Gallis, Michael Alexander, 1909-2001

Michael Gallis was a Russian-born architect who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1924 at the age of 16. He enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Oregon, Eugene, one of the first schools in the United States to discard the Beaux Arts model and embrace modernism in its pedagogy. During World War II, Gallis joined an architectural engineering firm specializing in th design of U.S. military installations around the world, and later reflected that this job was a key to his later career as he learned how to produce construction documents and how to coordinate with various engineering fields. Following the end of the war, Gallis worked for San Francisco architect John Dinwiddie, who introduced him to German architect and emigree Erich Mendelsohn. At Eric Mendelsohn Architects, Gallis was responsible for translating Mendelsohn's visionary sketches into realizable buildings using the expertise in construction drawings gained during the war. After Mendelsohn's death Gallis was tasked with completing two of Mendelsohn's projects, the Stanford Research Park headquarters of Varian Associates, a technology startup, and a research laboratory for the Atomic Energy Commission near the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. These two projects dominated Gallis's practice from 1953 until he closed his office in 1973. Michael Gallis died in 2001.