WEBVTT 00:00:05.139 --> 00:00:07.139 well, S. U. Was looking for a new dean of the College of Architecture and 00:00:11.880 --> 00:00:19.880 environmental design and uh Russ nelson had recently come to a S. U. As 00:00:20.010 --> 00:00:26.576 the new president and he was the he was dean of business, was it colorado 00:00:26.609 --> 00:00:30.157 ? I think colorado. 00:00:30.190 --> 00:00:35.817 And he thought that searches should be professionally conducted, not left 00:00:35.850 --> 00:00:43.167 to idle academics. And so he hired a very very good search firm and I was 00:00:43.200 --> 00:00:48.487 contacted by this search firm and I found it a very very positive 00:00:48.520 --> 00:00:53.896 experience to be hired through a search firm because they are they any 00:00:53.929 --> 00:00:58.516 really valuable intermediaries? You can be very frank and honest with them 00:00:58.549 --> 00:01:01.237 about what you're looking for and they can be very frank and honest with 00:01:01.270 --> 00:01:06.186 you about what they believe the university is looking for. And so they act 00:01:06.219 --> 00:01:14.219 as a wonderful broker. And so I was interested. I was interested maybe 00:01:14.969 --> 00:01:19.947 primarily because when I did my vespa motor scooter trip around the United 00:01:19.980 --> 00:01:23.706 States, I had fallen in love with the southwest 00:01:23.739 --> 00:01:27.736 actually was probably more new Mexico than Arizona, but I had really 00:01:27.769 --> 00:01:32.337 fallen in love with, I thought this is just the most spectacular place. I 00:01:32.370 --> 00:01:36.447 can't imagine anywhere that would be more exciting and exhilarating to 00:01:36.480 --> 00:01:40.807 live in. And I had the typical englishman's 00:01:40.840 --> 00:01:45.027 sort of delight at the thought of spending time in the desert, most 00:01:45.060 --> 00:01:48.986 english people like that idea. Nothing could be more different than 00:01:49.019 --> 00:01:57.019 England and on a hot sunny day anyhow. So I came and and was interviewed 00:01:57.340 --> 00:02:03.406 and in the process of that the whole thing Jack Kinzinger who was the 00:02:03.439 --> 00:02:10.566 provost at the time, I had a way of doing things because eventually it's 00:02:10.599 --> 00:02:15.807 handed over to the provost to make the decision and 00:02:15.840 --> 00:02:20.386 he said, I want to come to Cincinnati and I want to talk to somebody who 00:02:20.419 --> 00:02:26.077 is your superior, I want to sort somebody who's your peer and I want to 00:02:26.110 --> 00:02:32.196 talk to somebody who works for you. And I thought that was incredibly 00:02:32.229 --> 00:02:36.827 bright and I copied him. I thought that was a great idea. So when I was 00:02:36.860 --> 00:02:42.096 hiring school directors, I did that too. And so he came to Cincinnati and 00:02:42.129 --> 00:02:49.066 I went to the airport and I parked illegally while I went to collect him 00:02:49.099 --> 00:02:54.047 at the gate and walked out the door and went over to the car and got in 00:02:54.080 --> 00:02:57.087 and he looked at the car, looked at where he was parked and he said, ah a 00:02:57.120 --> 00:03:05.120 risk taker, I see, I like that. Uh so anyhow, I 00:03:06.340 --> 00:03:11.297 came and had chats with all the various people he wanted me to see and 00:03:11.330 --> 00:03:18.767 then he'd arranged for us to have dinner together at the very fancy 00:03:18.800 --> 00:03:25.777 Netherland Hilton hotel in downtown Cincinnati in the Palm Court. And so 00:03:25.810 --> 00:03:31.606 we get settled at the table and he starts saying, you know, I think 00:03:31.639 --> 00:03:36.256 probably we'd like to have you come as Dean and then he realized what the 00:03:36.289 --> 00:03:41.837 story was and he spent the rest of the evening wooing my wife. Um you 00:03:41.870 --> 00:03:46.726 realize the problem is not going to be me, the problem was going to be her. 00:03:46.759 --> 00:03:53.606 So it was really quite a wonderful event and in the end what he did and 00:03:53.639 --> 00:03:58.837 yeah, you can linda, you may have been involved in this. He arranged for 00:03:58.870 --> 00:04:05.316 my wife to come on her own to phoenix and to be shown around and to be 00:04:05.349 --> 00:04:11.626 introduced to various people. Uh and and so that that clinched the deal. 00:04:11.659 --> 00:04:16.606 What was the college like when you arrived? 00:04:16.639 --> 00:04:22.906 It was very clear that it had a very strong architecture program. Uh it ah 00:04:22.939 --> 00:04:28.257 I'm I'm a great admirer, roger slants who was the director of the school 00:04:28.290 --> 00:04:32.476 at the time and I'll talk more about him later because I think I have an 00:04:32.509 --> 00:04:39.536 enormous amount to him, but the school of architecture clearly had a 00:04:39.569 --> 00:04:43.746 strong position in the community, relatively strong position in the 00:04:43.779 --> 00:04:51.779 university and was doing well. Uh it was not quite so clear that the other 00:04:53.660 --> 00:04:58.606 disciplines in the college, which in those days were a school of design 00:04:58.639 --> 00:05:04.507 headed by bob Wolff, which was interior and industrial design, graphic 00:05:04.540 --> 00:05:11.226 design came later and then there was a school of planning with a certain 00:05:11.259 --> 00:05:14.137 presence of landscape architecture amongst his faculty, but no, no 00:05:14.170 --> 00:05:18.937 architecture, no landscape architecture program. So it was a very uneven 00:05:18.970 --> 00:05:23.877 little cluster our progress, strong architecture, relatively weak design, 00:05:23.910 --> 00:05:29.817 relatively weak planning and landscape architecture. Um so it was very 00:05:29.850 --> 00:05:35.116 clear to me uh that as the dean of this, I had to get the whole thing 00:05:35.149 --> 00:05:43.149 balanced and so we set about doing that. And over the next 15 years we're 00:05:44.810 --> 00:05:50.546 able to do a lot of things that I thought really produced a very balanced 00:05:50.579 --> 00:05:56.806 college. We ended up with three schools architecture 00:05:56.839 --> 00:06:01.077 design because it had just been the Department of design, had a school of 00:06:01.110 --> 00:06:05.827 design by this time graphic design had joined and then we had a school of 00:06:05.860 --> 00:06:08.906 planning and landscape architecture. 00:06:08.939 --> 00:06:15.226 And I, one of the things that I, I think it's been really terrific has 00:06:15.259 --> 00:06:20.426 been the caliber of the people that I've been able to or was able to 00:06:20.459 --> 00:06:26.106 assemble in the college in those days. I mean, I think 00:06:26.139 --> 00:06:32.077 initially Rogers was there, but he handed along 00:06:32.110 --> 00:06:38.887 and and went on to do other things. But then I was able to hire fritz 00:06:38.920 --> 00:06:46.277 Steiner who was a spectacular Dean of Planning and then later landscape 00:06:46.310 --> 00:06:51.546 architecture and bob wolf just went on from strength to strength in the 00:06:51.579 --> 00:06:55.366 design programs and we were able to bring graphic designers set into that 00:06:55.399 --> 00:07:01.606 program. I did sort of superficial, but nonetheless important things like 00:07:01.639 --> 00:07:05.767 paying the three directors exactly the same salaries so that there would 00:07:05.800 --> 00:07:13.556 be no hierarchy in the, in the college. The other thing that was true was 00:07:13.589 --> 00:07:21.589 that although the architecture had community support and a kind of public 00:07:22.550 --> 00:07:25.687 relations sense, it didn't have much community support in the financial 00:07:25.720 --> 00:07:33.720 sense. So the two most important meetings for me in the early years of my 00:07:33.839 --> 00:07:41.839 deanship, we're one with Gary Herberger out of which came the main support 00:07:42.490 --> 00:07:47.546 group for the College Council for Design excellence. And the other was a 00:07:47.579 --> 00:07:53.587 meeting with terry Goddard, who was the mayor of phoenix. Now, Roger had 00:07:53.620 --> 00:08:01.620 done a really good job in preparing the ground with terry Goddard, but 00:08:01.639 --> 00:08:08.697 1988 there was a bond issue in phoenix and significant sums of money were 00:08:08.730 --> 00:08:13.856 made available to provide cultural facilities in phoenix. This is very 00:08:13.889 --> 00:08:20.226 much terry goddard is doing and I went to an unveiling of a piece of 00:08:20.259 --> 00:08:26.587 public art somewhere and met terry and congratulated him on the bond issue 00:08:26.620 --> 00:08:30.106 and then I said terry, how are you going to make sure that money is well 00:08:30.139 --> 00:08:35.817 spent? And he said, you got any ideas? And I said yes, when I was in 00:08:35.850 --> 00:08:42.606 Cincinnati, I was a member of the city of Cincinnati's design review board 00:08:42.639 --> 00:08:45.616 and I think it would be marvelous if we could have something like that 00:08:45.649 --> 00:08:49.967 here in phoenix. And so he said, we'll find out more about it and let me 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:55.557 know and the net result of that was that the city formed a central city 00:08:55.590 --> 00:08:59.827 architecture review panel, always headed very wisely by a local 00:08:59.860 --> 00:09:05.276 businessman, but I was the continuing deputy head of that throughout my 00:09:05.309 --> 00:09:09.146 deanship and we were able to get some pretty good buildings, including the 00:09:09.179 --> 00:09:15.266 Burton barr library and the history building and some important cultural 00:09:15.299 --> 00:09:20.907 facilities, the phoenix art museum had a significant expansion. The 00:09:20.940 --> 00:09:26.246 science center was built and so on. And that was a little parallel to 00:09:26.279 --> 00:09:29.667 another very important thing that happened when I arrived here, which was 00:09:29.700 --> 00:09:36.506 , I got a letter from Russ nelson and he said, oh by the way, one of your 00:09:36.539 --> 00:09:41.986 jobs as dean of this college is going to be to chair the university's 00:09:42.019 --> 00:09:47.697 design review, which later on became the public Art and Design review 00:09:47.730 --> 00:09:54.356 board. Ah And so throughout my deanship, I chaired that too. And that put 00:09:54.389 --> 00:09:58.787 the school in a position to influence, not only what happened on the 00:09:58.820 --> 00:10:05.276 campus, what happened in the city and that made a huge difference to, to 00:10:05.309 --> 00:10:10.636 our morale and to uh the respect that we had and so on within the 00:10:10.669 --> 00:10:15.226 community. But you asked what was the college like? But let me go on to 00:10:15.259 --> 00:10:19.427 what I found the university to be like because I think the university and 00:10:19.460 --> 00:10:23.606 it's certainly one of the things that attracted me back in 1987 it was 00:10:23.639 --> 00:10:31.639 clearly on the rise Russ nelson. I, although he's a relatively quiet man, 00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:41.240 I read in him, somebody with a real nose for quality. Uh, and I think he 00:10:42.389 --> 00:10:49.207 initiated a whole series of things that significantly improves the quality 00:10:49.240 --> 00:10:55.006 of ASU is an enterprise. And then of course we were lucky enough to get 00:10:55.039 --> 00:11:03.039 larry Corey who completely transformed the relative evaluation of a S. U 00:11:03.639 --> 00:11:08.646 and U. Of a, certainly within the city of phoenix. 00:11:08.679 --> 00:11:12.967 And now of course we have Michael Crowe who's doing that at a national and 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:19.197 an international level. So the trajectory of the university, it was 00:11:19.230 --> 00:11:24.407 already clear to me when I arrived. I don't think it's owed to any one of 00:11:24.440 --> 00:11:28.967 these presidents, but I think they've each played a very important role in 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:32.297 driving that trajectory. 00:11:32.330 --> 00:11:39.447 And I was delighted to be a part of at least the first phase of of that of 00:11:39.480 --> 00:11:44.636 that process. The city of phoenix was doing the same thing at the same 00:11:44.669 --> 00:11:51.937 time. I mean from being a relatively minor regional center, it was 00:11:51.970 --> 00:11:59.287 gradually emerging as a, as a powerhouse. I mean it's still not there, but 00:11:59.320 --> 00:12:03.626 boy, what a difference there is today from what it was. I mean, I remember 00:12:03.659 --> 00:12:08.776 going to the Arizona theater and the performances were held in phoenix 00:12:08.809 --> 00:12:11.957 college, 00:12:11.990 --> 00:12:19.687 There was no equity theater in the valley. Uh and you know, I mean all of 00:12:19.720 --> 00:12:26.776 the cultural facilities where really shoestring situation. When I arrived 00:12:26.809 --> 00:12:31.736 somewhat like Mill Avenue was, I mean when I arrived my interviews, Mill 00:12:31.769 --> 00:12:37.266 Avenue was still a state highway with five ft wide sidewalks, trucks 00:12:37.299 --> 00:12:41.287 barreling down a two lane, four lane highway in the middle of the road and 00:12:41.320 --> 00:12:46.646 smoke shops and adult book shops along the sides. I mean the the the 00:12:46.679 --> 00:12:52.037 changes are absolutely extraordinary and I think that's something that 00:12:52.070 --> 00:12:55.187 I've certainly enjoyed. And I think everybody who likes being in phoenix 00:12:55.220 --> 00:13:01.307 has to enjoy, which is this incredible pace of change. I mean this is, 00:13:01.340 --> 00:13:05.707 this is a place that's changing daily. 00:13:05.740 --> 00:13:09.697 You mentioned Jack Kinzinger when you got here, talk about some of the 00:13:09.730 --> 00:13:14.927 other provost's along the way, there were a bunch uh and I can't remember 00:13:14.960 --> 00:13:18.736 all their names, to be honest with you. Uh Jack didn't last very long, I 00:13:18.769 --> 00:13:23.077 think he was out of here before I even arrived. Elmer came in. Well, no, 00:13:23.110 --> 00:13:30.276 Elmer followed whats his name, bro, Roland Roland Hayden and then Elmer ah 00:13:30.309 --> 00:13:33.907 and then Dick Pack, 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:37.396 but the one that I loved and everybody else did of course is milk click. I 00:13:37.429 --> 00:13:44.937 mean, they milt in my book was the absolute perfect provost. I couldn't 00:13:44.970 --> 00:13:52.970 have asked for a better boss in, in any way. He was generous, kind, but 00:13:54.759 --> 00:14:02.759 very, very clear thinking. Uh new and things needed to be changed. 00:14:03.440 --> 00:14:07.407 I thought he was brilliant as a provost. Absolutely brilliant. Roland 00:14:07.440 --> 00:14:12.557 Hayden was in there and when he was an engineering, he had his Council of 00:14:12.590 --> 00:14:18.587 100 I think the Council for Engineering Excellence. And and that's where I 00:14:18.620 --> 00:14:25.707 borrowed the title from, for our Council for Design Excellence. And also 00:14:25.740 --> 00:14:31.067 we had the, what later became the Herberger Center for Design Excellence. 00:14:31.100 --> 00:14:34.606 Initially it was just the Center for Design Excellence, which we got 00:14:34.639 --> 00:14:42.639 money for from both provost and the border regions. Ah I had realized that 00:14:43.409 --> 00:14:49.827 a professional school has a real problem in that it is a natural tendency 00:14:49.860 --> 00:14:54.907 for it to think that it just needs to teach the current state of the art, 00:14:54.940 --> 00:15:01.567 of whatever the art was business medicine teaching, whatever. And that 00:15:01.600 --> 00:15:05.667 what was absolutely essential in a major research university is that the 00:15:05.700 --> 00:15:11.116 faculty do research uh and that you actually take a critical position 00:15:11.149 --> 00:15:16.256 relative to current practice, but you can't really do that if all you're 00:15:16.289 --> 00:15:19.297 doing in school is teaching. 00:15:19.330 --> 00:15:24.407 Uh And there was a natural tendency in architecture schools, particularly 00:15:24.440 --> 00:15:29.876 for people to say, well, I teach and I practice and that's it. Ah, so I 00:15:29.909 --> 00:15:33.896 felt it was absolutely essential that we have some institution within the 00:15:33.929 --> 00:15:40.217 institution that could provide the necessary support and incentive for 00:15:40.250 --> 00:15:45.866 faculty to do research to publish their research to bring like minded 00:15:45.899 --> 00:15:53.167 researchers back here and so on. And so the, the Herberger Herberger 00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:57.476 Center for Design Excellence was never meant to be. And this is something 00:15:57.509 --> 00:16:03.356 that I not been very successful in persuading subsequent Dean's was never 00:16:03.389 --> 00:16:09.366 meant to be the place where a handful of research oriented faculty did 00:16:09.399 --> 00:16:15.207 their research. And all it simply did was help them go out and get grants. 00:16:15.240 --> 00:16:19.996 That's not what that was meant to be. It was certainly that, but much, 00:16:20.029 --> 00:16:26.996 much more than that. Uh and so we established a publication, We put on a 00:16:27.029 --> 00:16:30.577 whole series of symposia, 00:16:30.610 --> 00:16:37.266 which we also published and so on. And I think it was an important thing 00:16:37.299 --> 00:16:40.907 to do. And I think it it made a big difference. One of the things we did 00:16:40.940 --> 00:16:48.596 was to put on the desert cities dinner's in in in the city where we 00:16:48.629 --> 00:16:54.077 brought internationally famous people to speak about urban issues and so 00:16:54.110 --> 00:16:59.177 on. And I was with Grady Gammage just the other day and he was regretting 00:16:59.210 --> 00:17:02.766 that those seemed to have fallen by the wayside. I think those were 00:17:02.799 --> 00:17:10.597 important events. Uh The Herberger did some important projects you want to 00:17:10.630 --> 00:17:15.016 mention him. I know you were a tv personality with the environmental 00:17:15.049 --> 00:17:18.006 showcase house. 00:17:18.039 --> 00:17:22.117 Well one of the other things I mean publication is very important but I 00:17:22.150 --> 00:17:27.546 think what is tremendously important is to be visible to be visible in the 00:17:27.579 --> 00:17:33.847 community not just as a kind of personality but to be visible because the 00:17:33.880 --> 00:17:38.687 idea is that you promote are interesting and challenging and so on. So I 00:17:38.720 --> 00:17:44.467 was really delighted to discover that K. E. T. I was actually in the 00:17:44.500 --> 00:17:49.506 building almost next door to us and 00:17:49.539 --> 00:17:54.296 I was particularly pleased when the horizon program thought it appropriate 00:17:54.329 --> 00:17:59.066 to invite me from time to time to talk about important issues in the 00:17:59.099 --> 00:18:07.099 community which I'm delighted to do. But what then happened was that a P. 00:18:07.220 --> 00:18:11.256 S. Arizona public service which is one of the two utility companies in the 00:18:11.289 --> 00:18:16.627 valley. I felt that they needed to make up some ground relative to Salt 00:18:16.660 --> 00:18:21.566 River project. And one of the ways they thought they could make up that 00:18:21.599 --> 00:18:27.976 ground was by promoting an environmental showcase home S. I. P. Had done 00:18:28.009 --> 00:18:33.006 it in the botanical gardens. And I was really infuriated when I arrived 00:18:33.039 --> 00:18:38.006 here to discover that that building had been designed in Tucson, not here. 00:18:38.039 --> 00:18:42.357 Uh anyhow, A PS decided they want to do an environmental tok summer, 00:18:42.390 --> 00:18:45.697 somewhat more ambitious project. 00:18:45.730 --> 00:18:51.276 And so we worked with them and you in fact were very important and helping 00:18:51.309 --> 00:18:54.306 to put that in place. 00:18:54.339 --> 00:18:58.437 But then the question came up, what do you do about the public relations 00:18:58.470 --> 00:19:03.207 dimension of this enterprise? It's all very well to build a house, but 00:19:03.240 --> 00:19:07.536 who's going to know about it? Who's going to see it and so on? And so A PS 00:19:07.569 --> 00:19:13.276 talked to K. T. And said we'd like to do a series about the building of 00:19:13.309 --> 00:19:17.897 this environmental showcase home. And then the question was, well who 00:19:17.930 --> 00:19:22.897 would be the anchor for that series? And and so because I had already done 00:19:22.930 --> 00:19:28.097 some things with Katie, they decided to do a sort of camera test and see 00:19:28.130 --> 00:19:32.967 whether that would work in that worked out. Okay, so we did a whole series 00:19:33.000 --> 00:19:39.046 of of videos that are still available actually uh about the building of 00:19:39.079 --> 00:19:43.187 the environment showcase home. And of course out of that also came a book 00:19:43.220 --> 00:19:49.066 that David credited, which was published by the Herberger Center. And did 00:19:49.099 --> 00:19:54.397 you run into any financial problems or other administrative problems 00:19:54.430 --> 00:20:01.506 during your yes, I mean we arrived here in 1987 00:20:01.539 --> 00:20:06.417 which was the very end of a good time. Thank goodness for me because when 00:20:06.450 --> 00:20:11.197 I arrived I got a little bit of a honeymoon gift of dowry as a dean and 00:20:11.230 --> 00:20:15.647 new dean. But almost immediately they began to take some of that back 00:20:15.680 --> 00:20:20.806 because if anybody remembers there was a really serious economic downturn 00:20:20.839 --> 00:20:26.657 from almost that time and it lasted right through to 93. So there was 00:20:26.690 --> 00:20:32.756 about six years of really hard times financially. And one of the things 00:20:32.789 --> 00:20:36.806 that I quickly learned, one of the reasons I never took a sabbatical leave 00:20:36.839 --> 00:20:41.617 while I was dean was that one of the jobs of the dean is to defend his 00:20:41.650 --> 00:20:43.806 budget 00:20:43.839 --> 00:20:51.006 because provost is inevitably looking around to see where the money can be 00:20:51.039 --> 00:20:56.006 saved. We shall do least damage to the enterprise at university. And if 00:20:56.039 --> 00:20:59.786 you're not particularly visible and if you're not particularly valued by 00:20:59.819 --> 00:21:05.816 the community, you're going to be gobbled up. And so certainly one of my 00:21:05.849 --> 00:21:10.167 jobs was to defend not only the college, but also some of the components 00:21:10.200 --> 00:21:16.657 of the college. I remember distinctly a conversation where one of the 00:21:16.690 --> 00:21:20.266 problems asked me, do you really need an interior design program? Is it 00:21:20.299 --> 00:21:24.566 really worthy of a place in a research university? And I had to mount a 00:21:24.599 --> 00:21:27.826 fairly powerful argument to say, yes, we absolutely do need an interior 00:21:27.859 --> 00:21:31.137 design program and that our spectrum of design disciplines would be 00:21:31.170 --> 00:21:36.576 completely incomplete without interior design amongst it. So, so I mean 00:21:36.609 --> 00:21:42.526 that's a very important part of the job of, of a dean. And you've not only 00:21:42.559 --> 00:21:46.607 got to go out and get money from people like Gary Herberger and his pals, 00:21:46.640 --> 00:21:50.266 but you've also got to defend the money within the university and make a 00:21:50.299 --> 00:21:56.836 strong case continuously for continued investment in your programs by the 00:21:56.869 --> 00:22:01.847 university. Well, that Counsel for Excellence that you had, there was some 00:22:01.880 --> 00:22:08.907 pretty heavy hitters as I recall. Yes, Yes. Well, I in a, the Gary Herbert 00:22:08.940 --> 00:22:14.806 uh benefit of your viewers say the name is probably very familiar, but 00:22:14.839 --> 00:22:19.076 Gary Herberger is a member of the Herberger family bob Herberger Herberger 00:22:19.109 --> 00:22:24.947 , his father, it was a man from the Midwest who used to take his winter 00:22:24.980 --> 00:22:31.967 holidays here and that's a kind of hobby. He has accumulated land, I went 00:22:32.000 --> 00:22:35.506 out and bought land 00:22:35.539 --> 00:22:40.306 a lot of the land that he bought turned out to be in and around Scottsdale 00:22:40.339 --> 00:22:48.339 Airport and became extremely valuable. So bob became a multimillionaire 00:22:48.740 --> 00:22:56.740 Gary. It was an architect uh, and had studied with frank Lloyd wright and 00:22:57.309 --> 00:23:03.107 had worked in architectural offices in the valley. But then he gradually 00:23:03.140 --> 00:23:09.306 joined his father in helping to manage this. Now increasingly valuable 00:23:09.339 --> 00:23:17.339 land resource that they had and he was appropriately and justifiably much 00:23:17.539 --> 00:23:21.796 admired in the development community here in the Valley. Hornberger family 00:23:21.829 --> 00:23:26.637 has done an awful lot of good in the, in the, in the valley here, but he 00:23:26.670 --> 00:23:30.377 had a lot of admirers amongst the developers and a lot of those developers 00:23:30.410 --> 00:23:36.707 joined him in supporting the college and so we had about 30 40,000, 00:23:36.740 --> 00:23:42.167 $50,000 a year to play with. One of the things that's important about 00:23:42.200 --> 00:23:45.496 money is that it's all very well to go out and get a big lump of money to 00:23:45.529 --> 00:23:50.437 put in an endowment, but it doesn't do much good at 4%. You've got to have 00:23:50.470 --> 00:23:57.026 money to spend as well. And so one of the real assets that I had as a dean 00:23:57.059 --> 00:24:01.687 is that I was given complete autonomy in handling the money from the 00:24:01.720 --> 00:24:05.826 Council for Design Excellence. And so faculty member could come into my 00:24:05.859 --> 00:24:09.947 office with a good idea and walk out with a commitment for some money to 00:24:09.980 --> 00:24:14.107 support that idea and I didn't have to talk to anybody else about that. 00:24:14.140 --> 00:24:19.407 You came here. I think just about the time the new north building was 00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:25.637 approved and appropriated. The north building was in working drawings and 00:24:25.670 --> 00:24:28.667 of course that had been achieved by roger slants and I said, I would talk 00:24:28.700 --> 00:24:33.407 about him and I really should mention Roger was a spectacular director of 00:24:33.440 --> 00:24:36.887 the School of Architecture. He did an enormous amount of good and he 00:24:36.920 --> 00:24:40.907 certainly laid the groundwork for what we were able to do with the design 00:24:40.940 --> 00:24:47.016 review committee and so on. But he had persuaded Russ nelson that we 00:24:47.049 --> 00:24:50.306 needed to have very good architects and we needed to have design 00:24:50.339 --> 00:24:56.776 competitions, uh, to Tuesday's good architects, but anyhow, I know you 00:24:56.809 --> 00:24:59.816 want to draw attention to the fact that it was the local professional 00:24:59.849 --> 00:25:03.006 community that 00:25:03.039 --> 00:25:08.867 established a high priority for a new building for, for our college. Uh, 00:25:08.900 --> 00:25:15.607 and they certainly are owed a great deal of credit for that. But we did 00:25:15.640 --> 00:25:20.607 get this new building and the building had been designed by Alan 00:25:20.640 --> 00:25:27.506 Czerniakow, who had been a teacher at Princeton along with Michael Graves. 00:25:27.539 --> 00:25:32.427 And it's a building of a particular time. It's what we call it, a 00:25:32.460 --> 00:25:37.637 postmodern building. Uh, not particularly popular amongst architects to 00:25:37.670 --> 00:25:41.607 students these days, but still, I think pretty good building, 00:25:41.640 --> 00:25:47.836 but I was able to change a few things, but not anything very much before 00:25:47.869 --> 00:25:51.397 the building was built. All right. The most important thing I changed was 00:25:51.430 --> 00:25:57.437 to move the cafe from the bridge to its current location where it's become 00:25:57.470 --> 00:26:01.336 a very successful and very popular cafe. And we saved the bridge for other 00:26:01.369 --> 00:26:08.937 important things. And you had the idea for the Oculus over the patio. You 00:26:08.970 --> 00:26:16.970 put that on me. Okay. David was a wonderful associate dean for a while and 00:26:17.440 --> 00:26:21.207 did wonderful things with our buildings on campus. You worked with other 00:26:21.240 --> 00:26:27.836 administrators, Deans, anyone of them that any of them that he would 00:26:27.869 --> 00:26:35.506 comment on, that helped you. And let's say, I'll be honest with you. Uh, 00:26:35.539 --> 00:26:40.806 one of the things about being a dean is that it's a very lonely position. 00:26:40.839 --> 00:26:47.816 Uh, you, you only have a dozen peers and they have their own 00:26:47.849 --> 00:26:49.907 responsibilities. 00:26:49.940 --> 00:26:55.076 You have two bosses, the provost and the president and then you have a lot 00:26:55.109 --> 00:26:58.306 of people who are scared of you. 00:26:58.339 --> 00:27:03.316 And that's not a very easy position to be in. And it's certainly something 00:27:03.349 --> 00:27:06.857 I hadn't realized how challenging it was until I finally stopped doing it 00:27:06.890 --> 00:27:12.207 and found that life was a lot pleasanter after stopping being a dean. Uh, 00:27:12.240 --> 00:27:16.246 no, I mean, I admired many of the other deans, but I can't say that any, 00:27:16.279 --> 00:27:21.907 any of them are, I became particularly closely with the possible 00:27:21.940 --> 00:27:29.940 possible exception of ted Humphrey who had established the honest college 00:27:30.240 --> 00:27:36.546 and I continue to be friends with him and, and I admire enormously what he 00:27:36.579 --> 00:27:39.566 put in place there, which I think has made a huge difference to this 00:27:39.599 --> 00:27:45.427 university. You've done travel, you've had your own interests and research. 00:27:45.460 --> 00:27:50.187 It seemed like desert cities was something you did want to talk about any 00:27:50.220 --> 00:27:54.107 of those travels. 00:27:54.140 --> 00:28:00.437 One of the things that is a continuing issue, both for our college and in 00:28:00.470 --> 00:28:05.907 the community is the question, what do we do about our climate here? I 00:28:05.940 --> 00:28:12.417 mean, this is a desert climate. We're we're in a desert here and the 00:28:12.450 --> 00:28:18.056 college long before I came here had a long history of people like john 00:28:18.089 --> 00:28:24.467 gelatin and others, uh, of, of trying to do research that address those 00:28:24.500 --> 00:28:32.417 issues. Um when I came to phoenix, uh there were a group of people around 00:28:32.450 --> 00:28:38.697 terry goddard in the mayor's office who were also very interested in the 00:28:38.730 --> 00:28:44.576 idea of phoenix as a desert city. And I got very involved with them and we 00:28:44.609 --> 00:28:48.957 were going to put what we call the desert oasis in the middle of downtown 00:28:48.990 --> 00:28:55.137 and we got a little bit of that done, but not much. Um but that never left 00:28:55.170 --> 00:29:00.657 me. It was always a big concern for me. And so whatever opportunity I had 00:29:00.690 --> 00:29:07.407 to talk publicly about our responsibility as a desert city I took. 00:29:07.440 --> 00:29:13.857 But I was very, very fortunate when I came to the end of my deanship, Milk 00:29:13.890 --> 00:29:19.177 click was very generous and gave me a full year sabbatical leave at full 00:29:19.210 --> 00:29:25.056 dien li pei. Uh and as I said, I had not thought it appropriate to take a 00:29:25.089 --> 00:29:28.246 sabbatical leave while I was doing because I was so scared what might 00:29:28.279 --> 00:29:33.467 happen to the college if I was away, but I decided to spend that 00:29:33.500 --> 00:29:37.367 sabbatical leave traveling around the world, 00:29:37.400 --> 00:29:41.717 visiting desert cities all over the world, particularly the older pre 00:29:41.750 --> 00:29:48.806 industrial desert cities to gather an array of ideas that might be 00:29:48.839 --> 00:29:52.707 valuable as one 00:29:52.740 --> 00:30:00.740 continue to consider the case for desert urbanism. So I traveled to Iran 00:30:01.369 --> 00:30:09.369 and to the Yemen and to India and to Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco and to 00:30:11.869 --> 00:30:18.806 chile and peru and Australia and all of those places and I was filming 00:30:18.839 --> 00:30:25.187 most of the time while I was away. My original idea was to try and lay the 00:30:25.220 --> 00:30:32.226 groundwork for doing a series for public television and unhappily that 00:30:32.259 --> 00:30:38.127 never quite occurred. But what did happen was that many of the films that 00:30:38.160 --> 00:30:42.107 money, much of the film that I'd taken while I was on my travels, I was 00:30:42.140 --> 00:30:48.986 able to edit into some short films that insight media decided to market. 00:30:49.019 --> 00:30:53.036 So those were marketed for quite a few years and I used to get a nice 00:30:53.069 --> 00:30:57.546 little royalty check every night again for those. But what did emerge from 00:30:57.579 --> 00:31:03.437 that is a couple of book chapters on making desert cities, one of which 00:31:03.470 --> 00:31:10.516 was published by the University of New Mexico. And then another one was a 00:31:10.549 --> 00:31:15.597 chapter in a book which was put together by David P africa uh, from the 00:31:15.630 --> 00:31:21.006 course that he taught here. Uh huh. But yes, desert cities have been a 00:31:21.039 --> 00:31:26.036 desert urbanism and urbanism generally has been a subject of great concern 00:31:26.069 --> 00:31:30.786 to me. But more recently 00:31:30.819 --> 00:31:34.967 I've been, I took a second sabbatical leave, awful lot of reading in 00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:41.927 Cambridge and here. And I've been working on some theoretical ideas about 00:31:41.960 --> 00:31:47.066 the necessity for intricacy and architecture and urbanism. Well, you've 00:31:47.099 --> 00:31:50.607 certainly done a lot for 00:31:50.640 --> 00:31:57.816 the university and I'd say the college uh, since you stepped down as Dean. 00:31:57.849 --> 00:32:02.476 What's been happening? Well, obviously a lot has happened to the college 00:32:02.509 --> 00:32:07.687 , including its merger into the Herberger Institute 00:32:07.720 --> 00:32:10.207 I think 00:32:10.240 --> 00:32:15.306 my successor is Dean, I think did extremely well and 00:32:15.339 --> 00:32:20.756 the guy we call Duke writer, Wellington writer unfortunately didn't stay 00:32:20.789 --> 00:32:25.417 very long and, and I think he got a lot of things going. It would, it 00:32:25.450 --> 00:32:28.607 would have been nice to have seen 00:32:28.640 --> 00:32:32.776 mature a little. And certainly one of the things he got going was the 00:32:32.809 --> 00:32:39.476 phoenix urban research lab, which was the successor to the joints urban 00:32:39.509 --> 00:32:44.847 design studio that our cameraman john McIntosh headed up for many years, a 00:32:44.880 --> 00:32:50.806 really important arm of what we, we did it in the college, 00:32:50.839 --> 00:32:53.107 but 00:32:53.140 --> 00:32:58.177 let's just deal with the negatives First, I think the Duke unfortunately 00:32:58.210 --> 00:33:05.766 went on to Chicago the economic crisis occurred. The college was absorbed 00:33:05.799 --> 00:33:13.799 into the Herberger Institute, our enormous number of cuts of all kinds 00:33:14.640 --> 00:33:22.640 and I think we are still reeling under the negative impact of all of that. 00:33:22.740 --> 00:33:24.740 Although in principle, I think the idea of an institute that includes both 00:33:29.619 --> 00:33:34.076 all of the creative arts as well as the design disciplines is in fact a 00:33:34.109 --> 00:33:38.717 very attractive idea. But at this point it's no more than an idea. It has 00:33:38.750 --> 00:33:44.336 not been in any way really realized. Hopefully that will happen in in in, 00:33:44.369 --> 00:33:52.266 in in the future. From a purely personal point of view, I have discovered 00:33:52.299 --> 00:33:55.357 a whole new career, 00:33:55.390 --> 00:34:00.336 I have thoroughly enjoyed being a young faculty member teaching 00:34:00.369 --> 00:34:05.217 architecture at Cambridge, but when I went to Cincinnati and then on to 00:34:05.250 --> 00:34:12.017 here, I was an administrator and uh moved further and further away from a 00:34:12.050 --> 00:34:15.097 direct interaction with the students, although I had always taught a great 00:34:15.130 --> 00:34:21.247 big introductory survey course. Um but when I came back after my 00:34:21.280 --> 00:34:25.796 sabbatical leave and started teaching in the design studio, I discovered 00:34:25.829 --> 00:34:32.217 rediscovered an incredible sense of fulfillment of being involved in 00:34:32.250 --> 00:34:34.856 teaching design. 00:34:34.889 --> 00:34:41.606 And it so happens that we have a rather important and and emerging lee 00:34:41.639 --> 00:34:47.307 even more important set of programs in the college now 00:34:47.340 --> 00:34:51.006 which we call the three plus programs, they're called three plus because 00:34:51.039 --> 00:34:59.039 it takes three and a bit years for us to mature a qualified designer, 00:35:01.239 --> 00:35:05.186 whether an architecture or landscape architecture, interior design, 00:35:05.219 --> 00:35:09.296 industrial design, whatever it may be, The students who come into that 00:35:09.329 --> 00:35:16.077 program come from all over the country with previous degrees in all kinds 00:35:16.110 --> 00:35:21.836 of different areas. Just yesterday we were looking at student work from 00:35:21.869 --> 00:35:27.017 students, out of mathematics, out of business, out of interior design and 00:35:27.050 --> 00:35:35.050 so on. And I have found teaching those mature young students mature and 00:35:35.349 --> 00:35:38.336 young in the sense that they're in their mid to late twenties, many of 00:35:38.369 --> 00:35:45.847 them has been incredibly rewarding. The learning curve is unbelievably 00:35:45.880 --> 00:35:51.896 steep and the sense of achievement that is available to a teacher is is 00:35:51.929 --> 00:35:57.267 huge and I loved that. And then the opportunity to teach seminars 00:35:57.300 --> 00:36:03.256 associated with my areas of research has been also huge 00:36:03.289 --> 00:36:08.586 and rewarding pleasure. So I've discovered, rediscovered or newly 00:36:08.619 --> 00:36:15.197 discovered the enormous rewards of being a full professor, which is great 00:36:15.230 --> 00:36:22.697 thing that you Yeah, but the one thing I did want to make sure ah 00:36:22.730 --> 00:36:30.236 is the, is the incredible quality of the team that we had here. You've 00:36:30.269 --> 00:36:35.486 been kind enough on occasions to talk about it as a kind of golden age. 00:36:35.519 --> 00:36:41.046 And in many ways it certainly was that, I mean, when I think of you and 00:36:41.079 --> 00:36:45.697 john and of 00:36:45.730 --> 00:36:51.736 roger slants, hickory bus mary, kiel Beverly Brandt fritz stein. I mean, 00:36:51.769 --> 00:36:59.307 there was an incredible team of people that we're all committed in their 00:36:59.340 --> 00:37:03.776 own particular way, but but in, in in a way, they really worked together 00:37:03.809 --> 00:37:11.416 uh, to, to build a very, very strong college while I was lucky enough to 00:37:11.449 --> 00:37:16.097 be dean of it. And 00:37:16.130 --> 00:37:19.997 when I left Cincinnati, 00:37:20.030 --> 00:37:26.137 I was hugely disappointed. And how many of the things that I had, I felt I 00:37:26.170 --> 00:37:33.006 had built, there have been left to decay after I left by my successor who 00:37:33.039 --> 00:37:37.697 was not committed to their continuation, but wanted to do other things. 00:37:37.730 --> 00:37:43.267 And so I had to do a little bit of mental gymnastics to say what's really 00:37:43.300 --> 00:37:50.137 important is not what follows, but what is happening at the time and how 00:37:50.170 --> 00:37:57.896 it affects the various players, the people who were there at the time. And 00:37:57.929 --> 00:38:03.447 I was lucky enough to chair a national conference where many of the people 00:38:03.480 --> 00:38:08.526 I worked with at Cincinnati came and I realized how much pleasure I got 00:38:08.559 --> 00:38:15.396 out of their continuing success in life and so having stepped down as dean 00:38:15.429 --> 00:38:22.267 here, I was, I think wise enough not to worry too much about my legacy in 00:38:22.300 --> 00:38:26.126 the sense of the structure of the institution and things like that, but 00:38:26.159 --> 00:38:31.026 more the legacy in the sense of the continuing success of both students 00:38:31.059 --> 00:38:37.057 and the faculty who were lucky enough to be here at that time. And things 00:38:37.090 --> 00:38:44.526 like the fact that several of the dean's at Tucson came from our team 00:38:44.559 --> 00:38:48.677 hickory bus was was the dean there, bob hershberger, who was my first 00:38:48.710 --> 00:38:53.347 associate dean, became dean down there. The fact that fritz Steiner went 00:38:53.380 --> 00:38:59.086 on to be a very successful dean at Austin University of texas at Austin 00:38:59.119 --> 00:39:05.787 and one could go on and on and that's been a source of great pleasure. 00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:10.086 Well, I've always had the theory that an educational institution is only 00:39:10.119 --> 00:39:15.077 as good as the faculty and 00:39:15.110 --> 00:39:19.017 an administrator's job is to assemble the faculty to nurture the faculty 00:39:19.050 --> 00:39:24.916 and to stimulate the faculty. So if a young person is in a position to get 00:39:24.949 --> 00:39:31.677 some sense of whether there is a strong faculty in place, wherever they 00:39:31.710 --> 00:39:35.936 want to go, that's what they should be looking for. And the strong faculty 00:39:35.969 --> 00:39:42.646 is passionate faculty, somebody deeply committed to ah their own work and 00:39:42.679 --> 00:39:47.387 the work of those around them. And 00:39:47.420 --> 00:39:51.787 if you can sense that it's a marvelous institution, but if there's 00:39:51.820 --> 00:39:56.977 discontent and unhappiness and jealousy and all those other things then I 00:39:57.010 --> 00:39:59.887 want nothing to do with it. 00:39:59.920 --> 00:40:03.677 So you're recommending Cambridge, 00:40:03.710 --> 00:40:11.477 Cambridge has a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage. Uh It's 00:40:11.510 --> 00:40:17.436 very very old. I think they just had their 8/100 anniversary and it's been 00:40:17.469 --> 00:40:22.276 throughout those 800 years, one of the major universities in the world. 00:40:22.309 --> 00:40:27.736 And so it has a kind of momentum that 00:40:27.769 --> 00:40:35.546 is unstoppable. It will always attract very talented people. Um I think 00:40:35.579 --> 00:40:41.557 ASU is not anything like that situation. It certainly has momentum but 00:40:41.590 --> 00:40:47.686 that momentum doesn't have the kind of inertia that that place like 00:40:47.719 --> 00:40:52.876 Cambridge has. It could slip back very quickly and very easily uh huh to 00:40:52.909 --> 00:41:00.276 being a minor provincial institution. And 00:41:00.309 --> 00:41:06.177 but I, you know, I certainly sense the continued upward trajectory for A. 00:41:06.210 --> 00:41:13.876 S. U. And and it clearly has extremely strong leadership right now. And so 00:41:13.909 --> 00:41:19.477 I think this remains a very, very attractive place 00:41:19.510 --> 00:41:24.356 for all kinds of reasons. John I want to thank you for your service to 00:41:24.389 --> 00:41:30.489 Arizona State University and the college. Thank you. Thank youjohn