Ralph Anderson (architect)

He was raised in the Magnolia neighborhood of the city and attended Queen Anne High School; for a time he was enlisted with the Army Air Corps.

[1] His early work, including his own first home at Hidden Lake, constituted what he later called his "modernist glass-box phase".

"[1] After about a decade of building houses mainly in the Eastside Seattle suburbs of Mercer Island and Bellevue, Anderson opened an office at 108 S. Jackson in Pioneer Square, then known as Skid Road.

Among the tenants of the remodeled Smith / Butterworth / Alaska Trade buildings is the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Anderson died at the Horizon House retirement community in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood on October 24, 2010, at the age of 86, after suffering a recurrence of kidney cancer which he had battled in his fifties.

[5] Among the prominent Seattle architects who worked for Anderson at some point in their careers are George Suyama, David Fukui, Jim Olson, Jerry Stickney, Ron Murphy, Jack R. Vincent and Gordon Walker.