Ian Bader was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1954. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Witwatersrand in 1977, having received numerous honors and awards during the six-year architectural program, including the Hernstad and Levinsohn Prizes for the best and most original dissertation, the Burton Prize for the Best Graduate in Architecture, and the Saul Margo Memorial Prize, conferred on the most distinguished student in the School of Architecture.
Upon graduation Mr. Bader remained at the university to teach the theory and practice of architecture to senior students and was honored with a Wits University Grant from the Human Sciences Research Council. In 1979 he visited New York, and was engaged by I. M. Pei & Partners (as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners was then known) to work for the summer on Raffles City, a 4.2-million-square-foot mixed-use complex in Singapore. Thereafter he returned to Johannesburg to complete his thesis for a
Master of Architecture degree, entitled "Architecture, Truth and the Work of Art," before returning to the United States and rejoining I. M. Pei & Partners in 1981. Ian Bader became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1991.
Mr. Bader's activities within the firm together with his continued involvement in teaching and exhibitions — notably a retrospective exhibition in 1987 — established his reputation for both inventive and responsive design.
In 1986, at age 34, he was included in 40 under 40, a select group of young architects chosen from across the United States by leaders in the field as "the best designers dedicated to an ongoing investigation representing current ideas and issues."
Ian Bader became a partner of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1999. Over the course of his two decades in the firm he collaborated regularly with design principals I. M. Pei, Henry N. Cobb, and James Ingo Freed on a wide variety of
projects, including academic buildings, museums, performing arts centers, commercial developments and courthouses. Projects to which he made a significant contribution include the expansion and modernization of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, and the design of the Guggenheim Pavilion at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. Mr. Bader acted as a design principal for the Choate Rosemary Hall Science Center at the Choate School in Connecticut;
the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA; and the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, where, as Design Partner, he assumed primary responsibility for the realization of the project.
Mr. Bader's key involvement in the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse and Harborpark on Fan Pier in Boston has led to several additional judiciary projects. He is Design Partner for the Queens Family Court and City Agency Facility in Jamaica, NY, which Mayor
Bloomberg dedicated in February, 2003. He is also Partner in Charge of Design for the United States Courthouse in Hammond, Indiana and the Richard J. Daronco Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, NY.
Mr. Bader is Design Partner for Palace Hotel in Jerusalem; China Europe International Business School, Phase II, in Shanghai; CHASS Instruction and Research Facility at the University of California at Riverside, and Queens Gateway to the Health Sciences Secondary School, Jacobi Medical
Center Phase II Modernizations, and Vivian and Seymour Milstein Family Heart Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, all in New York City.
Other institutional work includes collaboration on the design of the Center for Government and International Studies at Harvard University (2005) and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (2003). Mr. Bader was the Design Partner for Bellevue Hospital Center Ambulatory Care Facility in New York City, which opened in 2005.
In addition to
these institutional projects, Mr. Bader continues to pursue his ongoing interest in commercial work as Design Partner of the new 30-story headquarters for the First International Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv.
Mr. Bader maintains Pei Cobb Freed & Partners' enduring commitment to approach each project on its own terms, drawing inspiration from the particularities of place and program. Avoiding formal preconceptions, he seeks to find a coherence between functional requirements and technique
of construction together with the intangible qualities which animate a work of architecture.
