A Norwegian-born architect, Peter Pran is Senior Vice President and Design Principal of Ellerbe Becket, a leading international architecture-engineering firm that combines a conscious commitment of creating cutting-edge architecture with the financial security of one of the largest practices in the States. Pran calls himself a New Modernist, rejecting historicism as not recognizing our own time; he worked with Mies van der Rohe on the Chicago Federal Center and the Berlin National Gallery. Pran's designs, with their curved surfaces and thin planes are characterized by a site-specific content and a poetic feeling of movement with its inherent sense of freedom.