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26        CURRENT BIOGRAPHY

[[Image: photo of John Hancock Callender]]
[[Photo credit: Kay Simmon]] 
[[Caption: JOHN HANCOCK CALLENDER]]

an evaluation chart to be used when considering the purchase of a house, and lists 134 points to check. "Any family, no matter what its size, needs, or taste, can buy a house more intelligently after reading this," commented the Chicago Sunday Tribune. Callender taught architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York during 1955 and at Columbia University in New York from 1952 to 1953. He completed in June 1955 a year's research at Princeton University School of Architecture on stainless steel curtain walls, at the request of the American Iron and Steel Institute.

John Hancock Callender was born on January 18, 1908, in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Alonzo Lee Callender and the former Lola Hancock. His father was in the wholesale millinery business. He has one sister, Marjorie Weaver. His ancestors were early settlers in Missouri, having "followed Daniel Boone from Kentucky." John was reared in his native city and attended Westport High School. His principal extracurricular activity was debating. He worked after school in local architects' offices, in a bank, and as a delivery boy. During summer vacations, he sold tickets in the railroad station.

Before he was graduated from high school in 1924, John had decided he wanted to become an architect. He competed for a four-year scholarship to Yale University, winning second place and choice as alternative. He applied for and received a small scholarship for his first year at Yale. The second year, the winner of the original four-year scholarship left college because of illness, and Callender, as alternate, received this assistance for the next three years. In addition, he worked as a waiter and bus boy and tutored during the summers.

In his junior year at Yale, Callender left college for six months to work full-time as a tutor to the children of an American sugar planter in the Dominican Republic. Upon his return to college, he continued to take courses in architecture, while majoring in English, as there was no undergraduate major in his field. He won a prize for an essay in American literature, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the A.B. degree by Yale in 1928.
Callender studied at the School of Architecture of Yale University for two years.  In 1931 he took a position in housing research with the john B. Pierce Foundation, New York City, where he remained until 1943.  "My work," he has explained, "consisted of devising new methods of architectural construction, and of studying materials with the idea of producing low-cost housing by technical means rather than by government subsidy or by playing with interest rates."  He was concerned especially with prefabrication.
As research secretary of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, Callender wrote in 1931 that "the architect should approach the problem of designing a prison exactly as he would approach that of any other building" (Architectural Forum, September 1931).
He discussed designs for schools in the United States in the Architectural Forum (December 1933) and termed 80 per cent of all rural schools and 60 per cent of all urban elementary schools "completely antiquated."
Callender undertook formal study in the School of Architecture at New York University in 1935, and received his B. Arch. degree in 1939.  During World War II, between 1943 and 1945, he served with the Army Engineers, Manhattan District, employed on the atomic bomb project at Columbia University.  His work involved supervision of laboratory remodelings and additions.
Beginning private practice in New York City in 1945, Callender designed houses for "fairly well-to-do" individual clients.  He served as consultant to the National Housing Agency on the Veterans Emergency Housing Program during 1946 and 1947.  This program was an effort to promote "an industralized or factory method of mass production of houses, largely by prefabrication."
As a consultant, Callender advised the Quality House Institute program from 1947 to 1953, which he described as "a promotion idea to get speculative builders to build better houses of good quality costing a little more money, instead of producing houses of poor quality in order to cut prices."  Sponsored from 1947 to 1949 by the Revere Copper & Brass, Inc., and from 1949 to 1953 by the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, the institute also tried to convince merchant builders that to employ architects was the first way to improve buildings.  "I believe," Callender says, "that the institute program made a perceptible impression on speculative builders, and that they are now building better single family houses for sale to the public."
As a consultant to the U.S. Government's Housing and Home Finance Agency on Demountable Defense Housing in 1952, Callender made several trips to Washington, D.C., to review the agency's plans and to advise that more