Gary Anderson (designer)

Concurrent with his work in government-related planning, Anderson held an adjunct faculty position in the Edward St John Department of Real Estate (in the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins). In this capacity he taught courses and wrote on the role of design and planning in private sector development, and he became a member of the executive committee of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), Baltimore District Council. In 2005 he became a Fulbright Senior Specialist, and was invited by the Helsinki University of Technology to lecture and advise graduate students on their theses in the Faculty for Engineering and Architecture and the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies.

It was not until the 1990s that the connection between Anderson and the symbol began to be better established, with the publication of an article by Philip B. Meggs in the trade journal Print, which credited Anderson with the design and showed that Anderson's symbol represents a modern expression of Bauhaus principles, a view which was reinforced subsequently by Peder Anker.

In 1978 he accepted a position in the School of Architecture and Planning at King Faisal University (KFU) in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. At about the same time, he was accepted into the PhD program in Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He spent the next seven years alternately engaged in teaching and research at KFU, where he ultimately became acting head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He continued to work on his PhD at Hopkins, which was awarded in 1985 after he defended his thesis on socio-cultural aspects of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia that, in combination with the rise of the oil economy, determined patterns of urbanization there. While still at KFU, he worked with CH2M Hill to undertake a comprehensive socioeconomic survey, which was one of the first in Saudi Arabia.

By the 1970s, the mixing of the youth subculture with concurrent political and social upheavals seemed to give rise to a violent counterculture that appeared to morph out of the previously peaceful youth movement. In 1968, the Tate/LaBianca murders were committed by the youthful Charles Manson Family, and in 1970, the 26-year-old civil rights activist Angela Davis was implicated (although ultimately found not guilty) in the murder of a superior court judge.

In 1970, when Anderson was 23 years old, the Container Corporation of America (CCA) released a poster that was widely distributed to colleges and universities in the United States. Under the direction of Walter Paepcke, the CCA had established itself as a leader in corporate graphics and design. The poster advertised a competition to design a graphic symbol which would be used on recycled paper products and which could recognize a commitment to environmental sensitivity on the part of any manufacture who was engaged in recycling. The winning symbol would be given over to the public domain. The competition was also to honor the first Earth Day, which was held that same year on April 22.

Gary attended public schools and graduated from high school in the Las Vegas Valley. In 1966, after completing one year in the engineering program at the University of Southern California, Anderson changed majors and enrolled in the USC School of Architecture, where he studied from 1966 to 1970. He relied on various scholarships — notably from the Graham Foundation, the Architectural Guild of Southern California and the American Institute of Architects — to fund his tuition. He earned a bachelor of architecture degree, magna cum laude in 1970 and a master of urban design degree one year later in 1971.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the teaching philosophy of the USC College of Architecture and Fine Arts was influenced by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Institute of Design. The Dean of the USC College, Crombie Taylor, was the former acting Director of the IIT Institute of Design. Consequently, the College's architectural education, like that of IIT, was steeped in Modernism and in particular the Bauhaus aesthetic and the Bauhaus approach to integrating art, architecture, technology and culture. This was evident in the work of the College's faculty, who included the building scientist, Konrad Wachsmann, and the designer of some Case Study Houses in Southern California, Pierre Koenig. Other faculty who influenced Anderson's design aesthetic were the graphic artist John Gilchrist, whose recommended reading included D'Arcy Thompson's book On Growth and Form. Other readings were from Ralph Knowles, who was an early advocate of environmentally-friendly design that prefigured more recent sustainable design and development, and Richard Berry, the urban planner and theorist who explored with his students the relationship between design and information theory.

Partly in reaction to these and other events, a youth movement was forming that questioned the established patterns of human interaction that gave rise to such problems. Among the early manifestations of this movement was a commitment to nonviolence and pacifism. It engendered, as well, a renewed interest in the stylistic aspects of culture such as were evidenced during a previous youth movement in the late 19th and early 20th Century when the Jugendstil and Art Nouveau flourished in the applied and graphic arts. Another aspect of the youth subculture of the 1960s and 1970s was the recreational use of psychoactive substances and psychedelic drugs.

During this time the world outside the university was in tumult which was reflected by events on campus. The Watts Riots had raged just south of USC the summer before Anderson arrived, and he was briefly engaged with the South Central Neighborhood Design Center, an organization that had been set up to provide pro bono architectural services in distressed neighborhoods, as a means of furthering the cause of social justice. Three years previously, Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, which implicated big business and industry in profiting from practices that caused irreparable environmental harm. US involvement in the Vietnam War had steadily increased since 1959, with the deployment of combat troops in 1965.

In the late 1950s, the family ultimately settled in North Las Vegas, Nevada, where Glen had been stationed at Lake Mead Naval Base, engaged in work related to atomic research at the Nevada Test Site. In 1958, shortly after joining the electronics firm of EG&G, Glen died of complications possibly attributable to exposure to atomic radiation years before at the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site.

Gary Dean Anderson (born 1947) is an American graphic designer and architect. He is most well known as the designer of the recycling symbol, one of the most readily recognizable logos in the world.