[1][2] Anderson received his architectural degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, and then went on to study as a Fulbright Scholar in Munich in 1961–62.
The next 50 years of his career would be dedicated to publishing scholarly works and to teaching in the field of architectural history, theory, and urban studies.
He argued that the design process was akin to a research project and that there was an affinity between architecture and history when it comes to methodological rigor.
The architects he studied, Peter Behrens, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, and Eladio Dieste among others were positive exemplars of this approach.
The History Theory Criticism section was the first Ph.D. program in a school of architecture in the U.S. Anderson supervised hundreds of theses at MIT, including those of scholars now well known in the field.