Summary

The first fifteen years in the formative life of an MIT professor. Author of many books, and international lecturer, Wayne Andersen was born in 1928 on a Plymouth county farm a few miles north of Sioux City. His father was an age-fifteen immigrant from Denmark; his mother, born of German immigrants, was raised on a farm near Clinton, Iowa. This book is a marvel of autobiography, full of surprises. In captivating detail, it runs through the author's early years from farm house birth to his departure for California at the age of fifteen to find work in the defense industry.

Author Bio

Wayne Andersen is professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the 1950s while attending the University of California at Berkeley, he was an abstract expressionist painter and architectural designer in the San Francisco Bay area. He moved to New York in 1959 to undertake graduate studies in art history and archeology at Columbia. After completing his doctorate and spending a year as senior curator of the Walker Art Center, he spent two years in Paris before joining the Department of Architecture at MIT in 1965. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the firm he founded, Vesti Design International, carried out major architectural projects in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of nine books and many essays. He currently resides in Boston with his wife, the landscape historian Phyllis Andersen.