John Chamberlain may refer to:
John Henry Chamberlain (21 June 1831 – 22 October 1883), generally known professionally as J H Chamberlain, was a nineteenth-century English architect.
Working predominantly in the Victorian Gothic style, he was one of the earliest and foremost practical exponents of the ideas of architectural theorist John Ruskin, who selected Chamberlain as one of the trustees of his Guild of St George. Chamberlain's later work was increasingly influenced by the early Arts and Crafts movement.
The majority of Chamberlain's buildings were located in and around Birmingham, where he was a major figure in civic life and an influential friend of many of the liberal elite who dominated the city under Mayor Joseph Chamberlain (to whom he was unrelated).
Chamberlain was born in Leicester on 21 June 1831, son of a Baptist minister, and received his architectural training with a local practice. After further experience in London and a period travelling in Italy he moved to Birmingham in 1853. He designed two buildings for John Eld, the business partner of his uncle. The first of these to be completed, Eld's house at 12 Ampton Road, Edgbaston (1855) survives to this day and already shows many of the features that would characterise much of Chamberlain's later work: a gothic structure in polychromatic brick with finely crafted decoration inspired by natural and organic forms. The shop at 28–29 Union Street for Eld & Chamberlain has been demolished.
John Angus Chamberlain (April 16, 1927 – December 21, 2011) was an American sculptor. At the time of his death he resided and worked on Shelter Island, New York.
Born in Rochester, Indiana as the son of a saloonkeeper, Chamberlain was raised mostly by his grandmother after his parents divorced. He spent much of his youth in Chicago. After serving in the U.S Navy from 1943 to 1946, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1951–52) and Black Mountain College (1955–56). At Black Mountain, he studied with the poets Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, who were teaching there that semester. The following year, he moved to New York, where for the first time he created sculpture that included scrap-metal auto parts. Over the course of his prolific career, he had studios in New York, New Mexico, Florida, Connecticut, and finally Shelter Island.
Chamberlain is best known for creating sculptures from old automobiles (or parts of) that bring the Abstract Expressionist style of painting into three dimensions. He began by carving and modelling, but turned to working in metal in 1952 and welding 1953. By 1957, while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, New York, he began to include scrap metal from cars with his sculpture Shortstop, and from 1959 onward he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Far more than just another wrinkle on assemblage Shortstop and subsequent works completely reinvented modeling casting, and volume altering Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the readymade and using the car as both medium and tool.