Gary Anderson (designer)
Midwestern forebears included members of the communal, utopian Icarian Movement as well as supporters of the populist progressive politics of William Jennings Bryan.
In 1958, shortly after joining the electronics firm of EG&G, Glen died of complications possibly attributable to exposure to atomic radiation years before at the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site.
][citation needed] In 1966, after completing one year in the engineering program at the University of Southern California, Anderson changed majors and enrolled in the USC School of Architecture, where he studied from 1966 to 1970.
This was evident in the work of the College's faculty, which included the building scientist, Konrad Wachsmann, and the designer of some Case Study Houses in Southern California, Pierre Koenig.
Other faculty who influenced Anderson's design aesthetic were the graphic artist John Gilchrist, whose recommended reading included D'Arcy Thompson's book On Growth and Form.
[citation needed] Through the University's work-study program, Anderson worked as an assistant to Crombie Taylor, preparing an exhibit of the ornamentation of the early modernist architect Louis Sullivan that melded together aspects of both organic and geometric form.
Three years previously, Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, which implicated big business and industry in profiting from practices that caused irreparable environmental harm.
Partly in reaction to these and other events, a youth movement was forming that questioned the established patterns of human interaction that gave rise to such problems.
[7][14][15] Anderson has said that his academic experiences and the spirit of the times were primary determinates of his design; but that violence stemming from the drug-infused political radicalization of the youth movement led him to strive for a graphic approach that, while acknowledging the fluid mysticism of underground psychedelic art associated with Haight-Ashbury, reflected restraint and balance, as well.
[7] Anderson has also identified more specific but diverse influences that include a variation on a popular nursery rhyme,[12] an elementary school field trip to an industrial printing press, the Woolmark symbol,[12] and the graphic art of M. C. Escher,[2] which at the time of the design competition had only recently become widely accessible in the United States.
[citation needed] In 1978, Anderson accepted a position in the School of Architecture and Planning at King Faisal University (KFU) in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.
He continued to work on his PhD at Hopkins, which was awarded in 1985 after he defended his thesis on socio-cultural aspects of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia that, in combination with the rise of the oil economy, determined patterns of urbanization there.
[9] As a result of his work there,[21] he was awarded the national Urbahn Prize for Architecture by the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME), a distinction which he shares with other notables such as Harold Adams, the retired CEO of RTKL.
In this capacity, he taught courses and wrote on the role of design and planning in private sector development,[22][23] and he became a member of the executive committee of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), Baltimore District Council.
Anderson became a Fulbright Senior Specialist, and was invited by the Helsinki University of Technology to lecture and advise graduate students on their theses in the Faculty for Engineering and Architecture and the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies.
Following the original press releases and initial coverage in trade publications, the design was sometimes erroneously attributed to the head of the Container Corporation's graphics department.
