John M. Woodbridge *56

John Woodbridge, the architect who led the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, died June 2, 2014, of a heart attack. He was 85.

Woodbridge graduated from Amherst College in 1951, and earned an MFA degree in architecture from Princeton in 1956. For 14 years, he worked in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), where he was the designer for the Capitol Reflecting Pool and National Sculpture Garden in Washington as well as the Stanford Center for Research and Development in Education at Stanford University.

Woodbridge resigned as associate partner at SOM to head the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp. (PADC) after Congress authorized its creation in 1972. Woodbridge led the effort to plan the Pennsylvania Avenue development between the Capitol and the   White House. He left the PADC in 1977, after the plan’s completion.

After leaving the PADC, he returned to the San Francisco Bay area and served as a principal and consultant to several architecture firms there. In 1974, he was named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Woodbridge is survived by poet Carolyn Kizer, whom he married in 1975; his two children from his first marriage, to Sally Woodbridge; and three stepchildren.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.