Peter Pran of Ellerbe Becket (Paper) (Architectural Monographs)

A Norwegian-born architect, Peter Pran is Senior Vice President and Design Principal of Ellerbe Becket, a leading international architecture-engineering firm that combines a conscious commitment of creating "cutting-edge architecture" with the financial security of one of the largest practices in the States. Pran calls himself a New Modernist, rejecting historicism as "not recognizing our own time"; he worked with Mies van der Rohe on the Chicago Federal Center and the Berlin National Gallery. Pran's designs, with their curved surfaces and thin planes are characterized by a site-specific content and a poetic feeling of movement with its inherent sense of freedom. Using invited competitions as a way of exploring and exposing new ideas, Ellerbe Becket has won NYC/AIA Design Awards for six years in a row and five Progressive Architecture Awards in six years, producing schemes such as the groundbreading high-rise design for the Saudi Corporate Headquarters, Jeddah, Canadian National/Royal Trust Development, Toronto, Canada; and the Headquarters of Schibsted Gruppen Newspapers Aftenposten and Verdens Gang, Oslo, Norway. Their design for the Deloitte & Touche Headquarterss, Wilton, Connecticut received a National AIA Interior Architecture Design Award of Excellence in 1992. Based in Ellerbe Becket's New York office, Pran also collaborates with design teams throughout the firm's international office network. In addition, Pran has taught continuously for over 20 years as Professor of Architecture at universities in the United States, Italy and Japan. With an essay by Kenneth Frampton and statements by Fumihiko Maki anbd Daniel Libweskind, this Monograph includes the characteristic models made from cardboard and metal as well as plans and photographs of built projects detailing the works produced to date by Pran at Ellerbe Becket.