Meet architect Randall Stout

Architect Randall Stout, who designed the Taubman Museum of Art, lives in Los Angeles and has designed buildings in Europe. But he remains a soft-spoken native of eastern Tennessee.

"Appalachia, the Blue Ridge, is like home to me," said Stout, who grew up in Knoxville.

Stout, 50, has degrees in architecture from the University of Tennessee and Rice University. He was a senior associate of Frank Gehry, who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He opened his own firm in 1996.

The Taubman Museum is the first completed museum Stout has designed from scratch. He had designed a museum addition and done consulting work for the North Carolina Museum of Art, among other museums. It was a deputy director at the North Carolina museum who suggested Roanoke consider Stout.

As for Stout's design philosophy — you've heard of thinking outside the box?

"He doesn't even start with the box," said Judy Larson, the Roanoke museum's director when Stout was chosen in 2002. "He just has a very different way of thinking about spaces."

Larson once visited a Stout-designed bathhouse in Germany. "It looks like a bird taking off," she said.

In 2005, Stout's design for the Art Gallery of Alberta won an international competition that included such luminaries as Zaha Hadid, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Stout has said the Canada museum, which is under construction, was inspired by Inuit stone sculptures and the northern lights.