okay. Uh huh. Okay. So, um
, again, this is really more on the history
of the school, and you've seen a lot of
history. And so why don't we start with how
you ended up here? Well, I would start
also with the context of the times in the sixties
. This was, from my point of view,
a period of very strong deans in schools of architecture
. There was Perkins in the University of Pennsylvania who
mentored Luhan. And then, literally, there was
Camp Hefner at N. C. State, which
at the time I think was probably the most important
, um, undergraduate school of architecture in the country
. One second, my picks. Okay, so
everything all right, um campaign, for example,
would invite Frank Lloyd Wright to the campus, and
they would walk arm in arm through the trees and
talk all day. Um, there was Camp Hefner
, uh, and then Gropius course there at Harvard
. And my contact started with Sam Hurst, who
was the dean at Auburn at the time in the
early sixties mid sixties, who only stayed there a
few years, but he later went on to be
Dean at U C L A R u USC in
LA This this really set the tone for enormously autocratic
rule and architecture schools, for better or for worse
. And these men were so powerful in terms of
their convincing you to go against the Bauhaus, the
old not to buy a house, the bazaar way
of packaged learning. And they were supported by no
a whole set of process philosophers coming out of England
and early US Chicago from John Dewey, too,
Um, Alfred North Whitehead in England, who insisted
on this learning through uhh, an empirical feedback of
what you were doing rather than your future preparation.
So they were. They were in a simple sense
, and we misunderstood. I'm sure half of their
important points, but it raised the question of situational
thinking that shows up at every scale of our our
work. And so we were a little bit lead
. I say we it seems that was we,
because at Auburn we were very much influenced by not
the Masters, but that the masters existed and the
Masters brought about different way of practice. So at
that time you were looking at these very strong schools
influencing practice rather than the other way around practice influencing
schools. So, uh, there was a bit
of anarchy from time to time about how one thought
and probably a less of an influence on end product
and woven influence on the way you're working, uncovering
the problem or that you were trying to address.
And there were several architecture firms that were, I
think, right alert to this world. Ehrenkrantz,
for example, set up a whole system of designing
schools, and it was it was part the system
of building. And it was part the system of
education that a school had to deal with a so
called open plan, which turned out to be not
so easy for education majors to teach in. But
never mind. It was enormous intellectual thought about how
to read issues that architecture could address. And that
was one of the big things that that came to
us is what are the questions that architecture should be
asking which touched Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift discussions? Um
, who he could continually said the best thing for
young scientists is not to study science but to hang
around the scientist of the time and see what questions
they were asking science to address. this was extremely
exciting. So Burchard comes out of Harvard, Um
, and, uh, probably achieve certain things that
Gropius never really achieved. For example, Gropius coming
out of the box house Oh, always addressed all
the disciplines of the art, arts and crafts,
pushing them into a, uh, industrialized how to
how to make things that could be reproduced and still
hold aesthetic memory of the material and the process of
making. Yet in in the Bahamas, there were
the great metal workers and sculptors and painters, and
the music didn't ever pick up, But it was
used. So Burchard had a shop. That was
one of the first things he wanted to have.
And Group has never got a shop in Harvard,
and I know of at the time. Um,
but that linage of fair strong beans mentoring strong teachers
and teachers that made mistakes. I mean, teachers
that were not taught as teachers. But we're strong
architects trying to change the way the profession addressed the
world. And this was the context that I grew
up in at Auburn. Uh huh. Sam Hurst
. Was this wonderful? Gentlemen, First of all
, they were all extremely civilized human beings. All
over mad scientists in a way in that they would
simply push their ideas to the point of alienating,
in many cases, the bazaar habits that so many
all the schools were stuck in that mode. There
was no question about it. So Burchard came here
, and I have to go back to the linage
. Also at Tech Um, Kogyo, for example
, the first department head that was part of engineering
college. And he had enormous influence in a I
, um, policies and questions about how to train
an architect and how to make a good architect have
a life outside of the practice. Then came Lynn
Curry, who also when when he left here as
department head, he went to Chicago and had tremendous
influence in the AI policies for internship for young architects
. So it was all an educational thrust, uh
, not toward in condition, but toward situational awareness
of what we should be addressing. And remember being
shocked by one of the architects, one of the
educators suggesting that architects ought to Maybe when they're talking
to clients suggest that maybe they don't need a building
, they need to change the way they run their
business and This was, you know, heretic talk
for architects to give up a commission, but to
change the way a client actually lived. Or so
we were all just excited about this, this kind
of thing. But with Lenny Curry here when you
were here, Leigh Ann Curry had left. I
came the year after Burchard came. I think our
two years after birth came and one year after Ferrari
came here from Auburn. But we hold you for
one second. I just want to. But these
deans were bigger than life. I mean, Perkins
would walk into a room in a white linen suit
and the whole room would just quiet down when he
would enter the room. And he supported Con.
Can you imagine this rascal? And he was supporting
them in terms of all sorts of bureaucratic noise that
that con created. But this went on and on
and have to go back to two tech. Lee
Ann Curry brought in, uh, really strong people
. So when I came here, there were three
extremely strong teachers in this small town. I mean
, you can imagine how small Blacksburg was in 1969
68. Um, there was Herschel L. Arth
, who had worked with Notre in California after the
Second World War. And we'll talk about an order
in a minute. Um, and then Charles Wehrli
, who had worked with Meese in Chicago. And
then there was a man named Jack Colton who had
worked for the best engineers in the world who were
thinking about architecture as part of their language. So
these old gentlemen, when I came here, um
, they had just solid respect for their for their
thinking. And they were going against the buzzard.
Probably not as much as we were, but so
that context is very important. Lynn Curry, for
example, retired here and built a house up close
to Holland Park and and really was quite a contribution
to the school for years and years after he removed
back here. But to go back to nor Tra
. And from my point of view, North Korea
was probably the most visible architect speaking about education.
Yeah, he, uh, he had worked with
Adolf Loss and Erich Mendelssohn and brought in when he
went to California from from from Europe, embraced Frank
Lloyd Wright and Schindler and Rudolph Schindler and talk,
um, all these young young people coming out of
California and one major 11 important one was Harwell Harris
, who became dean in the fifties early fifties at
Austin University of Texas. Then he hired um,
Can you believe it? Colin Rowe, John Hejduk
, Robert Sharansky, Sharansky, Sharansky, Virna Seligman
and all of these four became very powerful speakers to
architectural thinking, which were totally against the the bazaar
. Prepackaged skill set. The I mean, say
that When was that? Syracuse. For a number
of years. John Hendrick, you know, at
Cooper Union, and then Colin Rowe refused to be
an administrator, But I went to Cornell and those
four and three or four others that Harris hired in
Texas. They were eventually called Texas Rangers, and
their writings were prolific in terms of the questions that
architecture should be dealing with. So they pushed a
notion of research that, finally, that never really
caught on. So it became a bit into intellectual
discourse rather than the research. But they they set
the seeds for deeper investigations that revealed ways of thinking
, influenced ways of working and therefore ways of making
um so we go back, we go back to
and don't forget the none of these great Dean's could
have functioned without great presidents of schools, universities.
And so when Burchard came Lee Ann Curry more or
less hired Burchard, mhm was. It was a
no brainer for Lee Ann Curry. And at the
time we had t. Marshall Han, who was
probably, from my point of view, the smartest
human being I've ever met in my life. And
he opened up Virginia Tech from Inmate into a coed
school, and the population of the school quadrupled when
he was here. And everything he did was a
kind of experiment that he trusted the dean's to carry
out, and Burchard walked right into this situation.
In fact, I don't think we're early and the
larks and Putin really wanted Burchard good. He was
hard and virtually immediately began to write, and I
mentioned to you before. Oh, probably in 63
. I'm thinking 63 64. He wrote to really
important articles for the AI Journal, which fundamentally questioned
the way the practice was being done in our country
, especially, and talked about process and talked about
the questions we should be asking and began to embrace
certain practitioners that he felt like we're we're responding to
that process. Cardell, Relic and Scott in Texas
. CRS had a They did a total process.
Uh huh. Contact with the with their clients that
became very famous, and nobody could actually replicate the
things. But they would hold up in a motel
with clients for a solid long weekend and brainstorm everything
you can think of and every thought they had from
a client. They had to turn into some form
tendency possibility. So they made cards. There were
walls just full of cards of responses to client desires
and client formulations, and eventually became called. They
were called snow cards, which means a snow job
. But anyway, they did it. And coming
out of that group yeah, with card L.
Riley and Scott was a young man named Willie Pena
, and he formulated a programming process that eventually he
called problem seeking rather than problem solving. So was
that trying to find what is the question that's that's
critical? What's the question that can be made conceptual
for schemes for architecture schemes within the limits of what
architecture could do? And we all at least address
that stuff? Cordel came here twice to speak,
and this brings up a whole history of visitors that
we had that were really quite quite strong. Card
l came. I can't even remember all of the
ones. But they were all brought from a point
of view of how to think about architecture. In
fact, interrupt you continue, I thought, but
just curious where they brought before they became well known
or where they brought up. They were probably somewhere
in between. Somewhere had already become mature. We
never got some of them because I think we just
began to think we didn't need them, which is
probably mistake, but that bringing other disciplines in also
came off of that speaker so early on. Well
, let's go back. Ferrari actually came here in
65 60. We have five fall of 65 and
Burchard had come in 64 I think. And so
they stepped together, too, to brainstorm, I
would guess every week and for all I did.
The diagrams of Of Birch is thinking, which that's
another background there. When Ferrari came to Auburn,
he was brought by the industrial Design Department head there
who had come from Switzerland and new Ferrari from from
the Ah, ha and Zurich. And don't forget
, Ferrari studied with her silly and this enormous,
powerful young teachers at the High and Zurich. So
when Ferrari came to Auburn and 60 three, I
guess 60 s 63 probably, and he couldn't speak
English very well, really not very well at all
. And so Lucy, his wife, would go
to faculty meetings and interpret to him what was going
on. So when we would take seminars with Ferrari
and Bill Turner, who was another teacher there who
went on to be Dean at at Tulane, he
in turn, I did a little seminar call,
what is the city? And for I couldn't speak
English. So we had to diagram. We had
these big newsprint pads, and every time we had
to say something in the seminar, we had to
make the diagrams of what we were trying to say
and then for I would make better ones as we
spoke. So that diagram Attic, that visual insistence
on words having visual conceptual visual form was ingrained in
all of us there at Auburn and Auburn, and
Sam Hurst was the keeper of our discontent with politics
and and also we were right in the middle of
the civil rights movement there in Alabama. Can you
imagine? So our thinking caused all sorts of problems
in Alabama and in. And I think that's why
Burger mhm Sam Hearst left and he was not there
very long. But he brought in young teachers that
had never taught, uh, from NC State and
from MIT and from now the East Coast. And
they were they were finding their way in terms of
clarity and ambition, and and you're thinking And we
were sitting right in the middle of the whole thing
is a bunch of young young faculty, uh,
I I would always argue with Ferrari. Ferrari was
a troublemaker. Terrible troublemaker. He would come in
to our fifth year lab and just blast everybody.
Oh, and we would blast back as opposed to
. So what do you say? I have to
do what he says, and he would never allow
us to do what he said. So it was
extremely intense kind of experiment, if you would.
And we were coming off of out of annex mhm
revelations when he went to the West and Midwest and
the pueblos and all of his writings and Forum magazine
and the Dutch Forum magazine. So we were totally
consumed by this whole questioning of even team of the
C. Um, where C, um, was
the Bible, right? And so the Siem questioned
Ozark and we questioned CEO, and in doing so
uncovered all sorts of questions that we never thought would
be part of the curriculum. So even the film
series question, when I was a student at Auburn
became one of our great efforts. We had a
Methodist preacher there in town who was a bit of
a rebel, and he would help us get Bergman
films and Visconti films and things that you know you
wouldn't see in the normal theater. And we talked
to theater that was next door to Big and Hall
, which was the architecture building to show these things
on Wednesday afternoons, and we would charge 50 cents
to go in and get paid for getting the film
. And we created enough money to run a raffle
, two for Eames chairs. So that was we
just thought we could just do anything, you know
, But we would go to these films and then
this Methodist preacher would invite us to the church.
Okay, Man's there, and we would analyze these
things or at least talk about them at night.
He eventually got fired from the church because he was
he was a little too radical, but we just
loved it. So we were taught with artists,
especially the first year, not skills but ways artists
thought ways. Artists saw things, ways media affected
your ideas. And one, we had a very
, very powerful young artist, name Brisbane who,
of course, extremely talented, intense and never smiled
and gave us assignments that were totally ambiguous. And
he was actually a famous kind of map maker.
That's why I made a living. And there was
another faculty named Orsini that Auburn, who was really
a good painter, good artist, could drawer,
and he taught us basic design or foundation design.
So we were totally surrounded by the different disciplines.
And, of course, the industrial design people were
sitting there right in our face better than we were
because they had all the machines, and so photography
came up as absolutely necessary, and we were in
a school with the art department, so every morning
we would come in every day. We would come
in too big and hall and you would smell turpentine
. And it was like a Pavlov signal to go
to work. So we all kind of we're stuck
in this artist world. There was music in our
school, so we held jam sessions. So would
you say that Ferrari brought that here? Was that
certain parts or something that you brought? It was
probably Ferrari. Probably Ferrari picked it up there at
Auburn that it was possible and it was necessary.
Mhm. But the film questioned the the writing we
wrote. We made a little publication which questioned the
administration, which, well, it had to issues
that came out. But anyway, yeah, but
that that environment, that the way you're thinking affects
the way you work, and you must train that
thinking so that you don't get conventional at the wrong
moment was in the air all the time, and
we were We were surrounded by very, very strong
students. I mean, some of the upperclassmen,
Chris Risher, its name one or two. These
people were a little older than we were and critique
the freshman violently. I mean, it was a
daily confrontation with these rascals. One. And I'm
missing his name right now. But one of them
, his father, was the local MM newspaper editor
, literally in Auburn. And he was a big
liberal. So that question of the politics of our
life running around us was in our face all the
time also. But we learned from the upper upper
year guys who could draw like the wind and their
struggles with each other. So it was a kind
of competitive world, intellectually competitive, not success.
Competitive, for example. There was one one student
that could just draw like crazy. And we all
thought he wasn't a good designer and and that hurt
his feelings terribly because he never did become part of
the intellectual argument. But he could draw. And
he was practitioner from day one, probably when he
was 14, he was making houses. So there
was a competitive notion. There was a challenge about
intellectual growth, and I think Ferrari, coming out
of Zurich coming out of the Max Bill world picked
up on that and understood that completely from Day one
. Sal likes to say that Ferrari was not a
very good philosopher, but he knew when it was
a philosophical question that was in the air. So
that kind of reference, the notion of intellectual always
revolved around having to have a reference for your ideas
. Not a not a model, necessarily. Put
a reference to your idea so you could expand those
thoughts passed your first situational response. So it,
uh, in Auburn, the music? Yeah,
school. And we after about a year at all
. But we found out that Paul Rudolph had actually
graduated from Auburn and did a house. I think
he was still a student or maybe just a young
architect for the Appleby who was the department head of
art. And he did a house for Appleby in
Auburn. And we all just salivated it went over
and looked at it and love that whole yeah,
connection that to a bigger scale. Uh huh,
that we were not just isolated doing projects. The
context was not just auburn or not just Alabama,
not just local, but it was a bigger scale
than that. So we had enormous amount of no
contact with other disciplines. And rather than study those
disciplines, we studied the people that we're doing,
and we had a great saxophone player named Bobby Green
Hall, who went on to be fairly famous.
But he died young and he would. He would
lead our I would say, every once a week
we had a jam session with jazz in the in
the architecture building in the little gallery there, and
that went on every single week for years. That
sounds like it sounds like Auburn was really critical for
Ferrari. Yeah, it was, Yeah, I
think he realized so many things could be done with
with students in an American model. See, Froy
went against and so did Birch. It, in
a way, went against the European model of education
, meaning that while we were autocratic here and no
question about it, it was. They went against
the studio master mentality. And of course, the
European educational system is loaded with that. It still
is. In fact, the French are going down
the drain because of it, and the the Swiss
were smart enough to embrace that. But but their
their mentors their masters were educationally alert so that a
lot of young architects come out of the Swiss educational
system, hit the ground, running with innovative ideas
rather than just, uh, technically competent, although
they are technically competent. So for I and Virtue
, and I'm not sure it's that radical. But
there was a tendency to embrace the American freedom and
one of the big things that I think it's still
important. Especially here is all the student work is
highly visible all the time. So we went against
even in Auburn, the little closed door studios.
Although we had them, we would break them out
of the mold, and all of our work was
always displayed in progress in the in the hallways.
They're at Auburn. So that was one of the
big things, I think, situational thinking and make
the work visible. Don't let work get isolated so
that the students are are reading the work of others
all the time. So our strong students there in
Auburn were the model for the other students. There
was no question about it, rather than that the
faculty being the model and that was that was against
a lot of current at the time, thinking in
terms of architecture, in fact, at Harvard at
the time, and probably still is you go to
Harvard for graduate program and you do the work of
the of the master. And in Europe it's exactly
the same. Still, but Ferrari and and Burchard
moved and I would say a little bit, sometimes
radically fast and sometimes very slow away from that model
. So the students became the the focus. Uh
huh. And not that the students were free in
quotes. Although we felt free. Our work was
more dominant than our instructions are our assignments, and
I'm coming back to that one more and more now
. Do you think that that's still the case here
? I think although it's fragile and most students like
I was and everybody else Uh huh. It's difficult
when you don't have a instructions of what to do
and how to begin how to begin as the monster
. Yeah, but there was this discussion, always
between the form of something in the structure of something
which is a philosophical position. Yeah, that has
never been resolved in the world and never will be
. But that dialogue between those two aspects of making
I'll bring in material brings in the context, brings
in all sorts of other variables, So that linage
and we just came from enormous, powerful, enormously
powerful individuals. And I go back to those old
deans. Perkins. I met Camp Hefner. I
thought I was in the presence of some deity.
You know, I tell the story. We went
up there from Auburn. A bunch of us got
in a VW Beetle and drove from Auburn to Raleigh
just to meet the camp. After because we were
fed up with our school and he invited on a
Sunday morning, he invited us into his office and
he was sitting in front of the window. Well
, you could really not see his face. It
was a silhouette, and he had hair like like
Bob Dylan, and we were just we never did
. I don't think I remember seeing what his face
looked like, but he told us all to get
back in the car and go back down to Auburn
and finish our degree and shut up, you know
? But he had It was a Sunday, and
they were dedicating a big sculpture sculpture in the I
don't know if you've been to Raleigh, but it's
a wonderful campus and has a lot to do with
Camp Hefner's vision and contacts with the art world and
Harwell Harris. Eventually they're all down in Texas was
a teacher there that the camp after brought in who
did lots of wonderful wooden houses there in and Raleigh
. But that linage is loaded with just models of
behavior models of of how you think models of how
to stay focused on the work and less focused on
you're your authorship. So early on we went against
authorship. In fact, this this past spring Michael
, one of one of the fifth year students with
me and Riva, had that same problem. We
went to look at to run your work and,
yeah, the same problem of authorship. Are we
looking at this work because to run, you did
it. Are we looking at this work because it's
fundamentally instructive and good, And that was a good
discussion, because my education was to embrace the author
. But to embrace the work as much as you
could and see how many layers you could you could
analyze to go through and understand it. So I
guess I hadn't realized I don't know why I never
realized that you aren't teaching it. No, I
was a student was the fifth year students for I
brought you here and that was the first time I
Yeah, I'd. When I graduated, I went
to New Orleans and worked for Charles Colbert. I
think for six months until he went broke, he
was the former dean at Columbia and I wanted to
work for him because he did the best schools in
all of Louisiana. And I went down there and
got a job. My first two days I slept
on his couch because I didn't have a place to
live, and it was very intense. Uh,
work like that. And I worked for about five
years out of school. And then the recession came
. They're pretty heavy. Recession in our little office
was suffering. So for I called and want to
know what? I'd like to get a masters degree
. So we packed up and did it. But
that was so He had three of us from Auburn
. Tom Reagan, who's now the dean. I
think you just retired from Texas A and M.
It also become Dean at Miami and then move from
Miami to, and he brought in ad Miami brought
in Aldo Rossi to do a campus plan for university
of Miami. But he came in first, and
then I came second from Auburn. And then comes
Wow, Harold Hill, who? Whose father was
an architect in the Gulf Coast, really important architect
. And then sometime after that, Bill Brown came
and we we made a joke with Poor Bill that
he had come from Harvard had just gotten a degree
from Harvard. He had been out of school for
years, and the the joke was that we wouldn't
dare tell virtue that he was from Auburn because we
were thinking maybe Burchard wouldn't hire anybody else from Auburn
. So he he came. So there were four
of us from from the Auburn experience all pretty much
in the same class graduating. But I just have
to go back to that advantage. And we were
when we came in as young faculty. I was
32 which was a little bit older than some of
the others, but we were all young. Faculty
had never talked. I had been a little adjunct
critic, critique critics at LSU, but nothing formal
. And when we came in, there was a
large whirly and Poulton, and we said in critiques
with them with their all fifth year faculty and where
there was an administrator and politician was an administrator and
they fought each other all the time, just like
we fought each other all the time. But that
was that was something critical. It wasn't something that
we took for granted. So we never, never
consciously went against those three men. But we would
argue with them and question them until they had better
arguments that we would just shut up, you know
? But in in a way, I go back
to this autocratic mentality. It was a It was
a single person mentality here at attack, including Burchard
, including T. Marshall Hung the present. I
mean, you just didn't if you have, if
you went against what they wanted to say, you
had to have an alternative. You couldn't just be
against what they were saying because they were too powerful
in terms of their rational laying out of the program
, for example, Burchard literally flew to London.
He had heard about the what's the name of the
group park your Gram and flew to London and met
three of the our program Original art program and hired
two of them green and who are missing the name
of the The one who was my neighbor, actually
, when we live in a little tiny house on
Palmer Drive and he just hired him and brought him
here without any kind of search committee or anything,
and that's the way he did things early on.
But he was a prolific writer, and we always
love to make the joke that when you spoke to
virtue, you normally didn't understand what he was saying
. But it was so wonderfully sad. He just
went away happy. He went away, inspired that
his formulations were so, so complete and and inspiring
. He was also cheap, so it was very
economical. He hired all of us for nothing.
You know, we were all kind of dumb and
and but enthusiastic in the point. So that intellectual
question we were we were not intellectuals, but we
respected what it meant in an environment, and we
thought the practice should have that kind of intellectual based
, regardless of their forms or fashion or styles or
whatever. So we all embraced some of the same
writings. We we kind of thought we were embracing
the structuralist positions on on thinking and so Levi Strauss
and his writings, Structural Anthropology, who he was
kind of a rough practitioner to all of his anthropologist
colleagues put him down because he did bad fieldwork.
He took bad notes, but he had great insights
and formulations. Alfred North Whitehead with process of of
education, and John Dewey, who I think we
didn't understand very much, but those process philosophers things
becoming something was where we thought schools had to to
get back to the architect and how you train the
architect rather than make the architecture. And, of
course, it's not divorced from that. But that
focus is easily misunderstood because you know the process question
that a normal young student was that it's endless that
you how do you end this thing? And we
always made quirky formulation that you end your process when
you have an idea, and then it starts over
. So that's we started a lot of things that
or easily misunderstood if they're superficially apply. Mhm process
has a beginning and an end. There's no question
about it, and the immature position is that it's
just endless, and it's not endless. As an
architect, it's endless. But as a maker of
things. There's a there's a cycle of closure and
that was that's one of the hardest things to get
across when you're you're pushing process rather than philosophies of
being idealistic, philosophies of being. So what you
say And you can kind of restate this, Um
, I'm curious, like with the film, basically
, the structure is going to be this sort of
this period before all of you were here, where
the schools, you know, really started at the
land Grant just getting up to the point where,
like, Burger comes and cocoa comes. And then
the middle part, I think, is the biggest
part, which is what you're talking about Ferrari and
Bill Brown and all the curry. I guess before
that and then the final part is going to be
in school now. And so I'm very curious how
these ideas, like if there are through lines or
if there into the way that you were working when
you were here back then has changed significantly. You're
you're somebody who has seen the whole thing Very curious
in that aspect. Well, I think we all
went through mhm. Well, if you go back
to the notion of intellectual imperative. You will.
You will evolve with new new findings. Mhm.
I think we were easily mm against stylistic behavior.
Stylistic kind of visions, but terribly focused on on
ways of doing things that can go back. Also
doing in the context of the sixties. There was
this great wave of methodology and some were mechanistic.
Some were dynamic, the Dems newsletter. We all
kind of scorned it a little bit, but we
watched it, you know, we didn't We didn't
let it just disappear. And the coattail Riley and
Scott programming intervention with their clients. Those things were
not trivial to us and Burchard, actually, one
of the things I don't think he ever achieved was
he wanted to embrace the behavioral sciences. And I
don't think we ever got to that. We we
did in that. In fact, Bertram was always
accused of his faculty being a small university. So
we had in Urban affairs world. There were economics
, people in geriatrics studies and everything but planning in
quotes and in architecture, there was painters and yeah
, different disciplines that weren't licensed architects. And we
were hiring people that have never practiced. Yeah,
so that whole I think that question of behavioural sciences
kill Per came in has an extremely strong behavioral scientist
architect and he had a practice in Houston with ransom
, and they did hospitals and schools and really very
strong. But I think that's one of the things
that never got off the ground. So and I
think it was the structuralist mentality versus the behavioralist.
We had Amos rapper poor here to speak, and
we were all having coffee with him one morning and
ask him, What's the difference between a structuralist and
a behaviorist? Because he was heavy behavioralist And he
said, Well, the behavioralist can't get enough information
, and the structuralist tries to order the information that
he has, And we thought, Oh, that's
a wonderful formulation, but it also makes you a
little bit of ignorant if you if you don't continue
to to fill up. But that early, the
context of behavioralist design methods was not ignored by the
early school here, and it came from Birch.
Birch talked about that, and what he was doing
was trying to slow down the architects practicing architects and
get them into an intellectual position where they needed other
disciplines. So early on here, Ferrari started a
the so called foundation lecture series, which has degenerated
, I think a little bit, but what our
first one was our first series from Day one was
to invite very important people on campus to come talk
about how their discipline thinks. And we had in
industrial engineers, who the smartest engineers in town came
and the psychologist on campus came, and we embrace
the education school here. In fact, we kept
trying to to get there were two young educators that
were really quite radical, and we tried to get
them to change their curriculum to where they would have
designed studios and talk about education in a studio setting
rather than a classroom setting. It never happened.
But it was close, and they brought up the
argument between Jerome Bruner, the cognitive field theory psychologist
and and the Who's that? Uh huh, the
Chester Oh, drawing a blank here. But mm
, there was the field theory world, and from
Bruner, who was coming as an interpreter of Jean
Pierre J. The Swiss psychologist and multiple choice who
is the multiple choice guru. My parents would be
very disappointed that I don't know I can't and the
notion of testing multiple testing so you get better and
better and better. So all the process philosophers,
we're forcing us into a examination of Don't go after
a future. Don't don't teach somebody skills that may
be out of date when they start to try to
use those. So that situational thinking was going against
preparation for a future world and focusing on what you're
doing right now. So that's why we tell the
freshman what they're doing right now is extremely real.
A cube is tangible and real as a building,
so these are not abstractions. In that sense,
they may appear that way, so that's another one
that's easily misunderstood. And I think Burchard appreciated that
. I don't think Burchard don't forget, Merchant was
heavy into the yeah, Harvard world of in condition
. There's no question about it, but for already
, then brought up that that whole situational alertness that
your work talks to you more than you talk to
the work sometimes, and that sounds a little cloudy
. But it's the truth. So slow them down
, slow down, have intellectual at least reference to
what you're trying to think or do. But We
were not out of context from the lineage that we
confronted every day so that that visitor question became very
important. Uh huh, especially the freshmen design lecture
. Our freshman found it. We call it foundational
lecture. The problem with some of the less intelligent
people we invited from on campus would come and talk
about their how they would like to have the dream
house. You know what dream house they'd like.
We kept trying to not allow that kind of discussion
, but but we had really good people. In
fact, the psychology department helped us do early on
student evaluation method. And that's where Ferrari finally came
up, and they did with him. Came up
with the notion that students should evaluate themselves, and
it was quite formal how they made the I don't
have all the forms and everything, but it was
not multiple choice, and it was. It was
. It was pretty intense how you evaluated yourself.
And of course, the faculty would always intervene and
refined that evaluation. But it was clear as an
effort coming straight out of the psychology department, so
we couldn't divorce, teaching and learning from psychology studies
, and we went against cause effect mentality and went
after that so called car cause organism effect, meaning
the organism was changing the cause. Then the effect
was part of that. Organisms structure, the person
, the situation, the context we embrace systems theory
, general systems theory, for better, for worse
. And then Mondo Stop came out with his mental
broke. Rather came out with his fractal world.
We all got excited about that, but we didn't
understand anything about it. So we were always alert
to some new way of thinking, which nine times
out of 10, we probably either bastardized or are
just fundamentally didn't understand. But we did embrace it
. Do you think that lineage is still with us
here? I think we're probably embracing accomplished products,
probably more than the intellectual reading. I asked a
friend of mine in Rome several years ago, who's
a It teaches the Arkansas University of Arkansas center in
Rome, and I asked him. He gave us
a talk about Adrian's villain, and I asked him
What major buildings are influencing us today? And he
said, I don't think it's the buildings anymore.
I think it's the books. And so he brought
up the three important books of that time. This
was in the late seventies, Venturi's number one modern
museum, modern art book complex. Complexity, contradiction
. And then Greg got these. No territory of
architecture or territory of architecture. What's the territory of
architecture? And then Gracie's book, Mhm. There's
not been translated into English, I don't think,
but material material of architecture, which has nothing to
do with material physical material, but the thinking.
So I thought that was a good response to my
dumb question. So the books are still. I
think the books are less are less influencing us now
than the than the products that architects make. The
signatory architecture and art. As much as I really
love the signature work, some of the signature work
that's everywhere. I mean, yeah, this is
what I'm trying to. It's hard. It's hard
to look at the way the school was when you
were first year in the school that you helped build
. It's hard to look at that, and I
think we're always a little nostalgic, and it always
seems like things were better and things are always getting
worse. And certainly that's not the message of the
film this is about, You know, this is
for yes, 50th anniversary. Uh huh. So
, you know, it's positive thing. It's certainly
not a school is gone downhill kind of a message
, But I do think in context of everywhere else
social pressures. Yeah, all architecture schools are in
a different place than they were at that time.
And I think if you can talk about that a
little bit how you know, I don't know what's
changing, You know, you certainly know where is
an educational model has changes that architecture itself has changed
. You know, the students have changed. Well
, you definitely don't have the strong Dean model at
the moment. And you don't have the openness that
I think we naively did. I mean, we
were wide open. We would argue with each other
in the lobby, let me start you over so
that I make sure I have that all in context
. So we're talking about everywhere. Yeah, just
kind of a little bit. So it's not object
. Doesn't think you're saying Well, I think you
have to say it that the dialogue between the way
you work and the day to day pedagogy is more
and more put more and more distance between those two
. So when when we when we argue in public
, mhm, What you're doing is making it,
making that question accessible to anybody. I'd say in
public, you don't do it in front of a
camera or in front of a TV familiar, but
you do it in front of the students and the
student work is visible all the time and over time
as it changes no and gets more material and more
complex, that's readable. But it's not describable so
easily so that tangible the work coming out of the
studio. And we always called it laboratory instead of
studio, which it was on purpose. And,
of course, university never understood. The lab was
with bumps and burner, and there was less than
a class, always one hour or something like that
. So we eventually caved in and called him studios
. And once you do that, then you have
a studio that's run by eager our George Mertz,
and that studio reflects that faculties direction, and the
labs did not. The work coming out of the
labs did not reflect the faculty direction. It reflected
the the confrontation between the student and the faculty in
the work. So our focus was always on the
work, and the faculty and the students were kind
of equal. In that sense, we're both going
after the work. But the faculty was not predicting
the work prescribing the work, and that's also misunderstood
. I mean, I don't hesitate to to take
a pin and redraw guys scheme. I mean,
but I'm feeding off of what he started. So
the studio model, which is a fundamental right now
in every school, does focus on faculty direction,
and the more of the faculty get pressured into publishing
. And, for example, when I first started
here, we weren't worried about what an individual faculty
did. We worried about our division, so when
we would go to conferences, we would present what
the foundation program was doing. And that's where I
started in the foundation program. And it was not
about what I was doing or what Tom Reagan was
doing. It was the work of the students and
the work of the program. So we were presenting
the program and sometimes very formally with with photographs and
exhibition boards, and that was that was that was
rare. We would we would we would go to
conferences and there wouldn't be a place to display any
of our boards. So we'll just take over the
lobby of whatever building. We had to lay all
the boards out on the floor and stand there and
talk to people as they came by. Kind of
primitive. But the society today, I think that
way of working and way of thinking is is or
the pedagogy the daily pedagogy? Yes, taken for
granted. We were always kidding people that sometimes the
the work being published coming out of these studios has
published before. The ink is dry on the student
work. And of course I think now the strength
of the school is to make itself public more and
more public. And I think that's where we probably
are reaping some good benefits from that because you can't
not do that silly. How, if you have
to, How would you describe the school? And
you thought nothing we have, Well, it's not
an autocratic environment anymore, and it probably can't be
, um, I think I think the studio master
mentality is probably amateurish in our school. Yet we
have the studio in the studio master. The experimentation
is less, and I think we had before and
less crossing disciplines. Mhm meaning, How many films
have you said Scene made here? How many we
were always. We had incredible slide shows when we
didn't have any slag machines, and as soon as
we got 40 slide machines, you didn't see any
more slide shows except at certain events. Certain in
another example was when we would present the foundation work
rather than the foundation studios. And right now,
I think our lobby is full of Georgia's studio and
comes out and then somebody else's studio the next week
. And I don't think that's particularly informative to the
students. It's informative of how much you did based
on what the faculties set up. That's why I'm
currently against judging your work based on the assignment that
you work on and maybe go or develop the assignment
. Let's say, as a beginning, but the
end condition is not measured by what the assignment was
. It's what you found on the way and how
you resolve those things that caused conflict because of the
assignment, if you want it. So in a
way, I think the school has gotten very public
and then quite successful. I mean, Lord,
look at the look at the things that Bob DNA
is able to do with with Joe, and those
are predetermined. Uh huh. Professional accomplishments. I
always had a hard time with professional demands, meeting
the deadlines and the kind of yeah, restrictions that
were very real in a professional sense. And putting
that back into the studio. I always thought that
was a little bit dangerous is the wrong word.
But I think not long term thinking, although we
need that. In fact, I started the with
Merchant, the the so called Field Projects program,
and we tried to avoid the the their agriculture,
uh, research world that was already set up to
do fieldwork. And we get our own field work
. We would consult with high schools and architects and
two front end kind of programming for different projects,
but and also the internship. I started that with
virtue. That was one of virtues ideas and where
we now call it X turn ship. That's what
we call it Dennis External ship, where you go
work for an architect, work in an architects environment
and get paid actually and get credit, which was
not the not the model from Cincinnati. Well,
they are working. They don't get credit. That
was radical in that sense, so we didn't avoid
the practice. But I think, no, we
would always make a requirement on the external ship that
they would allow the students to go to meetings with
clients, which was unheard of at the time,
and also not necessarily to design something but to participate
in the changes that happened from the beginning of a
project to the end. But I think we're in
conditioned, formulated at the moment, and so is
the country and some of the good. You know
, right now there's more good architecture out there than
ever before in the generation when the school started.
I mean, there's more overt accomplishments with his signature
stuff and not including the Taubman Museum. I mean
, I can argue with that thing all day,
but it's a world class attempt, some bad details
, but live with. So I think today we're
becoming much more public, which which, in a
way, is against ambiguity. In fact, I'm
not sure we are tolerant with any ambiguity at all
. At the moment, which I think is fundamentally
education. Ambiguity is probably the wrong word, but
you can make a false clarity on a predetermined situation
that unless you have the complex questioning mechanism going on
with you, it will be a very superficial kind
of resolution in the end product. And for example
, I don't think I think the solar houses not
superficial at all. And I think those wonderful folding
furniture things, the metal furniture, things that Joe
and Bob and I did a fantastic uh huh process
creating form sort of mentality. But we have to
be careful. I think that the exhibition is not
predetermined, and it takes extremely intelligent people to pull
that off. But sometimes we're embracing not intelligent people
, but productive people that can can condense or reduce
something to noiseless kind of in condition. It sounds
a little bit like sour grapes, but I think
that's what we're facing right now. The thing that's
saving us, I think, is the young faculty
are not isolated here, but they are under extreme
pressure to publish their work, not publish the work
of a have a group, our program or because
I believe in curriculum which is an evil word for
most creative people. But I think the curriculum has
to be structural to the point where you have freedom
within within certain limits. And I think that's what
we were. We were all constrained by. I
thought that yielded other thoughts architecturally, and we've also
constrained by the notion that architecture couldn't solve everything,
but it could question everything. There was one side
, more cases. Who would get around to that
one in a minute was part of a group called
the Inter College that Ferrari started, but he made
a he and a couple of guys made a graphic
presentation was a little film animated film on the problem
of pollution, and it was graphic convincing at the
time. But this Inter college was important. Ferrari
embraced guys that were flocking out of third year.
I mean, they were not very good students in
terms of the third year. Third year at that
time was run by a young MIT graduates that really
believed in methodology and and structural structural mean physical,
a practitioner kinds of thrust. But it was very
clever the way the third year was formulated. It
was so called technical year, but it was formulated
in the first. We were in the quarter system
, too. Don't forget that we weren't semester,
so we had three terms in the normal school year
and the first two terms in the third year.
Design was de emphasized and calculation was emphasized. Computation
was emphasized, and then you didn't see the word
designed show up until the third quarter. In the
spring, there was a very important kind of.
So you resisted designing without being constrained by the computational
world of structures and mechanical equipment, its own.
But that in one way it probably looked probably shows
where we were. We got a little too simple
. The foundation was to deal with the graphic and
the abstract and the visual world. And then the
middle part was to be technical. And then the
upper year was to be professional. That's not what
the curriculum was supposed to be. Foundation was to
deal with all of architecture. The middle world was
to deal with all of architecture, and the upper
years was to deal with all of architects. Now
you you run into a little conflict because the foundation
is built with 18 year olds and then all of
a sudden, in the third year you turn 21
and then in the up a year year 22 23
. So I think those little social things start to
come up. But the notion that a foundation program
is partial contribution to the world of architecture and then
the third year of the Middle World contributes a little
more to the whole world of architecture and in the
fourth year puts it all together is is furious.
So we went against this simple so called assignments in
the first year was simple. And then you moved
a little more complex and then a little more come
and then really complex. In the fifth year,
we thought that was ignorant beyond belief. It's that
would you say that we're still that we're better now
about keeping it all about all of architecture all the
way through? Or is that still I think we
have petitioned a little more, right? So the
foundation is limited. Two. The graphic world.
Although I think Sal and a couple of other people
, Shelly is using introduction to the whole profession and
sell with intellectual, whole thinking. I think it's
still going on, and a few others Pat.
So I think we've gotten petitioned in the third year
is to be more technical in the upper air is
to be more professional. Put it all together kind
of thing, which you can't post stuff together until
you're 50. But the narrative I think we've probably
not spend enough time with narrative development of the post
modern thinkers and much to our demise, I think
we don't appreciate that, for example, the difference
between a network and a system. And I think
the postmodernist to understand that completely. Yeah, and
so it hurts practice. Yeah, So our guys
are guys. Never were Our graduates never were hitting
the ground running, but they were hitting the ground
. Believing that the educational production they bring to a
practice can contribute. I still think a young young
architect coming out of school. A good school can
contribute to the analytic capability of an office tremendously with
most, most officers are backing away from any analytic
their production. Yeah, well, that, to
me, seems like a really important difference that the
idea that now I think before it seems like you
didn't have to leave the school, you know,
so ready to practice. But the way our profession
is set up, you can't practice. When you
leave school, you have to go to affirming.
And it's like, Do we need to learn the
lessons of the firm in school? Or do we
learn what we're not going to necessarily learn in the
firm in school and then get what we need from
the firm from the firm? It seems to me
like the whole internship questions still exist out there,
and I appreciate the A pushing for the internship formula
, but I think it's it's superficial and not many
officers can afford or don't think they can afford to
train somebody. But all apprenticeship mentality still exists,
and I think it exists in the studios to in
schools. Hans actually said something interesting to me.
We were I was I had an opportunity to summer
to go work for a firm as a firm.
I think I'd like to try to work for,
So it made sense to me to try to do
that. And so I said, You know,
is there any chance of getting out of summer studio
and going to work for this arm, and he
said, I don't think so. But even if
there was like you're like that would destroy you at
this point, he's like, You're at this point
where getting in that mentality would be very, very
, very harmful. And I think he was absolutely
right. There are few. There are few officers
that still think holistically, but I think the pressure
under the pressure is incredibly difficult with the economy,
of course. Well, you also look right now
. You cannot work for graphic design operation unless you
have a graphic design degree. Who has Nike years
ago? Not so many years ago. We're hiring
young architects coming out of school to do their villages
, the Nike Village, and they even started designing
shoes. And and now the Nike people don't hire
anybody but graphic designers, industrial designers. And so
it's harder and harder for us for a student to
go work in a in a different discipline. Mm
. From the way they're thinking, because the disciplines
are all partitioned right now. I think part of
that is people don't really understand anymore what architecture is
. The architecture is. We've got a little too
many signature proclamations here at the moment. But nevertheless
, the enormous, prolific kind of production in the
higher end of architecture is very real, and the
students have great examples that they've never had before.
Great bad examples also need to ask you before I
forget, because this was something that yeah, yeah
, the build up of the euro program because you
said Ferrari Cromwell really created it. But you were
expected to implement well, in 68 I think 67
maybe, um and Lucy explains this quite well.
They Herbert Crumble was here, and he had been
at the jihad a little younger than Ferrari, and
they both felt that the Western history of the Western
thought was missing a little bit in our in our
curriculum. So their thought was, too. Take
the students who had never been out of the country
, and this was probably the population, you know
. The young people at that time had never traveled
, So their idea was to take them to confront
Western art and Western values from the roots. And
they started in 67 and went, I think,
to Amsterdam and then took a drop of Paris Amsterdam
, I think, and then took a train down
to Salzburg because Cromwell new some agent down there,
some travel agent and they stayed in a little village
called Mosque outside of Salzburg and embrace the culture,
you know, and they lived in a little vernacular
village, and then they traveled Greece and Yugoslavia and
Italy. And it was It was a There was
a heavy educational formulation because these students had never really
travelled. Someone never been out of Montgomery County or
they're on. Coming to tech was the biggest travel
that ever made. Now, over the years that's
changed where, for example, I would say 60%
of the students that our own any travel program,
many study abroad. Program. We have have already
been to Europe more than once with their parents or
some high school thing or something. So it's moved
from our kind of, and this may say something
about the whole school from a heavy educational focus.
Two more professional achievement. Professional models, professional.
Uh huh, Mentor ship. So let's move from
educational to professional, and I still resist that a
little bit. But the early the early things I
went over. And so in the 69 yeah,
for the first time in more, I was just
an assistant and crumble. It was with me in
Amsterdam. And of course the distractions in Amsterdam were
very real. And we got on a bus and
went to Copenhagen. And the next morning we wake
up and promote tells me his mother is sick in
Austria somewhere and he's leaving and he'll pick me up
in Berlin. You'll come back to see me in
Berlin and I'm thinking, What in the world is
going on? So he reached it. He comes
in his pocket and pulls out. Uh huh.
German marks and Danish kroner, and then and said
here, This will help you get through. I
had to pay for lunch or something. So I
took the guys from Copenhagen on a boat over to
I forget the name of the town in northern Germany
, which was heavy Communist. It was at the
wall there, you know. So I'm taking them
with a bus through East Germany and that this is
69 it was not pleasant. We get to the
border, and it was all the young communist Russian
, an East German border guards about 14 years old
, carrying huge submachine guns. And we finally get
to Berlin, couldn't find the hotel and finally found
that this bus driver didn't know what time of day
it was. And up shows chrome. Oh,
you know he's there and then we're there for one
day and he says he has to go back to
Austria. So Lucy and I had to take them
through Germany, two to Salzburg. So it was
a little bit primitive, but again, heavy educational
. So anything we did was an impact on these
young people's lives. So we didn't. We search
for monuments, and we looked at the important things
that we knew at the time B F. Skinner's
little book, European Architecture. Everybody had one,
and we would scrounge everywhere and Johansson in Denmark,
we got to Berlin and, of course, overwhelmed
by the split between the East and the West.
And I don't think we've got into the East,
although I think we did. But so it was
pretty cloudy, but so we weren't chasing. They're
proven architectural monuments. At the time, we were
more of the culture, and Lucy was there teaching
language and culture, and we took him to trying
to think what we did between Berlin and what I
had in my junior year at Auburn. I'd want
a competition and it only two years into the competition
in the year before my old roommate had wanted and
he traveled throughout Europe with this money. And so
that was my That's what I want to do.
So I spent 10 months in Europe. He tried
him and fumbling around and chasing monuments and culture and
sketching, trying to learn to sketch. So I
when I came here with Ferrari, I knew the
program existed, and I told him I really wanted
to be part of it, So sure enough,
Boom. I got couple over my head the first
the first summer. So it was a summer program
before, and then Ferrari and Lucy always wanted a
base that we could have a studio. And then
travel was also so that became the big search.
And I guess the first one was in Zurich with
Carl Flag. He found a place where the guys
could hold up and I'm feeling on that one box
and then slowly contacts in Basel came up and found
a wonderful studio. And in Basel and they lived
in hotels around our old hotel across the river.
But that was that was the first studio we had
in a really full blown studio desk and everything in
Basel. And so the thought was that we could
by that building university goodbye that building. And Charles
Steiger was very excited about it. It was talking
to the president about it, and he got very
close to being able to purchase that studio because there
was an apartment above that we especially could stay in
, was perfect. And then the the dummy that
owned the thing began to talk about some under the
table money so you wouldn't have to pay so much
taxes. And boy, that cut it off immediately
. University backed off and said, No way in
the world, we're gonna touch this man. So
then Ferrari, unless he moved it to salt to
Lugano and we had one hotel there, namely Aurora
was a little two star hotel that that really was
a good base. I mean, we used that
as a base to go out and and you could
live there and almost control the whole hotel. Even
in Salzburg the early days, we had we saw
that more as a studio and had exhibitions losing our
story. The first exhibition there in University of Salzburg
. We had a classroom at the University of Salzburg
, which was dead center of the old town of
Salzburg, and we would visit there with bicycles come
and go from the village. So there was always
that notion of a studio in Europe. And then
you traveled to supplement that, and slowly, after
a few years in Lugano, we had a studio
there over an old printer, industrial printer, the
top floor, big warehouse like space. And then
that got a little too complicated for some. Forget
all the reasons so that Charles Steiger was slowly working
harder and harder to think how to how to get
a place, how to make a center. And
so the story is the Ferraris were looking at Logano
everywhere around Logano because then you Logano quite well for
Arias. Family had a little place outside of river
, which is a little town called on you.
And so they were in a little village Ron,
Kati, Lucy and Ferrari having lunch in a little
village, and they drove up through Riva and at
the time. Uh, what's the name Flora was
? Shark had pushed the Ticino Architects into making that
first exhibition that was done in Zurich. Colton Dancer
And she lived there in Riva and they didn't know
her. The woman has never come to the villa
, But anyway, they were driving up from his
only about six kilometers and passed this old villa and
looked at it and it was run down. And
they thought, Oh, what is that? So
they went right to the town hall and met the
mayor who was? My name is Bianchi, Carlo
Bianchi. And he he was the director of a
graphic design school in Lugano. So he was completely
sympathetic. So they met him, found out that
thing was for sale. And then the ball started
to roll and they went back and met the owners
of that old house. They turned the owners that
turned the house into a little bed and breakfast.
Like what we call a bed and breakfast. There
were apartments inside all through the villa, and they
were 80 years old, I think at the time
, and they fell in love with it for ours
, and you can imagine, I mean, for
ice. That was an absolute charmer. And so
was Lucy, is Lucy. But then that the
ball started to roll to acquire that place because we've
seen another place in Logano outside of Logano, north
part of Lugano. And that got complicated because the
owner sold it out from under us and all things
worked out for the best because it was not the
best location. It was a great house with several
other houses around it, but it would not have
been what we have now. So it went from
a summer program two mm to a summer program with
the studio, and then Ferrari decided, I don't
know this one night. I think we'll start to
follow travel program just like the summer program. And
I think Shelley went on the first one of those
, and that was travel with studio and then slowly
, slowly became The summer still exists that fall travel
still exists and how the the residency exists. But
the residency was what Ferrari and Lucy always wanted from
day one. And so then you kind of that's
been your baby well, in a way. But
there was no different than other. Exactly. I've
just been on the study of the study abroad program
so many times with him, so I knew how
to handle. See, that's the problem. When
you go to Europe with a group of students,
you cannot just replicate what you do here. I
mean, there's so many variables. I always say
that when you're working in a studio in Europe,
it's like pushing on a rope. Anything you try
to do, you go through a cultural flag to
try to get things done, and it's frustrating to
a lot of faculty, but how to manage?
So I still keep it a kind of educational question
where they've traveled or not and forced him into a
confrontation in a way between their skills that they bring
to a place and the ability to to connect with
. And it's not that for in the Western world
, European world is so close to America moment.
That's why we get criticized. Why don't you go
to China? Why don't you go to India?
Why don't you go to and my position is what
you're doing. You go back to Europe and you're
trying to find the Western way of thought That's the
rooted rooted in your what do you think? Where
you work. So I mean, as much as
I'd like to think about going to India, I
think a summer is not enough time. In fact
, the guys that went with what's his name in
Berlin and the little studio in Berlin this year.
Oh, God, what's the name? We visited
them and we were already there as long as they
were, and they had done no sketches and they
were just slowly getting. They were living in Berlin
slowly getting where they could control how to get things
made. And it takes longer if you are just
immersed in a foreign environment. So I think two
months is not enough for three months is not enough
. So those guys in the Berlin studio ought to
be their year, and then they slowly become functional
. And I think that functional dimension is important because
they can produce. And I'm not I don't mean
designing necessarily, but good taking something from a place
that they visit because it's well, you know,
you went to function blue. I mean, you
don't hit the ground running. You kind of expect
. Yeah, no you don't because that too many
mhm the pedagogical environment there, which is a daily
world, is totally different and that our work,
regardless of the culture, it's a and you can
stand and observe all day long. And if you're
not getting in part of it, you'll always be
an expatriate. There's no question, this idea that
you're going to go live in in a foreign country
and absorb all that stuff. Talk to Robert Turner
. He still refuses to speak French, but he
loves Paris and because he met this wonderful British developer
and they just clicked like that. So he was
able to function because he's super talented, too,
which helps. So it went from an educational focus
on the individual, using all the media photography,
sketching, video, audio, every media we could
struggle with in the old days to a more professional
where we visit offices, and even in the old
days we would visit a couple of officers offices or
have officers visit us and talk, especially in the
Ghana. When, when Ferrari finally made little studio
there, Mario Bhutto would just show up at the
dinner at night, you know, screw up the
whole thing. Where to sit around and talk.
Then he got too famous. Yeah, snorts who
would come and sit on the floor and talk without
English? Uh huh. The whole story is that
when when Gaddafi spoke in Italian, you didn't understand
what he said. If you didn't know Italian,
it's not so you don't have to know Italian.
By the time you finished talking, you know exactly
what he said. So it was that kind of
one or one. But now we visit offices and
try to get that professional dimension to their visits.
Easier said than done. Some of those awful we've
managed to get into Puts and Parks office this fall
, thanks to Robert Turner. Finally, after years
of trying to get that done. So it's gone
from that educational to a more practitioner, and I
would say professional, which maybe is the way the
school is gone. I'm good. Is there anything
else? I'm not wonderful. Everything. I'm sure
if I could listen to it, I would miss
half the things I'm supposed to say. But,
I mean, they also bear in mind this is
gonna be like a half hour long, so you
know it's everyone's gonna get boiled down to, like
, three minutes. Yeah, okay. But now
does it. If there's anything else you want to
talk about or say, or any anecdotes or stories
too many we had lots of. Well, if
we go back to the educational dimension, um,
our struggle early on was to not assume the students
come in here with nothing. And I think that
affect that That's touches the graduate program probably 10 times
more than it does the undergraduate. But the undergraduate
was, You don't just start over when you come
here. You've got to pull off your strengths to
address things you're not familiar with, and that can
be misunderstood completely, that you just turn them upside
down and tell him what to do. And that's
not That's not the way we thought you should work
but to pull the strengths. And some of these
young guys was kidding. The freshman upstairs yesterday that
Bernard Shaw ready to comment. Oh, Lord,
protect me from from principled people, and I said
all I do every morning when I'm teaching freshmen.
Oh Lord, protect me from high say t score
students because they can. They can help out verbally
explain away the confrontation of something new, and that's
what we try to do is expose these guys,
too, not something that they didn't know anything about
, but to see make what is that they all
make the familiar strange and strange. Familiar is not
, is not trivial. And how to do that
takes the enormous time and courage on the part of
the studio. So trying to build that courage with
their work and have the work speak back to them
. It's a very hard transformation, so in a
way, I think we may be not let we
may be letting that period get to be more simplified
. So when we say we didn't, we didn't
teach drawing. It's not it they didn't draw.
It's just that we've just said you do not teach
drawing. You forced to got to draw. And
then the drawing comes from the way they're seeing,
and then the media restricts them and they get better
and better at media. But that takes time,
so you have to have patience. I don't think
we've reduced the time two methodology, but the guards
this spring with the graduate students really helped, and
everybody sketched In fact, the first day we started
sketch and I really enjoyed the weather was so good
that in the middle of the lab the guys would
come and go. You know, it's really beautiful
outside. We should go outside the sketch. Okay
, Forget to laugh. So that's what we did
. And I think they're drawings. Got better,
but not because they were taught to sketch. You
mean don't forget. When Ferrari first came here,
there was a drawing class. There was a history
class in the history class was really not very bad
. It was just chaos because this this old faculty
, we had Henry Heath. Yeah, Henry Keith
. But in the East wish had thousands of slides
. They were beautiful slides, and that's what he
did. He just showed those lines. So we
slowly moved. We eliminate the drawing course and say
we did, and he did it in the most
subversive way he would. He would talk to students
into rebellion, which is he was very good at
that. And then the history class slowly and I
don't think it's ever we've solved it yet, but
we're trying to go to history of ideas rather than
history. of products, and I think we're not
just examples of. And then what the architect intended
to do and the hotshot are trying to catch the
newest wave of hotshot architect. Of course, before
history of ideas would also be, you can see
the same ideas in painting, in industrial design and
fashion design. And in architecture there were parallel,
and that was more critical than the products they were
making at that moment. So that educational probably you
have to be careful that, in fact, we
were accused. We invited the new dean at U
. N. C. C. Who was one
of the old teachers at Auburn, and he said
to listen to us one evening at the end.
I think it's after a few too many drinks.
He just said, You guys are not teaching architecture
at all who said thank you? We were teaching
, thinking we thought, which we weren't. We
thought we were. And I think the strength of
the the iterative allowing the student to iterative Lee go
back in to their own work on their own rather
than because of some critique is fundamental, and that
is very hard to instill in anybody. How to
how to for always said, If you want to
be a famous painter, you have to make a
painting every day for the rest of your life.
And of course, after the third day, you've
run out of ideas, right? You just run
out of gas So that staying, staying the course
, to remake something over and over and over.
And it's not a polishing question. It makes the
thing lose its noise. That is almost difficult because
of the time. So we've got to look too
efficient, I think tomorrow. But the tuition is
now four times what it was or five times unbelievable
pressure to hit the ground running with kids. And
we talked about not ever teaching, drawing and not
ever teaching photography do not have a teaching a computer
. Well, that's silly, because we did teach
drawing and we did teach computer and we did teach
photography. But it was with photography, not with
three credits or four credits. In fact, that
was the students in the foundation program that Inter college
. At least we're the best photographers you could possibly
imagine. So, as a young faculty, I
went into the dark room and tried to make my
prince and they kicked me out of the dark room
. And my friends was too bad they wouldn't let
me show up. So they took my negatives and
made them better. But that was humiliating at first
. Just kicked me out. Mm. All right
. I'm almost tape here and good good tables of 1533 01:47:36.630 --> A:middle L:90% party.