well, S. U. Was looking for a new dean of the College of Architecture and
environmental design and uh Russ nelson had recently come to a S. U. As
the new president and he was the he was dean of business, was it colorado
? I think colorado.
And he thought that searches should be professionally conducted, not left
to idle academics. And so he hired a very very good search firm and I was
contacted by this search firm and I found it a very very positive
experience to be hired through a search firm because they are they any
really valuable intermediaries? You can be very frank and honest with them
about what you're looking for and they can be very frank and honest with
you about what they believe the university is looking for. And so they act
as a wonderful broker. And so I was interested. I was interested maybe
primarily because when I did my vespa motor scooter trip around the United
States, I had fallen in love with the southwest
actually was probably more new Mexico than Arizona, but I had really
fallen in love with, I thought this is just the most spectacular place. I
can't imagine anywhere that would be more exciting and exhilarating to
live in. And I had the typical englishman's
sort of delight at the thought of spending time in the desert, most
english people like that idea. Nothing could be more different than
England and on a hot sunny day anyhow. So I came and and was interviewed
and in the process of that the whole thing Jack Kinzinger who was the
provost at the time, I had a way of doing things because eventually it's
handed over to the provost to make the decision and
he said, I want to come to Cincinnati and I want to talk to somebody who
is your superior, I want to sort somebody who's your peer and I want to
talk to somebody who works for you. And I thought that was incredibly
bright and I copied him. I thought that was a great idea. So when I was
hiring school directors, I did that too. And so he came to Cincinnati and
I went to the airport and I parked illegally while I went to collect him
at the gate and walked out the door and went over to the car and got in
and he looked at the car, looked at where he was parked and he said, ah a
risk taker, I see, I like that. Uh so anyhow, I
came and had chats with all the various people he wanted me to see and
then he'd arranged for us to have dinner together at the very fancy
Netherland Hilton hotel in downtown Cincinnati in the Palm Court. And so
we get settled at the table and he starts saying, you know, I think
probably we'd like to have you come as Dean and then he realized what the
story was and he spent the rest of the evening wooing my wife. Um you
realize the problem is not going to be me, the problem was going to be her.
So it was really quite a wonderful event and in the end what he did and
yeah, you can linda, you may have been involved in this. He arranged for
my wife to come on her own to phoenix and to be shown around and to be
introduced to various people. Uh and and so that that clinched the deal.
What was the college like when you arrived?
It was very clear that it had a very strong architecture program. Uh it ah
I'm I'm a great admirer, roger slants who was the director of the school
at the time and I'll talk more about him later because I think I have an
enormous amount to him, but the school of architecture clearly had a
strong position in the community, relatively strong position in the
university and was doing well. Uh it was not quite so clear that the other
disciplines in the college, which in those days were a school of design
headed by bob Wolff, which was interior and industrial design, graphic
design came later and then there was a school of planning with a certain
presence of landscape architecture amongst his faculty, but no, no
architecture, no landscape architecture program. So it was a very uneven
little cluster our progress, strong architecture, relatively weak design,
relatively weak planning and landscape architecture. Um so it was very
clear to me uh that as the dean of this, I had to get the whole thing
balanced and so we set about doing that. And over the next 15 years we're
able to do a lot of things that I thought really produced a very balanced
college. We ended up with three schools architecture
design because it had just been the Department of design, had a school of
design by this time graphic design had joined and then we had a school of
planning and landscape architecture.
And I, one of the things that I, I think it's been really terrific has
been the caliber of the people that I've been able to or was able to
assemble in the college in those days. I mean, I think
initially Rogers was there, but he handed along
and and went on to do other things. But then I was able to hire fritz
Steiner who was a spectacular Dean of Planning and then later landscape
architecture and bob wolf just went on from strength to strength in the
design programs and we were able to bring graphic designers set into that
program. I did sort of superficial, but nonetheless important things like
paying the three directors exactly the same salaries so that there would
be no hierarchy in the, in the college. The other thing that was true was
that although the architecture had community support and a kind of public
relations sense, it didn't have much community support in the financial
sense. So the two most important meetings for me in the early years of my
deanship, we're one with Gary Herberger out of which came the main support
group for the College Council for Design excellence. And the other was a
meeting with terry Goddard, who was the mayor of phoenix. Now, Roger had
done a really good job in preparing the ground with terry Goddard, but
1988 there was a bond issue in phoenix and significant sums of money were
made available to provide cultural facilities in phoenix. This is very
much terry goddard is doing and I went to an unveiling of a piece of
public art somewhere and met terry and congratulated him on the bond issue
and then I said terry, how are you going to make sure that money is well
spent? And he said, you got any ideas? And I said yes, when I was in
Cincinnati, I was a member of the city of Cincinnati's design review board
and I think it would be marvelous if we could have something like that
here in phoenix. And so he said, we'll find out more about it and let me
know and the net result of that was that the city formed a central city
architecture review panel, always headed very wisely by a local
businessman, but I was the continuing deputy head of that throughout my
deanship and we were able to get some pretty good buildings, including the
Burton barr library and the history building and some important cultural
facilities, the phoenix art museum had a significant expansion. The
science center was built and so on. And that was a little parallel to
another very important thing that happened when I arrived here, which was
, I got a letter from Russ nelson and he said, oh by the way, one of your
jobs as dean of this college is going to be to chair the university's
design review, which later on became the public Art and Design review
board. Ah And so throughout my deanship, I chaired that too. And that put
the school in a position to influence, not only what happened on the
campus, what happened in the city and that made a huge difference to, to
our morale and to uh the respect that we had and so on within the
community. But you asked what was the college like? But let me go on to
what I found the university to be like because I think the university and
it's certainly one of the things that attracted me back in 1987 it was
clearly on the rise Russ nelson. I, although he's a relatively quiet man,
I read in him, somebody with a real nose for quality. Uh, and I think he
initiated a whole series of things that significantly improves the quality
of ASU is an enterprise. And then of course we were lucky enough to get
larry Corey who completely transformed the relative evaluation of a S. U
and U. Of a, certainly within the city of phoenix.
And now of course we have Michael Crowe who's doing that at a national and
an international level. So the trajectory of the university, it was
already clear to me when I arrived. I don't think it's owed to any one of
these presidents, but I think they've each played a very important role in
driving that trajectory.
And I was delighted to be a part of at least the first phase of of that of
that process. The city of phoenix was doing the same thing at the same
time. I mean from being a relatively minor regional center, it was
gradually emerging as a, as a powerhouse. I mean it's still not there, but
boy, what a difference there is today from what it was. I mean, I remember
going to the Arizona theater and the performances were held in phoenix
college,
There was no equity theater in the valley. Uh and you know, I mean all of
the cultural facilities where really shoestring situation. When I arrived
somewhat like Mill Avenue was, I mean when I arrived my interviews, Mill
Avenue was still a state highway with five ft wide sidewalks, trucks
barreling down a two lane, four lane highway in the middle of the road and
smoke shops and adult book shops along the sides. I mean the the the
changes are absolutely extraordinary and I think that's something that
I've certainly enjoyed. And I think everybody who likes being in phoenix
has to enjoy, which is this incredible pace of change. I mean this is,
this is a place that's changing daily.
You mentioned Jack Kinzinger when you got here, talk about some of the
other provost's along the way, there were a bunch uh and I can't remember
all their names, to be honest with you. Uh Jack didn't last very long, I
think he was out of here before I even arrived. Elmer came in. Well, no,
Elmer followed whats his name, bro, Roland Roland Hayden and then Elmer ah
and then Dick Pack,
but the one that I loved and everybody else did of course is milk click. I
mean, they milt in my book was the absolute perfect provost. I couldn't
have asked for a better boss in, in any way. He was generous, kind, but
very, very clear thinking. Uh new and things needed to be changed.
I thought he was brilliant as a provost. Absolutely brilliant. Roland
Hayden was in there and when he was an engineering, he had his Council of
100 I think the Council for Engineering Excellence. And and that's where I
borrowed the title from, for our Council for Design Excellence. And also
we had the, what later became the Herberger Center for Design Excellence.
Initially it was just the Center for Design Excellence, which we got
money for from both provost and the border regions. Ah I had realized that
a professional school has a real problem in that it is a natural tendency
for it to think that it just needs to teach the current state of the art,
of whatever the art was business medicine teaching, whatever. And that
what was absolutely essential in a major research university is that the
faculty do research uh and that you actually take a critical position
relative to current practice, but you can't really do that if all you're
doing in school is teaching.
Uh And there was a natural tendency in architecture schools, particularly
for people to say, well, I teach and I practice and that's it. Ah, so I
felt it was absolutely essential that we have some institution within the
institution that could provide the necessary support and incentive for
faculty to do research to publish their research to bring like minded
researchers back here and so on. And so the, the Herberger Herberger
Center for Design Excellence was never meant to be. And this is something
that I not been very successful in persuading subsequent Dean's was never
meant to be the place where a handful of research oriented faculty did
their research. And all it simply did was help them go out and get grants.
That's not what that was meant to be. It was certainly that, but much,
much more than that. Uh and so we established a publication, We put on a
whole series of symposia,
which we also published and so on. And I think it was an important thing
to do. And I think it it made a big difference. One of the things we did
was to put on the desert cities dinner's in in in the city where we
brought internationally famous people to speak about urban issues and so
on. And I was with Grady Gammage just the other day and he was regretting
that those seemed to have fallen by the wayside. I think those were
important events. Uh The Herberger did some important projects you want to
mention him. I know you were a tv personality with the environmental
showcase house.
Well one of the other things I mean publication is very important but I
think what is tremendously important is to be visible to be visible in the
community not just as a kind of personality but to be visible because the
idea is that you promote are interesting and challenging and so on. So I
was really delighted to discover that K. E. T. I was actually in the
building almost next door to us and
I was particularly pleased when the horizon program thought it appropriate
to invite me from time to time to talk about important issues in the
community which I'm delighted to do. But what then happened was that a P.
S. Arizona public service which is one of the two utility companies in the
valley. I felt that they needed to make up some ground relative to Salt
River project. And one of the ways they thought they could make up that
ground was by promoting an environmental showcase home S. I. P. Had done
it in the botanical gardens. And I was really infuriated when I arrived
here to discover that that building had been designed in Tucson, not here.
Uh anyhow, A PS decided they want to do an environmental tok summer,
somewhat more ambitious project.
And so we worked with them and you in fact were very important and helping
to put that in place.
But then the question came up, what do you do about the public relations
dimension of this enterprise? It's all very well to build a house, but
who's going to know about it? Who's going to see it and so on? And so A PS
talked to K. T. And said we'd like to do a series about the building of
this environmental showcase home. And then the question was, well who
would be the anchor for that series? And and so because I had already done
some things with Katie, they decided to do a sort of camera test and see
whether that would work in that worked out. Okay, so we did a whole series
of of videos that are still available actually uh about the building of
the environment showcase home. And of course out of that also came a book
that David credited, which was published by the Herberger Center. And did
you run into any financial problems or other administrative problems
during your yes, I mean we arrived here in 1987
which was the very end of a good time. Thank goodness for me because when
I arrived I got a little bit of a honeymoon gift of dowry as a dean and
new dean. But almost immediately they began to take some of that back
because if anybody remembers there was a really serious economic downturn
from almost that time and it lasted right through to 93. So there was
about six years of really hard times financially. And one of the things
that I quickly learned, one of the reasons I never took a sabbatical leave
while I was dean was that one of the jobs of the dean is to defend his
budget
because provost is inevitably looking around to see where the money can be
saved. We shall do least damage to the enterprise at university. And if
you're not particularly visible and if you're not particularly valued by
the community, you're going to be gobbled up. And so certainly one of my
jobs was to defend not only the college, but also some of the components
of the college. I remember distinctly a conversation where one of the
problems asked me, do you really need an interior design program? Is it
really worthy of a place in a research university? And I had to mount a
fairly powerful argument to say, yes, we absolutely do need an interior
design program and that our spectrum of design disciplines would be
completely incomplete without interior design amongst it. So, so I mean
that's a very important part of the job of, of a dean. And you've not only
got to go out and get money from people like Gary Herberger and his pals,
but you've also got to defend the money within the university and make a
strong case continuously for continued investment in your programs by the
university. Well, that Counsel for Excellence that you had, there was some
pretty heavy hitters as I recall. Yes, Yes. Well, I in a, the Gary Herbert
uh benefit of your viewers say the name is probably very familiar, but
Gary Herberger is a member of the Herberger family bob Herberger Herberger
, his father, it was a man from the Midwest who used to take his winter
holidays here and that's a kind of hobby. He has accumulated land, I went
out and bought land
a lot of the land that he bought turned out to be in and around Scottsdale
Airport and became extremely valuable. So bob became a multimillionaire
Gary. It was an architect uh, and had studied with frank Lloyd wright and
had worked in architectural offices in the valley. But then he gradually
joined his father in helping to manage this. Now increasingly valuable
land resource that they had and he was appropriately and justifiably much
admired in the development community here in the Valley. Hornberger family
has done an awful lot of good in the, in the, in the valley here, but he
had a lot of admirers amongst the developers and a lot of those developers
joined him in supporting the college and so we had about 30 40,000,
$50,000 a year to play with. One of the things that's important about
money is that it's all very well to go out and get a big lump of money to
put in an endowment, but it doesn't do much good at 4%. You've got to have
money to spend as well. And so one of the real assets that I had as a dean
is that I was given complete autonomy in handling the money from the
Council for Design Excellence. And so faculty member could come into my
office with a good idea and walk out with a commitment for some money to
support that idea and I didn't have to talk to anybody else about that.
You came here. I think just about the time the new north building was
approved and appropriated. The north building was in working drawings and
of course that had been achieved by roger slants and I said, I would talk
about him and I really should mention Roger was a spectacular director of
the School of Architecture. He did an enormous amount of good and he
certainly laid the groundwork for what we were able to do with the design
review committee and so on. But he had persuaded Russ nelson that we
needed to have very good architects and we needed to have design
competitions, uh, to Tuesday's good architects, but anyhow, I know you
want to draw attention to the fact that it was the local professional
community that
established a high priority for a new building for, for our college. Uh,
and they certainly are owed a great deal of credit for that. But we did
get this new building and the building had been designed by Alan
Czerniakow, who had been a teacher at Princeton along with Michael Graves.
And it's a building of a particular time. It's what we call it, a
postmodern building. Uh, not particularly popular amongst architects to
students these days, but still, I think pretty good building,
but I was able to change a few things, but not anything very much before
the building was built. All right. The most important thing I changed was
to move the cafe from the bridge to its current location where it's become
a very successful and very popular cafe. And we saved the bridge for other
important things. And you had the idea for the Oculus over the patio. You
put that on me. Okay. David was a wonderful associate dean for a while and
did wonderful things with our buildings on campus. You worked with other
administrators, Deans, anyone of them that any of them that he would
comment on, that helped you. And let's say, I'll be honest with you. Uh,
one of the things about being a dean is that it's a very lonely position.
Uh, you, you only have a dozen peers and they have their own
responsibilities.
You have two bosses, the provost and the president and then you have a lot
of people who are scared of you.
And that's not a very easy position to be in. And it's certainly something
I hadn't realized how challenging it was until I finally stopped doing it
and found that life was a lot pleasanter after stopping being a dean. Uh,
no, I mean, I admired many of the other deans, but I can't say that any,
any of them are, I became particularly closely with the possible
possible exception of ted Humphrey who had established the honest college
and I continue to be friends with him and, and I admire enormously what he
put in place there, which I think has made a huge difference to this
university. You've done travel, you've had your own interests and research.
It seemed like desert cities was something you did want to talk about any
of those travels.
One of the things that is a continuing issue, both for our college and in
the community is the question, what do we do about our climate here? I
mean, this is a desert climate. We're we're in a desert here and the
college long before I came here had a long history of people like john
gelatin and others, uh, of, of trying to do research that address those
issues. Um when I came to phoenix, uh there were a group of people around
terry goddard in the mayor's office who were also very interested in the
idea of phoenix as a desert city. And I got very involved with them and we
were going to put what we call the desert oasis in the middle of downtown
and we got a little bit of that done, but not much. Um but that never left
me. It was always a big concern for me. And so whatever opportunity I had
to talk publicly about our responsibility as a desert city I took.
But I was very, very fortunate when I came to the end of my deanship, Milk
click was very generous and gave me a full year sabbatical leave at full
dien li pei. Uh and as I said, I had not thought it appropriate to take a
sabbatical leave while I was doing because I was so scared what might
happen to the college if I was away, but I decided to spend that
sabbatical leave traveling around the world,
visiting desert cities all over the world, particularly the older pre
industrial desert cities to gather an array of ideas that might be
valuable as one
continue to consider the case for desert urbanism. So I traveled to Iran
and to the Yemen and to India and to Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco and to
chile and peru and Australia and all of those places and I was filming
most of the time while I was away. My original idea was to try and lay the
groundwork for doing a series for public television and unhappily that
never quite occurred. But what did happen was that many of the films that
money, much of the film that I'd taken while I was on my travels, I was
able to edit into some short films that insight media decided to market.
So those were marketed for quite a few years and I used to get a nice
little royalty check every night again for those. But what did emerge from
that is a couple of book chapters on making desert cities, one of which
was published by the University of New Mexico. And then another one was a
chapter in a book which was put together by David P africa uh, from the
course that he taught here. Uh huh. But yes, desert cities have been a
desert urbanism and urbanism generally has been a subject of great concern
to me. But more recently
I've been, I took a second sabbatical leave, awful lot of reading in
Cambridge and here. And I've been working on some theoretical ideas about
the necessity for intricacy and architecture and urbanism. Well, you've
certainly done a lot for
the university and I'd say the college uh, since you stepped down as Dean.
What's been happening? Well, obviously a lot has happened to the college
, including its merger into the Herberger Institute
I think
my successor is Dean, I think did extremely well and
the guy we call Duke writer, Wellington writer unfortunately didn't stay
very long and, and I think he got a lot of things going. It would, it
would have been nice to have seen
mature a little. And certainly one of the things he got going was the
phoenix urban research lab, which was the successor to the joints urban
design studio that our cameraman john McIntosh headed up for many years, a
really important arm of what we, we did it in the college,
but
let's just deal with the negatives First, I think the Duke unfortunately
went on to Chicago the economic crisis occurred. The college was absorbed
into the Herberger Institute, our enormous number of cuts of all kinds
and I think we are still reeling under the negative impact of all of that.
Although in principle, I think the idea of an institute that includes both
all of the creative arts as well as the design disciplines is in fact a
very attractive idea. But at this point it's no more than an idea. It has
not been in any way really realized. Hopefully that will happen in in in,
in in the future. From a purely personal point of view, I have discovered
a whole new career,
I have thoroughly enjoyed being a young faculty member teaching
architecture at Cambridge, but when I went to Cincinnati and then on to
here, I was an administrator and uh moved further and further away from a
direct interaction with the students, although I had always taught a great
big introductory survey course. Um but when I came back after my
sabbatical leave and started teaching in the design studio, I discovered
rediscovered an incredible sense of fulfillment of being involved in
teaching design.
And it so happens that we have a rather important and and emerging lee
even more important set of programs in the college now
which we call the three plus programs, they're called three plus because
it takes three and a bit years for us to mature a qualified designer,
whether an architecture or landscape architecture, interior design,
industrial design, whatever it may be, The students who come into that
program come from all over the country with previous degrees in all kinds
of different areas. Just yesterday we were looking at student work from
students, out of mathematics, out of business, out of interior design and
so on. And I have found teaching those mature young students mature and
young in the sense that they're in their mid to late twenties, many of
them has been incredibly rewarding. The learning curve is unbelievably
steep and the sense of achievement that is available to a teacher is is
huge and I loved that. And then the opportunity to teach seminars
associated with my areas of research has been also huge
and rewarding pleasure. So I've discovered, rediscovered or newly
discovered the enormous rewards of being a full professor, which is great
thing that you Yeah, but the one thing I did want to make sure ah
is the, is the incredible quality of the team that we had here. You've
been kind enough on occasions to talk about it as a kind of golden age.
And in many ways it certainly was that, I mean, when I think of you and
john and of
roger slants, hickory bus mary, kiel Beverly Brandt fritz stein. I mean,
there was an incredible team of people that we're all committed in their
own particular way, but but in, in in a way, they really worked together
uh, to, to build a very, very strong college while I was lucky enough to
be dean of it. And
when I left Cincinnati,
I was hugely disappointed. And how many of the things that I had, I felt I
had built, there have been left to decay after I left by my successor who
was not committed to their continuation, but wanted to do other things.
And so I had to do a little bit of mental gymnastics to say what's really
important is not what follows, but what is happening at the time and how
it affects the various players, the people who were there at the time. And
I was lucky enough to chair a national conference where many of the people
I worked with at Cincinnati came and I realized how much pleasure I got
out of their continuing success in life and so having stepped down as dean
here, I was, I think wise enough not to worry too much about my legacy in
the sense of the structure of the institution and things like that, but
more the legacy in the sense of the continuing success of both students
and the faculty who were lucky enough to be here at that time. And things
like the fact that several of the dean's at Tucson came from our team
hickory bus was was the dean there, bob hershberger, who was my first
associate dean, became dean down there. The fact that fritz Steiner went
on to be a very successful dean at Austin University of texas at Austin
and one could go on and on and that's been a source of great pleasure.
Well, I've always had the theory that an educational institution is only
as good as the faculty and
an administrator's job is to assemble the faculty to nurture the faculty
and to stimulate the faculty. So if a young person is in a position to get
some sense of whether there is a strong faculty in place, wherever they
want to go, that's what they should be looking for. And the strong faculty
is passionate faculty, somebody deeply committed to ah their own work and
the work of those around them. And
if you can sense that it's a marvelous institution, but if there's
discontent and unhappiness and jealousy and all those other things then I
want nothing to do with it.
So you're recommending Cambridge,
Cambridge has a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage. Uh It's
very very old. I think they just had their 8/100 anniversary and it's been
throughout those 800 years, one of the major universities in the world.
And so it has a kind of momentum that
is unstoppable. It will always attract very talented people. Um I think
ASU is not anything like that situation. It certainly has momentum but
that momentum doesn't have the kind of inertia that that place like
Cambridge has. It could slip back very quickly and very easily uh huh to
being a minor provincial institution. And
but I, you know, I certainly sense the continued upward trajectory for A.
S. U. And and it clearly has extremely strong leadership right now. And so
I think this remains a very, very attractive place
for all kinds of reasons. John I want to thank you for your service to
Arizona State University and the college. Thank you. Thank youjohn