While I was in school, I worked for a one-person firm in Sacramento during the summers. I graduated in 1968 and went back to Sacramento and started work for a different firm, Dean Unger and Associates. I worked there for a while and then decided I wanted to go to graduate school. Where did you go? To the University of Illinois. I got a teaching assistantship. It essentially paid for my whole education there. Illinois was a much different environment from Oregon. Oregon was risktaking, experimental. Illinois had a very strong tradition of producing and representing your work with a high level of craft. The discipline was a nice balance for me from Oregon. When I decided I’d try teaching, I sent out about 70 letters and got some rejections. Then one day my wife, Beverly, called and said, “Oh, you have a telegram from the University of Arizona.” The Dean sent me a telegram saying, “Would you consider a teaching position at Arizona for this much a year? Please respond.” This was 1970. I hadn’t even interviewed. He just sent me the telegram and we went. When I got to the Arizona campus, most of my faculty colleagues had two schools in common, Oregon and Illinois, and the dean had been dean in Oregon. So, yeah, it was the old boys’ thing, before affirmative action. Did you teach and practice simultaneously? Most of the faculty had small practices, but at the first university breakfast I went to the university president said, “at Arizona, we publish and prosper”. I thought, “If I’m going to publish and not practice, what do I know that I could publish about?” When I was at Oregon they had a faculty lecture series. There were two lectures on Finnish architecture, and I saw Aalto’s work and thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” During my fifth year I did an independent study on Aalto. When I got to Arizona, I thought, “Well, I do know about that” and started developing articles on Aalto. My wife was also a teacher, so we went to Europe for the entire summer. We spent a third of the time in the Nordic countries, including several weeks in Finland. By that time, I had gotten more than enough visual material that I could say, “Okay, I’m writing articles, but I’m going to put out a letter to schools to see if they would want a lecture on Aalto.” Several schools responded, and I started lecturing. So, I had publishing and I had lecturing. Then I decided I need to be registered. I always wanted to get registered even as an academic, because I figured it was only way that I could prove to the professional community that I had standing. Being a member of AIA also reinforces that to the professional community. One of my colleagues had a friend who was a principal in a firm in San Francisco, a joint venture: Enteleki and The Design Company. Enteleki was a Salt Lake-based firm — Jack Smith, Frank Ferguson and Ray Kingston were all partners. They would come back and forth from Sun Valley and Salt Lake to San Francisco. I spent a year in San Francisco practicing full time. After that, I went back to Tucson for the next three years to teach studio and history theory courses. What did you apply from your time practicing to your teaching? I wanted to practice because you really need that experience to bring into the classroom. Students aren’t necessarily thinking about palpable things: How does a structure stand? How does it keep the rain off itself? And a whole range of very practical, straightforward things that buildings are all about. Teaching was setting up situations where you could impart that understanding to students and could begin to deal with those issues. Also, there were three of us who were engaged in a research design project funded by the University of Arizona. They funded us to do schematic studies for an animal research facility. We looked at how to deal with animals, but also, more importantly, how to make it a sustainable complex. The study developed a design for the complex which included environmental, solar and air movement studies: concepts that focused on sustainability. It was never built, but it was one that the university touted to try to 23
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