RODNEY MIMS COOK

Rodney Mims Cook, Jr., at the age of 15, initiated the campaign to successfully save the 5000+ seat Fox Theatre and received the National Trust for Historic Preservation Prize for doing so. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and a scholar of the American Academy in Rome. He was a White House intern in 1974. In 1982, he established Rodney M. Cook Interests, a design/development company. In 1987, he established PolitesCook Architects which designed the Newington Cropsey Museum, NY, housing the largest American collection of Hudson River School paintings (Arthur Ross Award to founder). Cook is the founder and president of the National Monuments Foundation, an organization that choreographed the design and construction of the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta. The National Monuments foundation was formerly the American Urban Design Foundation. The Millennium Gate received the 2006 Palladio Award for best design of a public space in the United States. He is a Founding Trustee of The Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Architecture and organized the design and construction of the Princes’ Olympic Games Monument in Atlanta with Anton Glikine, et al.  He is a charter signer of the Congress for the New Urbanism and is nearing completion on a 20-acre downtown Atlanta park celebrating 300 years of Georgia peacemakers, which will impact 5,000 acres of Atlanta’s under-developed Westside. Cook has assisted the Adams Memorial Foundation, orchestrating the design for a memorial library in Washington, D.C. to Presidents John and John Quincy Adams and their wives Abigail and Louisa Johnson Adams. Cook’s design proposal with co-designer Michael Franck won the 2011 commendation prize for the National Civic Art Society Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, also for Washington, D.C. This commendation resulted in Cook testifying before Congress. In November of 2015, he was a keynote speaker at the “Master Plan for 21st Century Havana” Conference, which for the first time in Cuban history, Cuban citizens and international scholars and urbanists collaborated to develop an independent and comprehensive holistic vision for the entire city. In 2016, he was a delegate to the Novus Summit in the United Nations General Assembly Room. Cook was a keynote speaker at the Museum of the XXI Century and New Media Technologies: Limits of Freedom Conference at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2017. He established the Millennium Candler Peace, Justice, and Millennium Gate Prize Denmark Commission in 2017. In 2019, he gave a keynote address at Burning Man on “CNU Cities and the Future of Global Urbanism on Land and Sea.” He is on the boards of directors of the National Monuments Foundation, the Hearst Castle Preservation Foundation, the Massachusetts Historical Society/Adams Papers, and the American University of Integrative Sciences. He is a founding board member, now emeritus of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, and an emeritus board member of Fox Theatre Incorporated and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  He has lectured at the University of Georgia, University of Virginia, University of Tennessee, Washington and Lee University, The Scott Room at the United States Senate, The Forbes yacht, Highlander, various waters, Hearst Castle, the Kremlin Armory, Tolstoy estate Yasnaya Polyana, Open Society Institute, Soros Foundation, Moscow, the Palm Beach Preservation Society Gruss Master Architect Lecture Series, National Building Museum, Washington DC, and the Russian Embassy, Washington. Mr. Cook’s work has been published in Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, Architectural Digest, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times of London, Pravda, Izvestia, The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard, Forbes and USA Today.