architecture atHarvard University, a position he held until his retirement in 1969.

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Sert’s importance in the field ofcomprehensive multifamily housing rivals that of Le Corbusier. A notable example of the work carried out by hisCambridge, Mass., architectural office is the Peabody Terrace Married Students’ Housing at Harvard (1963–65), in which a cluster of high-rise and low-rise apartment buildings are harmoniously connected with each other. Two outstanding examples of museum design by Sert are the Maeght Foundation (1968) at St.-Paul-de-Vence on the French Riviera and the Miró Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (1972–75), which houses works by Miró.