Robert P. Burns, 71; Architect Had Role in Lincoln Center Design

Robert Paschal Burns, 71, an architect who worked on New York’s Juilliard School of Music and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, died Friday in an automobile accident near his farm in Bennett, N.C.

Burns earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from North Carolina State University and won the prestigious Paris Prize in Architecture in 1957. After receiving his master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became an architect in Cambridge, Mass.

From there, he contributed to such projects as Juilliard and Lincoln Center.

Burns returned to North Carolina State and headed its architecture department from 1967 to 1974 and again from 1983 to 1991. In 1979, he was elected president of the Assn. of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

In the late 1970s, Burns became interested in historic preservation. He conducted a study of North Carolina courthouses published in 1978.