Rodney Mims Cook, Jr. is founder and president of the National Monuments Foundation, an organization focused on the development of new civic and historic projects around the world, new construction and restoration, and national symbols particularly. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University, a scholar of the American Academy in Rome, and a founding trustee of the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture. He choreographed the design and construction of the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta and coordinated the design competition and construction of the Prince of Wales’s World Athletes Monument for Atlanta’s 1996 Olympic Games. He designed the neo-Italian Newington Cropsey Museum of Art in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York; he was co-designer of a prize-winning entry in the National Civic Art Society competition for the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Memorial; he choreographed the collaboration of Handshouse Studios with the French Government to restore the spire of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris; and he co-sponsored Sabin Howard with WWI Commissioner Monique Seefried for the monumental bas-relief at the World War I Memorial in Washington. His current projects include the development of eighteen monuments celebrating 300 years of Georgia peacemakers for the now completed Rodney Cook Sr. Peace Park, formerly Mims Park, a rebuilt 19th-century Olmsted-designed park in Atlanta, originally built by his family. The City of Atlanta renamed it after his father, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives for 20 years who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King to keep the city peaceful. He is advising the Adams Family Memorial Commission on the site selection and design for a memorial library in Washington, D.C., dedicated to Presidents John and John Quincy Adams and their families.
Cook is a frequent speaker on urbanism, and has presented at the “Master Plan for 21st Century Havana” Conference in 2015; the “Museum of the 21st Century and New Media Technologies” at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2017; the Congress for the New Urbanism’s “Cities and the Future of Global Urbanism on Land and Sea” at Burning Man in 2019; and at the 2025 ceremonies in Paris honoring those who led the work to restore the iconic Cathedral of Notre Dame. He is a founding board member of the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art and a charter signer of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He currently serves on the boards of Hearst Castle Preservation Foundation, the Massachusetts Historical Society–Adams Family Papers, Atomic6 Technology, the National Monuments Foundation, and the Shin Dae-yong Global Peace Institute; he is an emeritus board member of the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, Fox Theatre Incorporated of Atlanta, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. He previously served as a member of the Commission from 2021 to 2022, including as vice chairman in 2021.