Richard Bender

Richard Bender is an architect and urban planner with extensive experience in urban, campus and community design. He also serves as dean emeritus and professor of architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley. Bender has also taught at The Cooper Union, Columbia University, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Swiss Federal Technical University, and the Instituto Universitario Arquitettura in Venice. Bender has served as chairman of Berkeley’s Department of Architecture, as associate dean for research in the College of Environmental Design, as director of the Campus Planning Study Group and the Urban Construction Laboratory at Berkeley. He has been the Visiting “GC-5” Professor of Urban Design and Construction at Tokyo University, and an honorary professor at the Université Europeene de Maitrise D’Oeuvre Urbaine in Cergy¬Pontoise, France. In the United States, he has been a member of the Federal Construction Council of the Building Research Advisory Board, an advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts, and a technical advisor to the National ‘Douglas Commission’ in Urban Problems. According to biographer Elizabeth Douthitt Byrne, in Bender’s “distinguished and wide-ranging international career in teaching and practice [he] has studied or worked with and/or been associated with some of the most influential artists, designers, builders and planners of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Josep Lluis Sert, Mark Rothko, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pete Seeger, Norman Mailer, Buckminster Fuller, Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind, Margaret Mead, Le Corbusier, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Saul Steinberg, I.M. Pei, Ada Louise Huxtable, Jean Nouvel, Fumihiko Maki, Reyner Banham, and many, many more. With his teaching and practice in New York, Greenland, Switzerland, France and Japan, he relishes learning and stimulating learning, bringing people together across disciplines.” Bender was a founding director of the nonprofit BRIDGE Housing Corporation. He continues as an emeritus director. He served The Getty Trust as advisor during the design and construction of The Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has directed master plans for the Benesse Art Site on the Island of Naoshima, Japan and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, as well as directing plans throughout the University of California System, including at The University of California at San Diego, UC Santa Cruz as well as UC Berkeley. Commemorating his important service to the University of California system, then Chancellor Chang-lin Tien awarded Bender the Berkeley Citation in 1990. At the ceremony, the chancellor noted that, “Dean Bender revitalized the planning process on the Berkeley Campus. He defined, instituted and led the Design Review Board. This has worked so well that he has been called upon by several other UC campuses to institute the concept there. And he has left his mark on so many building projects that it must truly be said of him, as for others like Frederick Law Olmsted and John Galen Howard, that the campus itself as a built environment is in significant part his monument.” In 2012, Bender was honored with the creation of a fellowship at the College of Environmental Designed, which was named after him. "The Fellowship, established by an anonymous donor, will be used to support a dual-degree graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Department of Architecture who focuses on the design of affordable housing in livable communities," building off Bender's legacy of affordability in community planning.