John Hadidian

John Hadidian was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1934. In 1952 he moved to Los Angeles to finish high school and went on to study Architecture and Engineering with a minor in Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1957. He returned to Beirut where he participated in the annual autumn salons from 1963 to 1966, in addition to group exhibitions at Gallery One (1967, 1971), Dar el-Fan (1970), the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism (1971) and Delta International Art Center (1975). He received an MFA from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in 1973. He was a practicing architect and a professor at the American University of Beirut for 12 years. He partnered with the prominent Lebanese architects Tony Maamari and Assem Salam on projects and built private villas. In 1977, he fled civil war in Beirut with his wife, the graphic designer Aza Hadidian, and their children and settled permanently in London, where he worked with the architect Krikor Baytarian before establishing his own practice ARC Design Consultants. He also partnered with the architect Rifat Chadirji and the firm Richard England and Partners, with whom he worked on the Haifa Street urban development project in Baghdad in 1981. He continued painting until his death in 2015.