John is a Designer and Strategist for Public Space and Systems. As a principal and co-founder of the storrow|kinsella planning and design studio, John is an accomplished award-winning designer of public places and systems, whose work is informed from a rich experience in architecture, planning, urban design, graphics and public art. His focus is on integrative design of places and connections and their constructability from conceptual levels to exacting detail. John and co-founder/spouse Meg Storrow are 24/7 partners in leading an array of challenging problem-solving assignments regarding the public realm. Their commitment and mission is to achieve a charged and vital balance between the built and natural environments in the creation of livable well-connected places and communities.
John began his career in the Michigan office of architect Eero Saarinen as, in succession, an entry level drafter and then field engineer on the IBM Watson Labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, followed by contributing to the development of Dulles International Airport, the St. Louis "Arch" site, and North Christian Church in Columbus. The latter, Eero Saarinen's last work, was completed after Eero's death and after the office completed its already planned move to New Haven (Hamden), Connecticut. John remained in the ES&A Connecticut office for another two years completing the North Christian Church project and working on the Vivian Beaumont Theater and Plaza in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Saarinen office experience was an amazing period working for and learning from a master architect at the peak of his career.
In 1964, John joined the New Haven studio of architect Paul Rudolph's private practice during Paul's tenure as head of the Yale School of Architecture. He was attracted to that studio by the exciting work that Rudolph was then producing including the iconic Yale University Arts and Architecture building. That experience and its exposure to the studio's small globe-wandering staff inspired an almost three-year period of travel-study experiencing ancient, historic and contemporary British and European architecture and town planning. It was a six-month VW microbus european odyssey followed by two years in London. It was also a journey that future partner Meg Storrow experienced later in a year-long break from her landscape architecture studies.
After his return to the United States, John formed an environmental design studio in Michigan, authoring HUD and AIA award-winning downtown development and urban design plans, and parks and recreation facilities. He was co-winner of one of the nation’s first (though unbuilt) Vietnam War Memorial design competitions. From 1981 through 1985, he represented Saarinen's successor's, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, on site for the construction of the $70 million Cummins Corporate Headquarters in Columbus, Indiana. At the conclusion of that project John and Meg formed the Storrow Kinsella Partnership in Columbus, to produce nationally published and award-winning work ranging from meditative courtyards to an interstate entryway. They relocated the studio to Indianapolis in 1996 having expanded their practice to a statewide scope. storrow|kinsella has evolved into a niche studio producing innovative work in the public space with an emphasis on the nexus between urban design and multimodal transportation, and on creation of effective strategies for implementation of ideas.
John blends his architectural, urban design and environmental graphic design skills with polymathic knowledge of architecture, ecology, engineering and transportation to leverage infrastructure investment into beautiful and functional places and connections that are grounded in pragmatic but uncompromising constructibility.