Born in Danville, Illinois, in 1925, Crites first became interested in architecture while stationed in Japan with the U.S. Navy at the close of World War II.
Crites studied engineering at Purdue University, transferring to Miami University in Ohio after changing his focus to architecture. He went on to graduate from Iowa State University in 1952 with a bachelor of architecture degree.
Crites’s first works were built in the ’50s around Paducah, Kentucky, an area then experiencing a growth spurt due to atomic energy projects being developed nearby.
Founded in 1957, Crites & McConnell designed some 250 buildings, primarily in the Midwest and Florida. Significant works include the Seiberling House (1961) in North Liberty, Iowa, a series of floating planes created for the owners of a significant art collection, and Crites’s own house (1964) in Cedar Rapids, a highly sculptural array of interlocking post-and-beam spaces.
Crites & McConnell’s C.Y. Stephens Auditorium (1969) at Iowa State University was voted the state’s Building of the Century by the Iowa chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Crites served as the chair of the graduate program in architecture at Iowa State University from 1975 to 1979.
Crites cites Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier as among his influences; of his contemporaries, he has a strong admiration for the late architect Fay Jones, whose work reflects a similar sensitivity to site and interest in natural materials.
Until very recently, Crites always stopped work at noon to play handball for an hour and a half. He admits he was “never a big-lunch kind of guy”—and has not taken a lunch meeting in almost 30 years.
Crites is also a painter who works primarily in watercolors. Although he admires abstract painters like Wassily Kandinsky, his favorite subjects are the old barns that he remembers from his days in Iowa.
Crites currently resides in Conway, South Carolina, with his wife of 32 years, Nene. He calls their marriage “the smartest partnership I ever entered.”
