do a few buildings and work on many urban design projects around Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. I became a more experienced professor. After about 12 years, I was ready for a leadership position. I interviewed at the University of Utah for the dean position, which was unusual because I hadn’t been a department chair, but it felt really right to be there. My experience as an urban planner was one of the things that made me a good candidate for dean. It was a small department: There were 12 faculty members and 180 students, and it was in a giant building. Faculty and students were spread out. As soon as I came, I wanted to build an urban planning program. It turned out there was an urban planning degree program in geography with one professor. With his blessing, we moved that program and renamed the Graduate School of Architecture to the College of Architecture and Planning, which was very pretentious because it really wasn’t that yet. The urban planning program blossomed over the next five or six years and gained national recognition. The architecture faculty was really supportive. They taught some of the classes and sat on all the hiring committees. We hired some of the best urban planning professors in the country. It was a very collaborative experience for everybody. The department had been very well run by Bill Miller, who had lots of great connections with local architects. But, beyond the architectural community, it was largely unseen in the general community. I encouraged the faculty to become more involved beyond the architectural community, such as the art community and the planning community. I sat on the board of five or six organizations like Envision Utah and Art Space and encouraged the faculty to do the same. They were on the Preservation Utah Board, the UTA Board, the Redevelopment Advisory Committee and so forth. We reached out and became much more widely known in the community. We also encouraged the students to get involved. We emphasized architecture as something that has a tremendous contribution to make in the community. How long were you at the University of Utah? Nineteen years. I was dean for 11 years. I continued on in the faculty for another eight years. The place had changed tremendously. We went from 12 to 25 faculty members. We had 184 students, and now I think they have 700 students. We added the Master of Urban Planning, a Bachelor of Urban Ecology, a historic preservation certificate and the Real Estate Development Program in partnership with the business school. The most important addition probably was the Multidisciplinary Design Program. This is one of the great accomplishments in my life — introducing all of these interesting programs, trying to make them work together, turning the college into a real college with multiple departments and giving students in Utah the opportunity to do things that they had never had the opportunity to do. Many of the urban planners that I work with today were products of the U’s Urban Planning Program. I am so proud of them because they have the chance to have those extremely meaningful jobs. Many go almost straight from their master’s degree into being the town planner. Utah had no resources like that before I became dean, and the faculty and I put that program together. Likewise, for the design program, there was a tremendous demand for it. Now, it turns students away in droves. It’s something that captured everyone’s attention since the rise of the internet and social media. The design program was also developed to be a community resource. One of the first projects that we did was designing a prosthetic for people in places without access to high-tech prosthetics; so, we did low-tech prosthetic limbs. We had partnerships with the medical school, with the business school and with economics. We had some really good leaders coming up, and so I stepped down as dean after 11 years and went back to the faculty. I did a lot more writing, got back to my research work and focused on my community volunteer work. I also did some travel and taught in South Korea in a program we had at the U. Then you retired? I’m retired now, but I’m not really retired. I’m still on the board of several organizations. I have been writing. I have published a number of papers. I organized a big international conference. City Centre, Terre Haute, Indiana, with David Scheer Diagram of urban elements, from ”The Epistemology of Urban Morphology” 12 REFLEXION
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