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Paul Katz, who as president and managing principal of one of the world's leading architectural firms, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, was the mastermind of many of its major projects in Japan, Shanghai, London and New York, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 57.
Mr. Katz recently learned he had cancer and was being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center when he died of septic shock there, his wife, Ziva Freiman, said. He lived in Scarsdale, N.Y.
In an age of specialists in architecture, Mr. Katz was an architect of wide scope who focused as much on fine detail as on the big urban picture.
"Paul could play more than one position," Eugene Kohn, chairman of KPF, said in a telephone interview. "He had it all in his head and put it all together — from the thickness of pipes and the shower heads in hotel rooms to stacking four or five uses around an elevator core in a skyscraper that connects to the transportation systems."
Bridging the aspirations of developers and the firm's architects, Mr. Katz negotiated into existence some of the tallest mixed-use buildings in the world, among them the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center and the 118-story International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong.
His other projects for KPF, which is based in Manhattan, included Roppongi Hills, a huge complex in Tokyo encompassing an office tower, apartments, shops and restaurants, movie theaters, a museum, a hotel, a television studio, parks and an outdoor amphitheater.
In London, he was a central figure in the development of Earls Court, an entertainment and conference center; the refurbishment and expansion of Covent Garden; and the Canary Wharf redevelopment. In New York, he was involved in the master plan for Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan and in KPF's five-million-square-foot commercial structures now under construction there.
Unlike a classic designer who gives a project its physical form, Mr. Katz was known for his insights on issues like elevator configuration, construction sequence and transportation connections, which wove projects together into functional networks.
"For Paul, it was the entire assemblage, not triumphant individual pieces, that gave the project its urban value," said James von Klemperer, the firm's design director, who has been named to succeed Mr. Katz as president.
In his "comprehensive view" of a given project, Mr. Katz also took into consideration "the history of the place — and not just the stuff on the street, but how it got there," said Leslie E. Robertson, an engineer who worked on the original World Trade Center and the Sony building in Manhattan and often collaborated with Mr. Katz on KPF projects.
Mr. Katz was born on Sept. 27, 1957, and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. His parents worked for a family-owned construction company, his father as an accountant and his mother running its human resources department.
Mr. Katz studied architecture at the University of Cape Town and later at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he received a bachelor of architecture degree in 1982. It was there that he met Ms. Freiman, a fellow South African, who was also studying architecture at the institute.
After marrying, they moved to the United States, where Mr. Katz earned a master's degree in architecture at Princeton, studying under Michael Graves. He joined KPF as a designer in 1984 and became president and managing principal in 2008, overseeing a staff of 670.
Besides his wife, he is survived by their son, Jonathan; their daughter, Hannah; his parents, Walter and Esther Katz; and his brother, Shmuel.
Mr. Katz played competitive chess for most of his life. Last summer he played in an exhibition match in the South of France against the young Norwegian prodigy and grandmaster Magnus Carlsen.
"He thought like a chess player, always three or four moves ahead, not only for our firm, but for the sake of the projects," Mr. von Klemperer said. "For Paul, cities were an urban chessboard."
