SALA is profoundly saddened by the death of our beloved colleague and friend, Professor Emeritus George Wagner. He passed away peacefully at a long-term care facility in Vancouver on July 11, 2024. He was 71.
As a brilliant writer and educator, George’s impact at SALA and in the broader architecture community is immense. He taught at SALA for 24 years, starting in 1993 and retiring in 2017. He served as Chair of the Architecture Program from 2009 to 2012. His intellectual passion for modernism and various avatars of the contemporary city, from innovative high-density housing to the ideological implication of urban form, deeply shaped the School’s pedagogy and influenced a generation of practitioners.
George was committed to architecture’s relationship to ideas as manifest in literature, fine art, and cultural theory. He was instrumental in introducing the required Contemporary Theory course to the Master of Architecture curriculum. He was also an astute and tireless flâneur who helped extend SALA beyond its location on UBC’s Point Grey campus. He coordinated UBC Architecture Tokyo, which between 2004 and 2016 functioned as a biennial SALA satellite where 16 students studied in Tokyo over an entire term. George became an expert in all things Tokyo and served as the critical conduit of architectural discourse and practice between there and Vancouver. He edited three remarkable books that emerged from this effort: Tokyo from Vancouver 1, Tokyo from Vancouver 2, and Tokyo from Vancouver 3.
Before coming to UBC, George attained the rank of Associate Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he taught from 1987 to 1993. Prior to that he taught at Rice, Yale, Cornell, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His writing has been published in many influential journals and in numerous books, including Architecture and Feminism and Stan Douglas. He was the editor of books on the work of Stanley Saitowitz, Thom Mayne, and Barkow Leibinger Architects. He received a B.A. in Architectural History from Bard College and a Master of Architecture from the University of Washington. He was also a licensed architect in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
George was always generous and often playfully funny. Working and learning alongside him was a delight and he will be dearly missed. SALA would like to offer its deepest condolences to his partner Hiroshi, his siblings Anne and Rob, and to his many colleagues, friends, and former students.
There will be a memorial at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 27 at Third Beach in Vancouver. Download the invitation.