Anthony Vidler, professor of art history and architecture and chair of the Department of Art History at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been nominated as dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University.

The appointment, made by Cornell Provost Don M. Randel, would be effective Jan. 1, 1997.

President Hunter Rawlings enthusiastically supported the nomination and will recommend that it be adopted by the Cornell University Board of Trustees, which meets later this month.

Vidler succeeds William G. McMinn, who stepped down in June after serving as dean since Aug. 1, 1984. Stanley J. Bowman will serve as acting dean until Vidler's arrival on campus.

"In Anthony Vidler, we are fortunate to have attracted someone of uncommon intellectual distinction to the deanship of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning," Randel said. "The range of his abilities and experience, furthermore, makes him ideally suited to address the academic issues facing the college as a whole, as well as to play a leading role in discussions among a set of related disciplines that are widely distributed across the campus. I look forward very much to his stimulating presence here."

British-born Vidler is a historian, critic and theorist in the study of urban planning and architecture, with specializations in European architecture, the architecture of the Enlightenment and the 18th century in France, the history of Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries and criticism of contemporary architecture. He is an authority on the work of the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806).

Vidler earned a bachelor's degree in architecture and fine arts and a professional graduate degree in architecture from Cambridge University in 1963 and 1965, respectively.

At Cornell, Vidler will oversee about 70 faculty members and 730 undergraduate and graduate students. The college has an annual budget of $10.4 million and offers the undergraduate bachelor of architecture, bachelor of fine arts, bachelor of science in urban and regional studies and bachelor of science in the history of architecture degrees. Advanced degrees are available in many fields, such as urban design, urban planning, architectural history, historic preservation and landscape architecture.

Before joining UCLA in 1993, Vidler taught for 27 years at Princeton University, where from 1990 to 1993 he served as the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture. At Princeton he also chaired the Ph.D. program in the School of Architecture (1973-93) and directed and chaired the European Cultural Studies Program (1980-87). Both at Princeton and UCLA, Vidler served on a variety of university committees and panels.

His honors include the American Institute of Architects' International Architecture Book Award, for Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Regime (1991) and the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award for Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1991). Vidler has received fellowships and grants from the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others.

Vidler's professional affiliations include service as a director of the Society of Architectural Historians and as a Fellow of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. He also serves as a consultant for The End of the Century Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In addition to his award-winning work on Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Vidler is the author of The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment and The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (MIT Press, 1992).