Louis A. Dean

Architect | 1912-2002

Lou Dean served as a principal of the firm Paderewski, Mitchell and Dean alongside C.J. Paderewski and Delmar Mitchell

Architect Louis ‘Lou’ A. Dean was born on April 12, 1912 in Winnetka, Illinois the second son of Fuller Dean, a successful architect in Chicago and his mother, Emma, an accomplished music teacher. Lou attended the North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka and graduated with the class of 1930. During high school he played football, basketball and baseball as well as serving as print manager of the yearbook. He also played the piano and saxophone and sailed as a crewmember on the Elizabeth, which raced from Chicago to Mackinac Island.

After high school he attended Yale University, studying architecture. During the summers, he worked for his father and other architects in Chicago, Winnetka and in Los Angeles. In 1940, with his wife Bette, he moved to Coronado where he became an architect with The Eleventh Naval District working in the building at the foot of Broadway in Downtown San Diego during World War II (alongside Sim Bruce Richards, Lloyd Ruocco and Russell Forester among others). They had two children, Robert and Carol, and moved to La Jolla in 1958.

Working alongside architects C.J. Paderewski and Delmar S. Mitchell and Louis A. Dean for decades, Lou retired in 1981 (from Paderewski, Dean, Albrecht and Stevenson) and died in 2002.