George Izenour

After that, Izenour moved to Cathedral Village in Philadelphia. He continued to work on theatre design projects until his death in 2007.

In 2004, Izenour was presented with the Wally Russell Lifetime Achievement Award. The "Wally" Award was established in 1992 in memory of Wally Russell. Each year, the "Wally" honors one individual who exhibits a strong sense of leadership, a commitment to technological innovation, and a career of service to the lighting industry.

In 1977 Izenour retired from Yale from his positions both as professor emeritus of theatre design and technology and director emeritus of the electro-mechanical laboratory of the Yale University School of Drama. He continued his consulting business in a converted oyster shack next to his home at Stony Creek, Connecticut, where he overlooked the Thimble Islands.

Izenour wrote technical articles for many professional journals, wrote the section on theatre design for the 1974 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, and contributed to the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction.

Izenour shared the Rodgers and Hammerstein Prize in 1960. He received the USITT Award from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology in 1975, The George Freely Award from the Theatre Library Association in 1977, and the Distinguished Service Award from the American Theatre Association in 1978.

Izenour designed a theater that could be converted from one stage type to the other by a process, part manual and part electronic, that took about 15 minutes. This convertible design was celebrated in the architectural world and became known as an Izenour theatre. Today Izenour theatres have been built across the United States, as well as in Canada, Venezuela, and Israel. No Broadway theatres adopted such a program. “Broadway is not for me,” he said in a 1959 interview with The New York Times. “I am a radical to those real estate operators.”

He and Hildegard had a son, Steven Izenour, born in New Haven in July 1940; he later became a world-renowned architect and artist.

Shortly after moving to San Francisco, Izenour met Hallie Flanagan, the national director of the Federal Theatre Project. Started by the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, this program was an effort to support productions in order to employ actors, playwrights, and technical staff to maintain theater during the hard times. Izenour eventually advanced to become the lighting director of the project. He designed the theatre built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

Izenour was made a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation on July 10, 1939. This was 10 days after the House Un-American Activities Committee declared all of the members of the Federal Theater to be Communists, and essentially shutting down the program of the Federal Theater. With his Rockefeller grant, Izenour gained a position at Yale University. He had a mandate to establish a laboratory dedicated to the advancement of theatre technology.

George Charles Izenour (pronounced I-zen-our), MPhys, AIEEE (July 24, 1912 – March 24, 2007) was an American designer and leading innovator in the field of theatrical design and technology, as well as an author and educator. He taught at Yale University from 1940 to 1977 (with time during World War II working on anti-submarine programs). In 1959 he established a consulting firm for theater design and acoustics.

George Izenour was born in 1912 in New Brighton, Pennsylvania; his family moved to Ambridge in 1917. In 1918 Izenour's father moved the family to Mansfield, Ohio. The boy had a condition known as keratoconus, a non-spherical deformation of the cornea of the eye, and he needed extra help from his parents in his early years of education. His mother taught him English and Latin, and his father history and mathematics. George began formal schooling at the age of six in Mansfield.

His son, architect Steven Izenour, had designed the house. He won both national recognition for it by the American Institute of Architects and international acclaim in an exhibit at the Pompidou Center in Paris. The living room was lead lined, in order to be acoustically separate from the rest of the house. It was designed in section to emulate the plan acoustics of Carnegie Hall. During construction, Izenour fired a starter's pistol every day in the living room to record the reverberation and adjust the baffles. He enjoyed playing a concert recording of the 1812 Overture at volume for visitors. The Juilliard String Quartet said Izenour's living room was one of their favorite recording spaces. Izenour lived there until his wife's death in 2002.