John Lansdown

Robert John Lansdown (2 January 1929 Cardiff, Wales – 17 February 1999) was a British computer graphics pioneer,polymath and Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which was renamed in his honour in 2000.

As early as 1960, Lansdown, a very successful architect with offices in Russell Square, central London, was a believer in the potential for computers for architecture and other creative activities. He pioneered the use of computers as an aid to planning; making perspective drawings on an Elliott 803 computer in 1963, modeling a building's lifts and services, plotting the annual fall of daylight across its site, as well as authoring his own computer aided design applications.

Lansdown joined the ACM in 1972 and Eurographics in 1983. From the early 1970s to the 1990s, he had influential roles in several professional bodies, and chaired the Science Research Council's Computer Aided Building Design Panel, through which he implemented a world leading strategy for developing computer aided architectural design in British universities. He had enormous influence as one of the founders and as secretary of the Computer Arts Society (1968–1991). He was on 10 editorial boards and chaired and organized many international conferences — Event One at the Royal College of Art (1969) and Interact at the Edinburgh Festival (1973) were seminal events in establishing the use of computers for the creation of art works.

In 1977, Lansdown became chairman of System Simulation Ltd the software company which, amongst other pioneering activities, had played a key role in the creation and development of the Computer Arts Society. System Simulation had been applying computer graphics techniques in TV and film applications following collaborative research work at the Royal College of Art. At System Simulation Lansdown then played a leading role in several pioneering animation projects, contributing to the flight deck instrumentation readouts on the Nostromo space ship for Ridley Scott's Alien, many advertising sequences and latterly, working with Tony Pritchett, producing the 3D wire frame drawings from which Martin Lambie-Nairn's original Channel 4 logo was rendered.

...
Wikipedia