In Memoriam
Neil P. Hoffmann
Neil Hoffmann
1964 Yale graduation
Neil Hoffmann died from cancer on June 26, 2024. He was an active member of the Class of 1964 and served faithfully on our Class Council. The following remembrances are included here:
- Obituary, The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Essay, 60th Reunion Book
- Essay, 50th Reunion Book
- Essay, 35th Reunion Book
- Essay, 25th Reunion Book
Obituary
The Philadelphia Inquirer
July 10, 2024
Neil P. Hoffmann, longtime Philadelphia architect and business rainmaker, has died at 82
He was a top executive at the firm once called Francis Cauffman Foley Hoffmann, and some of his best deals came away from work. “His true office was the golf course,” his family said.
Mr. Hoffmann enjoyed working with and mentoring young architects,
engineers, and other professionals.
Neil P. Hoffmann, 82, of Bryn Mawr, retired Philadelphia architect, business rainmaker, mentor, and lifelong golfer, died Wednesday, June 26, of cancer at the Quadrangle retirement community in Haverford.
Mr. Hoffmann studied under Louis I. Kahn, earned a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, and spent the next four decades cementing big business deals on the golf course and completing impressive construction projects for Bell Telephone, McNeil Consumer Products, Lankenau Hospital, Penn, St. Joseph’s University, and other clients. He was a rainmaker — smart, engaging, and persuasive — for the Philadelphia design firm that was once called Francis Cauffman Foley Hoffmann, and he and partner Jim Foley helped run the company, known now as FCA, for 30 years.
Mr. Hoffmann was friendly, a good listener, and made personal connections easily, and his family said in a tribute: “His true office was the golf course. There, he would charm his clients.” The firm designed dozens of research centers, hospitals, offices, and other structures around the region, and he helped expand its architectural services into interior design, and science and technology support.
“Neil was a conciliator,” said Maryann Foley, wife of his late partner. “He had a way of bringing people together and taking the edge off things.”
The company’s staff grew to 100 in the 1980s and ‘90s and operated an office in Center City. Mr. Hoffmann retired in 2013.
Mr. Hoffmann (left) and colleagues Steve Lebowitz
and Jim Foley go over a project.
He also served as president of the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia in 2003, and was a member of the Pennsylvania Society of Architects, and the American Institute of Architects. It was with those groups that he forged deep business connections and acted as a pragmatic and positive mentor to young architects, engineers, designers, and marketers.
“He wasn’t afraid to speak the difficult facts, the uncomfortable truths that may have been holding his friends, family, or colleagues back,” said his son Richard. “He risked being labeled a grouch because he believed in his people and wanted them to excel, and had a sweet, soft heart that took great pride when they did.”
A golfer and outdoorsman since high school, Mr. Hoffmann enjoyed nature and the fellowship of walking a course, and he played hundreds of rounds with friends, colleagues, and clients at dozens of courses around the United States and in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. “He was just fun to play with,” a longtime friend said in an online tribute.
He attended big golf events such as the Masters, U.S. Open, and PGA Championship with friends, and chaired local golf events as president of the Yale University Club of Philadelphia and a member of other groups. “Neil was not only a great golfing buddy, but a great friend,” a fellow golfer said online.
Neil Power Hoffmann was born May 28, 1942, in Chicago. He and his brother, Mark, and their parents lived in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Houston, and Dallas before settling in Fayetteville, N.Y., about 10 miles east of Syracuse.
Mr. Hoffmann met his wife, Nancy, at a party,
and they were married for 58 years.
He played soccer and golf at Jamesville-Dewitt High School and later at Yale, and earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture.
He married Nancy Everill in New York in 1966, and they had sons Carl, Richard, and Peter, and daughter Elizabeth. He and his wife moved to the Powelton Village section of Philadelphia when he attended Penn and lived later in Narberth and Bryn Mawr.
Mr. Hoffmann and his wife loved to travel, and they roamed around Europe for six weeks in 1967 and toured the United States in the spring of 1968. The family had a second home in Maine for years, and he hiked, camped, and sailed.
He went to Phillies games at Veterans Stadium, and he and his wife had season tickets to the Philadelphia Orchestra for 45 years. He was at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 1965 and usually had jazz, classical, folk, or rock music playing in the house.
Mr. Hoffmann was interested in design
and architecture even as a young man.
He liked to read, was interested in the environment and climate change, and his family joked that he often took more photos of interesting buildings than of them on vacations. He told his family to stop buying him presents because he had everything he wanted, and they said he faced recent health challenges with his usual grace and poise.
“He made everybody feel at ease,” his daughter said.
In addition to his wife, children, and brother, Mr. Hoffmann is survived by five grandchildren and other relatives.
Private services are to be held later.
Donations in his name may be made to the Environmental Defense Fund, 257 Park Ave. South, 11th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010; Green Building United, 1601 Market St., Suite 2270, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103; and the Damon Runyon Foundation, 1 Exchange Plaza, 55 Broadway, Suite 302, New York, N.Y. 10006.
Essay, 60th Reunion Book
by Neil Hoffmann
May 2024
Dear Friends,
I fear that the withering effects of the Parotid Gland cancer surgery in 2017 and the follow-up radiation has left me increasingly feeble and unable to join you. We recently moved to the Quadrangle, a CCRC in Haverford, near our children and their families. I greatly value my connection to classmates I have met through Chris Getman, golf, Tony Lavely and the Class Council. The Boston Class Zoom and the other online Class activities are a joy for me. I will be thinking of you all and particularly Chris at Reunion time. It can't be the same without him.
I will keep this short in hope that my photos can be included. Cheers and Boola, Boola to you all. Don't hesitate to text or email in these tumultuous times. Love to hear from you.
Neil
The Clan, Thanksgiving 2022
Graduation Day with grandfather Rudolph Hoffmann in Pierson Courtyard
Neil and Nancy
Essay, 50th Reunion Book
by Neil Hoffmann
May 2014
After Yale, I went to graduate school at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, receiving a Master of Architecture Degree in 1968. The military didn’t want me, I was 4-F. In 1966-67, I took a year off from Penn and worked for Skidmore Owings and Merrill in New York.
Nancy Everill and I were married in Syracuse, September 3, 1966. We lived in The Bronx that year and she taught at Garden City Junior High School a while I was working in the city. Between our two mediocre salaries (I think we each earned about $6,500) we saved enough to go to Europe for six weeks in the summer of 1967 including buying a Volvo 122S. Hard to believe today.
We went back to Philadelphia in the fall of 1967 so that I could finish my architecture degree and Nancy taught at a suburban Philadelphia high school. After graduation, we took a tour of the country which lasted most of the summer of ’68, and then I found a job with a Philadelphia architecture firm. To summarize my career, by the time you read this I will be retired from Francis Cauffman after 45 years 3 months, (12/31/2013). I sold my interest in the firm in 2008 (on the installment basis) but I continued to be active managing projects including a $125 million hospital expansion in Paterson, NJ. I am ambivalent about retirement but it’s probably time to try something new. I’ll give you a report in May.
Nancy and I have four children, Carl, Richard, Peter, Elizabeth, ranging in age from 42 to 31, in that order, and they are an architect, a filmmaker, a painter, and a fashion designer. Sounds more glamorous than it is. Richard and his wife have three children, so far our only grandchildren, but they are a joy.
We have lived in and around Philadelphia since 1967, but in four different houses, so we haven’t exactly been sedentary. Happily, three of our children live around Philadelphia and Peter lives in Brooklyn, married to a film maker, so they’re not too far away.
Nancy has a Ph.D. from Univ. of Pennsylvania in English. She’s taught at St. Joseph’s Univ., the Univ. of Pennsylvania and Villanova. She recently published her second book, William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design. You can find it on Amazon. It’s beautiful. If you’re interested in the history of early horticulture in the United States this is the book for you.
My primary hobby is golf. Even living in Pennsylvania I can be persuaded to play almost any time there’s not snow on the ground. In 1988 we bought a 1903 house in a late 19th century island summer community called Dark Harbor, on Islesboro, ME. At the head of my bucket list is being able to spend four months of the year there.
I have taken a number of memorable golf vacations to Scotland and Ireland. One of the great joys of recent years has been reconnecting with ’64 classmates at hockey games, reunions, mini-reunions, and class golf outings. You are an amazing group.
Like most of us, I suspect, if someone had told me I would have a career and a family and the experiences I’ve had over the last 50 years, I would have said they were crazy. I’m hoping that the best is yet to come.
Essay, 35th Reunion Book
by Neil Hoffmann
May 1999
It's great that we're doing the book again. I certainly enjoyed the one we did ten years ago.
Not much has changed in ten years for me — but my family is certainly growing up. Starting with my wife, Nancy, who after a twenty-year hiatus from academic life had the courage to return to Penn and get her Ph.D. in English in 1996. Her dissertation was a study of Travels by William Bartram, son of the great American naturalist John Bartram. Among other noteworthy attributes, Travels was the first full-length book by a native-born American published in the new United States. Nancy is in her second year teaching freshman English at St. Josephs University.
Son Carl graduated in 1995 from Washington University in St. Louis and is working in architecture — though not sure he wants to make it his career. Second son Richard graduated in 1996 from New York University-Tisch as a film major and is pursuing a variety of projects in fim and video. His senior film, Amelia, which the whole family participated in making, won several awards at the New York University Film Festival in 1997. Son Peter left on September 8, 1998, for England to pursue his painting studies at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle-on-Tyne. All three boys went to the Haverford School. Daughter Elizabeth, fifteen, started her sophomore year at Merion Mercy Academy. Elizabeth plays the harp and is also an artist. I guess all the talent came from Nancy, who in addition to her academic career is a published author.
For me, the Yale Club, the Carpenters Company, business, and golf keep me almost too busy to cut our too large lawn in Bryn Mawr. Business is currently great, but driven, at lest in part, by a stock market which has turned south. Healthcare facilities, primarily hospital renovations, and research, manufacturing, and office facilities for corporate (principally pharmaceutical) and academic institutions are the focus of our practice.
I look forward to seeing you all at the reunion.
Essay, 25th Reunion Book
by Neil Hoffmann
May 2989
I had the opportunity today to look at a set of architectural drawings done in 1965 for a classroom-administration building at Germantown Academy in suburban Philadelphia. This building is not a great piece of architecture and the architect was not famous. Its style might be characterized as vernacular modern with a Georgian flavor done in grey fieldstone with white trim and detail. The plan is a traditional H shape with an attached wing for the Administration. Boring, really, but very clear.
What struck me forcefully was the care, time, love, and attention to detail which went into those drawings. The craft they represent is literally dying and our generation is the last to have participated in it, if only briefly. These drawings spoke to me about how our world has changed in these last 25 years. Today, architecture is driven by schedule and budget. There is no time for care or attention to detail. Only the largest projects which represent and symbolize power and money in our society have any architectural character or pretentions, and that tends to be of the megalomaniac variety.
Our culture has always been money-driven, no great insight there, but when, in Tom Wolfe's words, the Masters of the Universe are bond salesmen, making a million dollars a year, things seem seriously out of kilter. I hope we haven't reached the day when a Yale education is viewed primiarily as a ticket to wealth and power.
It's hard to be optimistic about the future of a society in which making money is confused with the creation of wealth. The one perhaps feeding the individual, the other building an economic structure.
We desperately need a vision of the world which goes beyond ever-expanding personal consumption. I doubt if we'll get it from Bush or Dukakis. There is cause for some hoipe. We haven't caused a nuclear holocaust. We are learning more about how we must live in this world. There is more freedom, openness, equality in our society. People talk about the "Quality of Life." The world is a fragile asset we hold in trust for our children. Have we been "prudent men" in this fiduciary role? We are at a point in life when we can make a difference. Let's do better.