I’m part of a research group internationally. I have been very involved in the Salt Lake City Planning Commission for seven years now and have been chair. I’ve been in the Utah Women’s Forum and continue to be involved in the Girl Scouts of Utah. I get a lot of personal travel in, and that’s exciting, too. What are you most proud of? I’m really most proud of my children. I have two beautiful daughters, and they are both accomplished in their own ways. I’m proud that they think of me as an accomplished mom. I think I set a tone for them that said, like my dad said to me, “You can be what you want to be.” That doesn’t mean that you have to be in charge of everything. It means that you can be what you want to be, which I think is a very important message to send to women. I’m proud that I was able to be a role model for women architects in Utah. We started out not having a lot of architecture students who were women. Dean Miller had worked hard on that issue, but it still, I think, helped to have a role model in place there. I was a very visible architect in the city as somebody who was leading the school. I’m also proud of what I accomplished at the university: the number of programs that were introduced and increasing the ability of students to study lots of new, different things. It’s important not only for the students, it’s also important for the state of Utah to have those resources available. I’m proud of my research work. I have done a lot of research on urban morphology, which is the study of the history of cities. I’ve written 40 or 50 papers, I’ve done three books, and I have written a great article about Salt Lake City. Locally, people don’t know much about this part of my work, but internationally, that’s how I am known. A lot of my work is groundbreaking, theoretical and highly cited. That’s the academic measure that people use. Any disappointments? I would have liked to have been an architect in the sense of being able to design buildings. I did a little bit of it, but I did it in partnership with people who really did most of the work. I regret that I didn’t have that chance. I never thought I was very good at design until much later in my career when I actually found out that I was really good at design. Going back to my initial introduction to architecture school, where I was actually discouraged, I never realized that I could do that. How has architecture evolved since you began practicing? I think the evolution of practice has been really devoted to more and more computer-aided activities, which is kind of disappointing — not that it’s not great to have computers. It does cut out some of the grunt work. On the other hand, I’ve never noticed that it’s actually taken less time to do anything. Hopefully, it’s more accurate and more collaborative. Unfortunately, I think computer drawing has influenced architecture schools and the profession. Students don’t really know how to draw anymore or think with their hands as much because they’re going instantly from some little diagram right into the computer. The computer makes everything look beautiful, and everyone expects their drawing to be beautiful right from the very beginning. I remember going to a conference not too long ago. A person was showing the urban design work of her students, and I said, “It’s very clear to me that your students know how to design an infographic, but do they know how to design a street?” The infographics were amazing; everything you could possibly want to know about that area was beautifully and graphically presented. I think we lose something when everything has to be perfect immediately when you can’t just rip and tear up a model or sketch something a hundred times. Maybe we’ll be coming back to that more because the computer now allows you to sketch in it. I carry around an iPad and a pencil that I can sketch in, so even I don’t carry around a sketchbook anymore. It is the desire to be perfect right out of the bag that I think hurts the architect and the development of a design. So, I don’t think we see as much creativity as we could in architecture. Advice for young architects? I think the best advice I can give is to travel, to go to concerts, to get out of the architecture mindset and into the cultural mindset, so you are not just stuck doing architecture things in architecture courses. Go to the museum, look at art, talk about art and read all kinds of different things. So, I think the biggest advice I can give to architecture students is to aspire to be the Renaissance person. Bath House, Woodlawn, Ohio, with David Scheer Plan for the redevelopment of Fairborn, Ohio, with David Scheer Plan for redevelopment of central Bucharest, competition entry 13
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