John Fisher
Principal
John Fisher AIA is a registered architect in the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and he is NCARB certified. He received his Bachelor and Master of Architecture degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology and was a Fulbright scholar in Finland. He was a design instructor at Carnegie Tech. From there, he joined the faculty of the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was chairman of the Environmental Control Systems study area. He remains committed to "green" architecture in his current work. He has been practicing in California since his time at Berkeley, with a four-year hiatus as Dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. While at Syracuse University, he supervised the HUD research grant on Making Buildings and Facilities Accessible and Usable by Physically Disabled People (ANSI-A117.1). Upon his return to California, he opened his present architectural
practice. In addition to private practice, John has taught design part time at UCLA and Woodbury University. He has also been a visiting professor at Cal Poly, Pomona, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
John has 43 years experience as a registered architect and as a principal of his own architectural firms with offices in California, New York and China. He has been responsible for the design of over $3.5 Billion Dollars US in construction value for cultural, hospitality, commercial, educational and housing facilities around the country and in Asia and Europe.
Besides being involved with the design of over 150 theatres, John has written articles and lectured nationally and internationally on performance spaces. He has perfected a technique for participatory, creative problem-solving among project stakeholders, in order to achieve consensus on programming and design issues. He has served on the boards of directors for several theatre groups, in addition to holding memberships for the AIA National Committee on Design, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the League of Historic American Theatres, and the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. His theatre design has been recognized through numerous design awards. This success has also carried over to his work with multi-family housing and industrialized housing systems, including two AIA Special Design Awards for factory-built multi-family housing developments and extensive publication of his housing projects.
Since teaching environmental controls at Berkley, starting in 1965 parallel with his private practice, Fisher has been a pioneer in sustainable design producing green buildings long before the need was broadly acknowledged. At first he primarily focused on energy & water conservation and then in 1980 added recycling and non-toxic environments in his building designs. In 1990 he began utilizing photovoltaic cells for the generation of electricity directly from the sun. All of his projects are green to one extent or another whether they are LEED certified or not. He has completed one LEED Silver Certificate university building, has started construction on a LEED Silver college building and is about to start construction on what will be a LEED Gold hotel for Atman Hospitality Group in Merced, CA in joint venture with Barry Nathan, Architect. Fisher is supported by a staff of 20 including LEED Accredited Professionals and has 10 more LEED Silver, Gold, and Platinum projects in the design and documentation process.
He was a member of the International Solar Energy Society and is currently a member of the Green Building Council.
