Researching John Sheehy

Sheehy was born in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland in 1889, the son of a local policeman. He received his education at Tuam Christian Brothers School and St Jarlath's College and later at St Patrick's College, Maynooth and University College Galway.

Sheehy passed the Indian Civil Service examination in 1913 and was posted to Burma where he was on active service from 1914 to 1918. After the First World War, he returned to Burma and was appointed to the Development Commission in Rangoon and in 1924 was made deputy secretary to the Burmese Government. In 1937, Sheehy was transferred to Delhi and was appointed to the Central Board of Revenue of the Finance Department of the Indian Government. He was made a Companion of the Indian Civil Service in 1939 and received a knighthood in 1943. Following India's independence from Britain in 1947, Sheehy joined the Allied Control Council in Germany. Here he served as Director of Public Revenue and Assistant Adviser to the British Military Governor.

Sheehy married Jean Newton Simpson in 1927. They had 3 children including Sir Patrick Sheehy (1930-2019), a former chairman of British American Tobacco.

Sheehy was shot to death by intruders at his house in Vlotho, Germany on 11 May 1949. He was 59.

Sheehy was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. He received his B.S. in Architecture from the University of Minnesota School of Architecture in 1964, and his Master of Architecture, 1967 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sheehy is known for his expertise in the design of Mixed-use development commercial projects, and tall buildings. He was a member of the design team at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago, Illinois and has been the recipient of more than forty architectural design awards, including the 1972 Arthur Rotch Traveling Scholarship.

His significant work as principal at TAC includes: Boston’s Copley Place; 801 Tower, Los Angeles, California; the Johns-Manville World Headquarters, Denver, Colorado; Liberty Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John Sheehy is currently an associate professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. He has also lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, MIT Center for Real Estate, California Polytechnic State University/San Luis Obispo and has been a design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.