James Sanders is an architect, designer, and writer in New York City.
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Sanders is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and attended the MIT School of Architecture. Since 1985 he has been principal of James Sanders + Associates, an architecture and design firm located in New York City. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (Fellows Page, 2006) in 2006 for research on the experience of cities.
Mr. Sanders' design work has included public projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Pershing Square Management Association in Los Angeles, and the Parks Council, where he co-designed and co-developed a coordinated series of amenities that restored Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. His residential and commercial work has been featured in Interiors, Oculus, House Beautiful, The New York Times, and Architectural Digest.
In 2001, Sanders published a noted study on the relationship of the city and film, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (Knopf, 2001, Bloomsbury UK, 2002), which received an award from the Theatre Library Association in 2002 and was called a "marvellous -- miraculous -- book" by the famed urbanist Jane Jacobs. In 2007, the book became the basis for a large-scale multimedia exhibit in Grand Central Terminal, sponsored by Turner Classic Movies and Time Warner Cable.
Sanders’ most recent book, Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York, produced with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, with contributions by Martin Scorsese and Nora Ephron, was published by Rizzoli in 2006.
Sanders co-conceived and co-wrote (with Ric Burns) the award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film, and its companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History(Knopf, 1999). The eight-part, 17½-hour film series chronicles the city's rise from tiny Dutch trading post down through its continuing preeminence as the undisputed economic and cultural capital of the world. The series won several Emmy Awards and a Columbia-Dupont award.
With Burns, Sanders co-wrote Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film , for which he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Writing in 2007.
Mr. Sanders has created the content and design for several exhibit and multimedia projects, including "Timescapes," the permanent orientation installation at the Museum of the City of New York (created with Local Projects), "Seaport Past and Future," at the South Street Seaport, and the "Celluloid Skyline" website, which was called "the most beautiful website about New York" by Manhattan Users Guide (MUG.com).
Sanders is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and has written articles for the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Record, and co-wrote the introduction for New York City’s official bid book for the 2012 Olympic Games.