today is april 24th 2013. We are conducting an interview for the Arizona
State University retirees association video history project. We are
located today in the CSU community services building. I am David Schultz
lee, Professor emeritus of the School of Architecture. The technical
support staff today include john Macintosh operating the camera and roger
carter audio. He's also operating a camera. Also in attendance is linda
Vance Coy. Chair of the A S. U. R. A video history project. Okay, please
introduce yourself stating your name and your positions at my name is john
Mannion. I came here as dean which dean of the College of Architecture and
Environmental Design, did that job for about 15 years and then returned to
the faculty as a full time professor and still am that professor of
architecture like so to begin with, let our viewers know about your early
life. Where were you born and raised and trace your life path? Well, I was
born in 1936
and at that time my family lived in the city of Nottingham, famous for
Robin Hood
but in 1939 as you all remember something happened and we actually moved
from Nottingham to a place on the northwest coast of England, a place
called Southport and initially we moved in with my grandfather and then we
moved into a house there and I had my school days all in South board which
was fun back to England now when you were growing up in World War 2, 1939.
What was England like? And with the americans coming in to help fight the
war? What was that like? Well, there were several phases. I my earliest
memories were when we were still living with my grandfather and we were
bombed.
And I'm very, very memory actually wasn't a bomb. It was what they call
the landmine. Southport is where you were when I was in a place called
Birkdale, which is very close to Southport. And this was before we had air
raid shelters and the warning sirens had gone off and my sisters and I had
gone downstairs and we're sitting on the couch, the city in front of the
fireplace. My mother was over the back of the city, my grandfather was
sitting in the armchair by the fire, my step grandmother was sitting the
other arm chair and my father was putting his helmet on because he was an
air raid warden. And he was about to go out anyhow, he heard a strange
whistling noise and he said, everybody get down. So my grandfather and
step grandmother threw themselves on the floor in front of the fireplace.
My mother threw herself over us and my father went down behind the couch
and I don't remember the noise but I remember this almighty flash and the
drapes came in and then out taking the windows with them, but none of us
were hurt but if we've still been in our beds, we would have been cut to
shreds by window glass, but that was that was one bit of it. And ah and
then then we moved into our own home later on. And of course by this time
the war was well and truly in progress. Uh and uh by this time we also had
an air raid shelter and the warnings would go off and we'd go down in the
middle of the night and sit under the air raid shelter. And my parents
were very wise. Candies were in extremely short supply. During the war my
parents had a can of candies which only appeared when we went down to the
air raid shoulders. So we actually quite looked forward to the warnings
going on. And my my mother, my father would be out patrolling the streets.
My mother would tell us stories about when she was a little girl and so
that lasted obviously for us. The war started basically in 39 went all the
way to 45.
I remember distinctly the the celebrations for ve. Day and V. J. Day ah on
the streets of the town where we were living and there were lots and lots
of americans around because this was an R. And R. Place for americans. It
was a seaside resort town and there were lots of americans around. Of
course they didn't have fireworks but they had those awful thunder flash
things that they use for training people so they let the thunder flashes
off in the streets. Yeah and I decided I didn't enjoy that noise, but I
can remember that. I uh I went to grammar school, which in England means
an academic high school. It was quite a small one and only 350 boys. It
was gender separated. My sisters went to the girls high school uh and I
was in a advanced path. So I went through quite quickly
and actually graduated when I was just 17 and went on to Liverpool
University to study architecture. Uh and that was a five year program.
There
one of the things about Liverpool was that it always had a strong
connection to the United States and one of the rules of the game in many
architecture programs and certainly at Liverpool was that you had to take
a an internship in your fourth year and I was lucky enough to get an
internship in new york
and I worked for the famous architect guy called Marcel breuer in new york
and instead of only doing the six months, which was the normal internship
, I took an extra year and worked for most of that with Marcel breuer, I
worked for some other people at night and on the weekends and so on. But
at the end of that time I decided I really needed to see the United States
and so I bought a secondhand vesper motor scooter
and traveled on my own all the way around the United States over a period
of about three months and that was one of the sort of turning points of my
life where I, I learned that I could manage on my own and then eventually
went back to England and finished at Liverpool. While I was in the United
States. I had met my wife and I had decided that this was, this was
something that needed to be permanent. So I got myself a a fellowship at
Harvard and I went to Harvard as a graduate student in the Graduate School
of Design. And while I was there, my wife and I got married and so we
finished up there. Let's go back to when you met your wife, you were in
new york. Just describe how that has. Well I had got this job with Marcel
breuer in new york and initially rented an apartment in Borough Hall in
Brooklyn and I really didn't like that very much. And so I went up to the
area around Columbia University and it so happened by the time I went up
there, their semester, that spring semester was over and I found myself a
room in the fire, Gamma delta fraternity house at Columbia University.
Obviously the students were gone and they needed rent for the room, I
took a room there and it so happened that one of the members of that
fraternity. I had a girlfriend who was singing in the Pirates of Penzance
and the minor Latham theater of Barnard college, which is the sister
college of Columbia College, but also part of Columbia University, but in
those days they were separated actually, there's still and so they were
looking for male voices to sing in the choir of the pirate, another choir
, the chorus of the Pirates of Penzance. And and I've done a little
singing so I thought I might as well do that. So I went to that and that
one of the cast parties, I was introduced to my wife because we were both
tennis players. And so our first date was on the tennis court long since
disappeared Barnard college and we got married in the, the break between
the fall and the spring semesters of
of my time at Harvard. So she was on the back of that vespa motor scooter
when you went across. Not then, but when we, by the time
uh by the time we got married the vespa motor scooter had been swapped for
a lamb britta. Oh yeah, more horsepower. My wife had a job at that time
with IBM in the middle of boston and my job was to get it to IBM by eight
o'clock in the morning. So we would tool down Storrow drive with her sight.
She had to sit side saddle because IBM is uniform didn't give her enough
room to sit astride. So she sat side settle on the lam britta going down
Storrow drive, attracting a certain amount of attention,
which was fun. And then we decided that we needed to go somewhere where
neither of us was at home. And so we went to live in Munich and I got a
job within 24 hours of arriving in Munich with a professor. What was then
the technical hoax, a Munich, It's now the technical University, a guy
called fred Angara and I worked for him for two years.
And at the end of that time I realized that I was never going to be able
to speak german well enough to live permanently in Germany. And so there
was a question of what to do. My initial idea was maybe would be wonderful
to work with the United Nations. I like the idea of being a kind of world
citizen. And so I wrote to the United Nations and they wrote a rather
Bruce letter back saying come back again in 10 years time when we don't
have to teach you anything. So that was the end of that. But my wife was
working for a propaganda radio station uh, oriented in Munich oriented to
the Ukraine. And she happened to be in the library at lunch one day there
and saw a copy of the London Times and believe it or not in those days,
the London Times on its front page didn't have news. It had classified
advertising and way down the list there, there was a classified
advertisement for a teaching position at Cambridge University. I had
thought I might want to teach, but I didn't think I wanted to teach quite
that soon but it was a question of what to do next. So I send off a letter
and to my great surprise
a few weeks later I got a letter back inviting me to go to Cambridge for
interview. Um I had never been to Cambridge before
but while I was at Harvard I was a frank Knox fellow and frank Knox had
given money for english students to go and study at Harvard and one of the
other english students who had been on the frank Knox fellowship with me.
I had a position as a junior fellow at one of the Cambridge colleges. So I
wrote to him and said I'm coming for an interview where do you think I
should stay? And so he he said well why don't you come and stay in my
college? He was the junior fellow of christ's college Cambridge. So I went
and he ensconced me in the guest room of the college and he said oh by the
way you're invited for sherry in the combination room before dinner and as
your only guest tonight you'll be sitting next to the master of the
college. So I that was lovely and I went and had a lovely glass of sherry
and a nice meal. The master was a very gentle, nice man and we had a
lovely conversation and he found out all about me and so on and it was a
very nice evening, went back to the guest room, had a good night's sleep,
got up the next day and went off for an interview and lo and behold who
was the chair of the interviewing committee. But the master of christ
college Cambridge, who knew all about me by this time anyhow, the net
outcome of all of that was that I was offered a very junior a faculty
position at Cambridge at the ripe old age of 26 right place, right time.
Yeah, well getting to know the right people at the right place at the
right time. Um I was on a five year term contract but I was lucky enough
to get that translated into i tenure track and then a tenured position. So
I I taught at Cambridge for 14 years. Um and during that time I was lucky
enough to be able to build a house which we still own and we will be going
to very shortly go back there every summer now. Uh and uh so we also
practice as an architect while we were in Cambridge, all of the faculty at
Cambridge University School of Architecture where published practicing
architects. And so it was just a natural thing for me to do. And so we did
quite a few buildings and published quite a few buildings and then we were
lucky enough to win a major design competition for the Borough museum in
Glasgow and I stayed with that project with my partner through design
development drawings.
And then I was invited
to interview at Cornell for the chair of architecture at Cornell. So I
went to Cornell, it was april and it was freezing cold, the streets were
covered in ice. I don't think this looks very good. So I was happy when
they didn't offer me the position. But it put in my mind the notion that
maybe there was something other than being a a attended faculty member at
Cambridge. So a little later I was invited by the then dean of the College
of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati
to go and meet him in London to talk about the directorship of the
architecture program there. I wasn't initially that interested, I didn't
think that Cincinnati probably was in the same league as Cornell or
Cambridge, but I was lucky enough to have an american friend who was also
a faculty member at Cambridge who said you know I've worked in offices
with the graduates of Cincinnati and they're very good. I think you ought
to go and have a look. So I said sure I'll come out. So I went out and it
was april again and the daffodils were blooming and I thought this looks
quite nice. Um And so anyhow they offered me the job which
my wife was delighted to hear because as an american. My wife's from
Brooklyn, she put up with being an american wife in Cambridge for long
enough. And so she was very happy with the idea that we would be going to
Cincinnati. Ah I had never lived in the midwest. I obviously went through
the midwest on my trip around the states, but I discovered that well, two
things. One is that
americans are extremely snobbish about whether you live on the coast or
not, if you live on the east coast, then you're one kind of person if you
live on the west coast or another kind of person. And if you're in the
middle you are to be pitied. Uh and and I learned that that is an entirely
inappropriate and completely wrong estimation of the midwest, I know
you're from the midwest, so, but I learned to have a huge regard for the
culture of the Midwesterners. Ah they were honest, hardworking, they were
completely un presumptuous. They were wonderful people, both as colleagues
, Sanders, students. Yeah, well I went there to be ahead of the School of
architecture, but fairly shortly after I had arrived, they slightly
reorganized the college and I became the director of the School of
Architecture and Interior Design. So I took on responsibility not only for
architecture but also for interior design and I took that very seriously.
I I thought that if I was going to do that, I really needed to both think
hard and find out what there was to know about interior design. It also
gave me the idea of multidisciplinary schools, which is an idea that I
brought with me uh, to, to, to this, this university. Uh huh. But I
thoroughly enjoyed my time at Cincinnati. Um, the students were, as I've
said, terrific.
One of the reasons Cincinnati is as good as it is, is because it's, it's
one of the very few schools in the United States that has a co op program
and the co op program works extraordinarily well for professional schools.
My son is a doctor and he went through medical school, which still works
like a co op program. But basically the co op program says that there's a
freshman, you do a normal freshman year, but from there on until the very
end of your program, you alternate three months in school with three
months in an office and Cincinnati had a marvelous array of offices
available to the students, not only all over the United States, but in
many cases all over the world. And so you have these fantastic midwestern
students going to a very good school in the midwest but also going out to
offices all over the country and all over the world working with some of
the very best architects on some of the most interesting projects
that did actually pose a problem for me. And the problem was that as I
talked to the students, it became clear that they thought that the most
important part of their education was what happened in the offices and
that going to university was just a kind of fun thing. And as I thought
about it, I thought, well maybe they've got some points here. You know,
they're in an office, they're being paid, they're working on real life
projects with real live architects and interesting cities and here they're
paying for the privilege of working on fictional projects with part time
architects in the Midwestern city. So it's not an even playing field.
Quite obviously they enjoy the one rather than the other. So it posed a
problem for me, which is how to make school as attractive as the office
experience was. And my answer was too optimistic the intellectual
dimensions of the school so that they had an intellectual experience at a
higher level than they would have in their offices. And so we hired a
whole bunch of very, very bright young graduate students from Princeton,
Harvard and Yale. And that made a big difference. Many of those have gone
on to distinguished positions all over the country. Since then,