Author profile

John J. Parman is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, Architect's Newspaper, ORO Editions' A+RD research imprint, and Room One Thousand, the annual edited by graduate students at U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is a visiting scholar. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded Design Book Review, edited by Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, and published it until 1998. In 1989, he and Richard Bender founded the Urban Construction Laboratory to address a range of urban topics. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden founded Snowden & Parman, an editorial consultancy, continuing their ongoing collaboration.

Educated in architecture and planning, Parman lectured at U.C. Berkeley and California College of the Arts in the mid-1980s and again in 2004. He had a 40-year career in the field, with stints at EHDD, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and then at Gensler, where, as editorial director, he launched two of its flagship publications, Dialogue(2000) and the Design Forecast(2013). His team's work received the highest awards from Graphisand Arc International, and was twice a finalist for Folioawards for editorial excellence.