LEGENDS William Miller is a Professor Emeritus/Former Dean of Architecture and an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor. He talked to Fran Pruyn about his career, his time teaching, and his thoughts about architectural evolution in education. When did you first decide that architecture was for you? In grade school and high school. I grew up in Sacramento and, in 1948, we moved out to the East Side where all the postwar development was occurring. One day, a piano store moved in near my house. In the early 50s, pianos came in plywood boxes that were 4’x4’x8’. My friends and I asked, “Could we have those boxes?” They said, “Yeah, we don’t need them.” We hauled them to my house and made a town with them and an old Army Signal Corps building from an Army depot. There was this little enclave of buildings we developed. Then in high school, I started taking art and mechanical drawing and really enjoyed that. We had some family friends who were architects and I talked to them about the profession. When I graduated from high school, like most of my peers, I applied to three schools. We didn’t apply to Berkeley because none of us had the GPA to get in. We didn’t apply to USC because it was an expensive school. And we didn’t apply to Cal Poly Pomona because it was a huge school. I applied to Oregon, Utah, and Washington. I got accepted at all three, but I chose Oregon because a number of the architects I talked to who had gone to Oregon recommended it. That was a really good choice. First, Oregon had a non-graded design system: you either received a pass or a no-pass. That was great because it encouraged risk taking and experimentation. You could go out on a limb with your design and fall flat on your nose and not fail necessarily. That was very positive. The second thing was that Donlyn Lyndon, who was at Berkeley and was a principal at Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, became Department Head. Lyndon brought a whole range of new, young, very exciting, dynamic faculty, who were amazing. He belonged to a group, called something like “Architects Concerned for the Environment.” He had a symposium, and a group of people that came to the campus for a week. It included Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Stanford Anderson, and Henry Millon. The first day there were design reviews, and a number of us were chosen to review our work. It was probably the most eviscerating review that I ever had. We had rough reviews at Oregon, but this was like, “Oh my God,” we were all stumbling around. Then every night they had lectures by the people who were there. The person would lecture and then there was a question-andanswer period. They were eviscerated too. “Oh, okay. I got it.” The issue is that architecture is about ideas and how you convey them. That week rendered the school inoperative for the next couple of weeks because we were all blown away. It was a mindexpanding activity. Because of that, I thought that I might be interested in teaching. William Miller, FAIA INTERVIEWED BY FRAN PRUYN, CPSM 22 REFLEXION
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