Gunnar Birkerts, a Latvian-born architect who extended the vocabulary of Modernism using unexpected angular forms, folding planes and ingenious, light-suffused interiors, died on Tuesday at his home in Needham, Mass. He was 92.

His son, the literary critic Sven Birkerts, confirmed the death.

Mr. Birkerts absorbed the lessons of the Bauhaus while studying in Germany immediately after World War II, finding inspiration in the Scandinavian architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. He had encountered their work while reading architectural journals in the library of the United States Information Agency.

After emigrating to the United States in 1949, he worked with Mr. Saarinen at his offices in Birmingham, Mich., near Detroit, and later with Minoru Yamasaki, a leading practitioner of the style known as New Formalism. He started his own firm, Gunnar Birkerts & Associates, in Birmingham in 1963.