John Lansdown

Who was John Lansdown?

Robert John Lansdown was a British computer graphics pioneer, polymath and Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which was renamed in his honour in 2000.

As early as 1960, Lansdown, a very successful architect with offices in Russell Square, central London, was a believer in the potential for computers for architecture and other creative activities. He pioneered the use of computers as an aid to planning; making perspective drawings on an Elliott 803 computer in 1963, modeling a building's lifts and services, plotting the annual fall of daylight across its site, as well as authoring his own computer aided design applications.

Lansdown joined the ACM in 1972 and Eurographics in 1983. From the early 1970s to the 1990s, he had influential roles in several professional bodies, and chaired the Science Research Council's Computer Aided Building Design Panel, through which he implemented a world leading strategy for developing computer aided architectural design in British universities. He had enormous influence as one of the founders and as secretary of the Computer Arts Society.