Stanford Anderson (1934–2016)

Abstract

> This is my simple advocacy: the fruitfulness of recognizing the strengths and the claims of, on one side, our theories and conventions, that should not be held dogmatically, and, on the other, the realities, that are in some ways obdurate but often remarkably and fascinatingly malleable. To seek to live only a life of the mind at one pole, or of materiality at the other, or of coercive power from either, is to impoverish one's self, one's discipline, and one's smaller or greater community.1 Stanford Anderson was an architect, teacher, historian, urbanist, and critic of architecture (Figure 1). From the start of his career he studied the relationships of culture and society with design, seeking to refine a theoretical framework for understanding the architectural discipline, its constraints and potentials for supporting and enhancing life. Through sustained and probing studies of Peter Behrens, Hermann Muthesius, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Eladio Dieste, and others, Stan examined design with an architect's precision and a scholar's rigor. He identified himself as a member of the generation contending with postwar reactions against modernism; his historical, theoretical, and critical work can be interpreted as an energetic and unrelenting defense of architecture as a rational endeavor and of modernism as a liberating force. Figure 1 Stanford Anderson (photo courtesy of Nancy Royal). Born in Minnesota, Stan was raised in South Dakota before returning to Minnesota for an undergraduate degree in architecture. He earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958 and conducted dissertation research on Behrens supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in Munich in 1961–62, receiving a doctorate from Columbia University in 1968. In 1962–63 Stan taught at the Architectural Association in London. He was then invited by Henry Millon to join the architecture faculty at MIT in 1963, and together they …