John P. Klingman

Emeritus Professor of Architecture, Adjunct Professor

John P. Klingman is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Tulane University, where he was a full time faculty member for thirty-five years and a holder of the Richard Koch Chair in Architecture. A recipient of numerous School teaching
awards, in 2001 he received the President’s Award for Outstanding Teaching, Tulane’s highest teaching honor. Regularly coordinating Thesis Design and teaching upper level design studios, his recent offerings related architectural design to issues of sustainable water engagement in New Orleans. This interest arose from his participation in the post Katrina Dutch Dialogues initiatives and the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan of 2013.

As a practicing architect, he has been engaged in consulting on projects in the city, including the US Customhouse over twenty-five years with Waggonner and Ball Architects, and on Tulane’s Uptown Campus. He was a member of the Architectural Review Committee of the New Orleans Historic Districts Landmarks Commission from 1995 until 2023. From 1997 to 2020 he wrote an annual “Best of New New Orleans Architecture” article for New Orleans Magazine. His 2012
book, New in New Orleans Architecture, highlights eighty outstanding contemporary projects, and an expanded volume is in production.

As a founding member of DOCOMOMO/NO, he has been active in seeking to preserve outstanding buildings from the mid-twentieth century in, beginning with Curtis and Davis’s 1968 Rivergate in 1994. He has presented public lectures and commentary regarding New Orleans Midcentury Modernism at the
DOCOMOMO US National Symposium, plenum of Annual Meeting of Louisiana Historical Association, Annual Symposium of the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans among other venues.

He is the author of a chapter in the 2018 anthology Sweet Spots: In-Between Spaces in New Orleans “Harmony Street- an Interstitial House,” that describes living in New Orleans without air conditioning. His 1898 Garden District house,
the first designed by Emile Weil an important early twentieth century architect, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2025.