About

John Ellis is an Anglo-Californian architect, urban designer and teacher. He grew up in an architectural household in London, graduating from Cambridge University and practiced for several years in England before emigrating to California. He worked with David Roberts in Cambridge on college buildings and the Fitzwilliam Museum extension (1972-3) and with Richard MacCormac in London on social housing for Milton Keynes and Warrington New Towns (1974-6).

John has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 1977. He has worked for a number of firms including KMD Architects, ELS, Anshen + Allen on projects as varied as the Oakland Federal Building (1992), and the Far East International Building in Shanghai (1995), before joining Daniel Solomon in 1996, where he has been a partner and Directer of Urban Design.

Since joining Daniel Solomon, John has led the urban design on many large scale social housing projects including Othello Station, Seattle; Hunters View in San Francisco; and Jordan Downs in Watts, Los Angeles. In addition he has master planned projects including the Coyote Valley, San Jose Vision Plan for the Greenbelt Alliance, and campus plans for UC Berkeley and UCLA.

John has taught at CCA in San Francisco and UC Berkeley for many years and was the inaugural Marshall Visiting Professor of Sustainable Urban Design at Cambridge University in 2012. In 2023 he was a Visiting Professor at Notre Dame University.

John has been an active member of SPUR in San Francisco and is a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism CNU.

John was made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2021.