John D. Anderson, FAIA, Honored with the 2013 AIA Edward C. Kemper Award
When he was 12, John Anderson re-created Center City, Philadelphia, block by block, out of ivory soap, and decided then to become an architect. Seventeen years later, after serving in the Naval Air Corps in World War II, he received his M.Arch. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, when Walter Gropius was dean. “He had a masters studio of the best and the brightest,” recalls Anderson. “I was not in that studio.” Anderson later moved to Denver, where he founded Anderson Barker Rinker, which pioneered sustainable design. In 1972, the firm designed the world’s largest solar-heated building, for Front Range Community College, in Westminster, Colo. “There weren’t many people in the early years who believed in what we were doing,” Anderson recalls. The project led to the firm’s dissolution: “I wanted to keep going, and they thought we weren’t going to make any money.” The practice, revived as Anderson Mason Dale Architects, later redesigned the entrance to Mount Rushmore. Retired from his firm since 1998, Anderson served as the AIA’s national president from 2000 to 2001. He bolstered the Institute’s finances, established metrics to track the racial diversity of its membership, and, in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, flew to New York and created a fund for architects who had lost offices and projects in the attacks.
Jury
Steven Spurlock, FAIA (chair) Wnuck Spurlock Architecture, Washington, D.C.; James Binkley, FAIA Reston, Va.; Brian F. Cavanaugh, AIA Architecture Building Culture, Portland, Ore.; Aisha Densmore-Bey, Assoc. AIA Aisha Densmore-Bey, Designer, Boston; Lonnie Hoogeboom, AIA Houston Downtown Management District, Houston
See the full announcement in Architect magazine.
