In Memoriam: George Wagner (1953 – 2024)

Architect and Professor Emeritus George Wagner passed away peacefully at a long-term care facility in Vancouver on July 11, 2024, at the age of 71.

Wagner taught at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture (SALA) for 24 years and 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,” reads SALA’s website. “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.”

Wagner also helped extend SALA beyond its location on UBC’s Point Grey campus and coordinated UBC Architecture Tokyo, which served as a biennial SALA satellite where 16 students studied in Tokyo over an entire term.

He later served as the conduit of architectural discourse and practice between Tokyo and Vancouver and edited three books that emerged from this effort: Tokyo from Vancouver 1, Tokyo from Vancouver 2, and Tokyo from Vancouver 3.

Prior to coming to UBC, Wagner attained the rank of Associate Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he taught from 1987 to 1993. He also taught at Rice, Yale, Cornell, and the Rhode Island School of Design before that.

His writing has been published in various journals and books, including Architecture and Feminism and Stan Douglas. He received a B.A. in Architectural History from Bard College and a Master of Architecture from the University of Washington and was a licensed architect in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

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