Fred Linn Osmon Collection

Fred Linn Osmon was born in 1932 in Las Vegas, Nevada, where his father worked as a high rigger and dynamiter at the nearby Boulder Dam construction site. The family moved shortly thereafter to California, where Fred’s father worked at the Empire Mine in Grass Valley. In 1936 Fred’s father died of tuberculosis and Osmon’s mother moved with Fred to St. Louis, Missouri.

After graduating high school in St. Louis, Osmon studied architecture at Washington University in the same city. During his undergraduate study he attended a two-week seminar with noted designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller, building a dome and attending extensive lectures by Fuller. Osmon earned his bachelor of architecture degree from Washington University in 1956.

Osmon enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1956, training as a pilot and attaining the rank of second lieutenant. Following his discharge from the Air Force in 1959, Osmon worked for the architect Hugh Stubbins in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then for two firms in New York: Curtis and Davis, and the John Carl Warnecke firm. While exploring graduate programs in architecture at several schools, Osmon sat in on a studio seminar by noted architect Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. Impressed by Kahn’s emphasis on discovering what a building wants to be, Osmon applied and was accepted to the graduate program in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

While studying under Kahn at Pennsylvania, Osmon developed his own architectural philosophy. In contrast to Kahn’s emphasis on monumental buildings and the role of the architect in the design process, Osmon wanted to focus on the client’s functional requirements combined with the architect’s personal sensibility to create beauty in design. He earned his master of architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962.

Following graduate school, Osmon worked as an architectural research associate at Educational Facilities Laboratories of the Ford Foundation. At MIT, Osmon met and befriended noted architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander and was impressed with Alexander’s ideas on a new design programmatic process called pattern language. The central ideas of this process, articulated in a 1977 book by Alexander and three of his students, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction are that users are more sensitive to their needs than architects and that a common pattern could enable architects to design and build practical and beautiful buildings at any scale. When the two architects (Osmon and Alexander) met, Alexander had recently accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley and wondered if Osmon might like to do the same.

Fred Osmon and his wife Linda Malm, whom he had married in 1963, relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in 1965. Osmon rejoined the Warnecke firm, this time at their San Francisco office. While there, Osmon worked with Thomas Creighton, the retired editor of the journal Progressive Architecture, on a master plan for a new college in Prescott, Arizona that never came to fruition. Osmon then joined the architectural school faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and continued to work on architectural projects for schools, migrant labor camps, the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, and private residences.

Osmon began his architectural practice in Arizona in 1973 and continued as an active architect for about thirty years, designing residential, commercial, medical, educational, and medical facilities. He also taught several design courses and a course on utopian housing at Arizona State University. His architectural projects focused on building ecologically sound and beautiful environments in the Sonoran Desert. Osmon also explored the way that architecture might reflect and influence family dynamics. He was married to Jacomina Jones Newman from 1985 to 2006 and currently resides in Cave Creek, Arizona. His work has received numerous awards including: