Introducing 2015 KRob Juror Paul Stevenson Oles, FAIA

Paul Stevenson Oles, FAIA, is an architect, teacher, architectural illustrator, and a legend in the field of visualization. He graduated from Texas Tech and Yale Universities and subsequently initiated his teaching career at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974, resulting in his classic textbook Architectural Illustration that was published five years later. Within the next decade, Oles taught in the capacity of adjunct faculty, lecturer, and workshop leader at Yale, MIT, and Harvard GSD, where he was a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies in 1982.

During his teaching years, Oles enjoyed expressing other architects' design intentions to clients and the public, by means of previsualization and post-construction comparisons of finished buildings. This work earned him an AIA Institute Honor in 1983. He was later elevated to Fellowship in the Institute in 1989, which described him as “the dean of architectural illustrators in America.”

In 1984 he co-founded the ‘American Society of Architectural Illustrators’, with its annual Architecture in Perspective juried competition and exhibition of architectural representation. The organization, which won an AIA Institute Honor in 1995, has since become international in scope and its highest award, the Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize, has become the undisputed world standard for excellence in this field of endeavor. Oles’ wax base pencil drawing of a Paris office tower was selected as the 1996 recipient of that Prize.

As a longtime user and teacher of SketchUp software, his 'PSO signature styles'--now included as a standard part of the software--were developed with a fine eye for texture and detail.  His "cartoon self" has been chosen as the current scale avatar that loads in default 2015 SketchUp templates.  

In late 2014 his retrospective drawing exhibition, Truth in Architecture, was held for two weeks in Santa Fe, and consequently traveled to Texas Tech University, where it is currently on view.  The show is scheduled for further exhibition next May in Boston, sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects.

Paul Stevenson Oles currently continues to lecture, consult, and conduct workshops in hybrid imaging.  He also continues occasionally to practice architecture and illustration at his firm, Interface Architects, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.