Dean’s Blog Blog 1 - Fall 09
September 10, 2009
The following notes were part of my address to the TSA Community at our first All School Meeting of the year.
WELCOME EVERYONE!
There is good news on several fronts.
We don’t have a hurricane and Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is here along with his entire leadership team from DC - both very good news indeed for New Orleans. President Obama appointed Donovan, and he has now been to New Orleans three times - visiting us more than any other city since the new administration took office, and visiting our great but damaged city perhaps more than any other administration in history (even within only eight short months since the new president took office). And he is the first architecture graduate to serve as HUD Secretary. This should hold special significance to us even if he went to an obscure school in Cambridge, Massachusetts and not Tulane.
I mention this in part because Byron Mouton, Emilie Taylor and several students spent a few hours recently taking them on a tour of our URBANbuild houses in Central City and the Hollygrove Growers and Farmers Market, a project of our amazing Tulane City Center. I am so proud of the work that faculty, students and staff have done on those projects, and they were very impressed.
Some personal reflections:
It is an honor to be here. I had looked at and had been offered several deanships over the past ten years. I am very glad I waited. Tulane School of Architecture is a special place, Tulane University is remarkably well positioned to build on its current level of excellence, and the City of New Orleans is unlike any other city in the country. Despite our small size, Tulane School of Architecture is a major player in the university and community - through individual efforts and involvement of students and faculty and through institutional engagement as well.
- TRUDC - Grover Mouton, Nick Jenisch and many students
- Preservation - Gene Cizek, Assistant Director Ann Masson and their colleagues and students in the MPS program.
- Tulane City Center - Scott Bernhard as director, Dan Etheridge as assistant director, Emilie Taylor as a full time staff member - and a very long list of faculty, staff, and students who have been involved with their exciting work over the past four years. Scott will be lecturing on the remarkable legacy of the Tulane City Center as the first lecture of our new year.
A few other announcements:
The Building - Sam Richards, Ian Daniels, Nick Chan, and Derek Buckley made amazing progress this summer. I am so grateful for all of their work, and others from the staff have contributed as well including Francine Stock, Dave Armentor, and Victor Garcia to name a few. We all need to be grateful and more importantly to be invested in taking care of this place as best we can. It is called stewardship, and I am hoping that everyone will do their part in creating and sustaining our own immediate working environment.
Digital Technologies - I issued what I called a Good News memo on August 1, and I updated it recently with late-breaking news. We made some recent progress even since August 1, and we will continue to work on a robust system.
I have spoken with student leaders already about piracy. The short message: It has to stop immediately. If you have pirated software, get rid of it. If you are ever tempted to pirate software (or movies or games or music), don’t do it. It is illegal and unethical. It is theft of intellectual property. I will be discussing this more with student leaders and student groups, but for now you have to understand that it is absolutely unacceptable and detrimental to the very foundation of the profession that you hope to join. Architects deal in intellectual property and you wouldn’t want people stealing your work either.
My First year - watching, listening, beginning, some impressions:
- Impressed with student self-governance at TSA. Student leaders here are strong, clear, and effective in representing all of you. It was an absolute pleasure to work with this talented group last year, and I’m looking forward to this year even more, because last year’s group trained me well!
- Impressed with the student lectures we heard last year - and we have a great line up in the fall and spring coming out of this summer travel fellowship winners!
- Impressed with the dedication of faculty and staff in supporting and encouraging the ambitions of our students.
- Gratified by the response I have received from the various initiatives that I have pushed already, including dramatically increased communications in many forms, funding for some key incentives to advance the school (among faculty and students), and my work in focusing the curriculum in support of excellence in design, engagement with sustainability, engagement with our community, and my encouragement for us to embrace change.
I am very excited about the progress we have made and the signal this sends about where we are heading. But it’s not just me. This is a collaborative effort involving a lot of very thoughtful, talented, and dedicated people.
This year and beyond
I see and feel a real sense of excitement in the building and in the air surrounding the arrival of three new full-time colleagues this fall along with Marcella Del Signore and Judith Kinnard who arrived last year. You have all seen their impressive bios in the announcement I sent around with great pride earlier this summer, and they also appear in the first edition of the TSA NEWS.
Tiffany Lin, most recently from Boston, but also from Ithaca, Miami, and she was born in Tiapei, Taiwan. She has even lived in Manhattan, New York AND Manhattan, Kansas.
Scott Ruff, most recently from Syracuse, but also from Hampton, Virginia, Ithaca, New York and born in Buffalo.
Kentaro Tsubaki, most recently from Lubbock Texas, and before that New York City, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and born in Kyoto Japan.
I also want to congratulate three current colleagues who have been promoted to professors of practice.
Cordula Roser Gray
Irene Keil
Coleman Coker - on leave this year teaching as a visitor at the University of Texas Austin.
Reflections on Architectural Education
I was looking for a good word to capture some of the essence that I see in architectural education, and I think I found a good one:
TRANSPARENCY - I have had many conversations over the years with one of my former colleagues, WG Clark, on this topic, both of us trying to tease out the implications that this term holds for a school of architecture. It is not only a literal term, and a subject of remarkable analytical insights by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in the 1950’s. It became an amazing tool for design as it played out at several schools of architecture over the sixties and seventies and is still used today - literal and phenomenal transparency that is. I am MORE interested in the word as a trope to better understand the wonder and magic of what we do in design education at TSA. There are really four aspects that I’d like to highlight:
1. As a way to introduce the wonder of design education to others who have no idea what it means - visiting students and parents for example. As a term, it startles the uninitiated. When we explain its significance, it can galvanize understanding about a completely different world that we inhabit. It’s about an education that is OPEN, where everyone sees everyone else’s work in the design studio, where ideas are shared, where the education is fundamentally collaborative and available to all.
2. Student work itself is part of an individualized conversation between student and faculty member, with constant and transparent input at every step of the design process. Whereas students in the humanities or sciences might do a paper or project and hand it in for a grade, our education is iterative and interactive. It is cyclical and often unpredictable. One discovers through design, and students learn by doing and making.
3. Reviews - every student presents her or his ideas repeatedly, and reviews are OPEN to discussion, debate, and criticism. Students develop remarkable skills of graphic and oral presentation to explain their ideas.
4. Finally, transparency to me also implies responsibility. When issues are openly discussed and debated, students and faculty are responsible for the constructive interaction that leads to a healthy education, to mentorship, and to great work. We are a commonwealth with shared responsibilities.
A few quick ANNOUNCEMENTS and a few closing remarks.
Monday, August 31- NOON Room 204 Visual Resources Presentation by Francine Stock, ONLINE AND IN THE CLASSROOM, everything you need to know
Reception at 5:00 PM ON MONDAY prior to Scott Bernhard’s lecture at 6:00 PM thanks to Wendy Sack and the wonderful dean’s office staff!
Monday, August 31 - 6:00 PM Scott Bernhard and the Tulane City Center legacy!
Monday, September 15 - Michael Maltzan from LA, the Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Lecture
Friday, September 25 @ NOON - Sarah Cloonan, the first Malcolm Heard Travel Fellowship winner and lecturer, coming back from Columbia where she is now pursing an advanced master’s degree atop her
M. Arch I here.
October 5 - Bob Hale of Rios Clemente Hale Architects in LA and Architects Week (Oct 2-9, final jury on
October 9) with a big party including Homecoming.
Thursday, October 8 - reception with TSA Board of Advisors at 5:00 PM!
Monday, October 12 - Errol Barron, back from his amazingly productive sabbatical (you’ll see) with a talk entitled The Architecture of Drawing.
Friday/Saturday, October 23, 24 - New Orleans Under Reconstruction Conference headed up by Professor Carol Reese.
Others beyond will be announced via email and on our digital screen!
For me, on a personal level, this has been a beginning of an important journey - working closely with a remarkably resilient and dedicated faculty and students. I feel a sense of privilege to be here, and I know that with privilege comes responsibility. We will be learning together, and I feel a palpable sense of excitement about the opportunities ahead.
Last year I left you with two brief quotes from one of the heroes of my youth, Robert F Kennedy. It has been interesting to see how Senator Edward Kennedy’s career in many ways ended up realizing much of the ambition and dreams that his brother so poignantly articulated during his lifetime - with over 2500 bills, many working to combat poverty, discrimination, and injustice, and thereby making this a much better nation in the process for all of us.
This year I’d like to reference another hero or I should say heroes of mine.
Auburn University recently lost one of its most respected and loved faculty members. Probably very few of you know who DK Ruth was. In addition to his many years of dedicated and inspiring teaching (noble in its own right), he was the co-founder and close friend of Sam Mockbee in creating and sustaining the Rural Studio. I’ve been thinking a lot about DK since I learned of his death. He worked quietly, never wishing to be showered with praise or national attention. He just did good and important work for many years, and he made a very big impact. So my two heroes here are Sam Mockbee and DK Ruth, and here is a brief passage from an article in METROPOLIS Magazine by DK after Sam died.
“Time spent with Sam Mockbee during the past ten years was time spent talking, planning, and dreaming. Remembering Sambo is remembering the man, not the architecture. His humanism, humor, and humility enabled him to touch the spirit of the people of west Alabama. I remember his words vividly: “Architecture is about shelter for the spirit.” “His feet were stuck in the Mississippi mud.”
These were the constant measures for the work we did. His wit was laced with fortitude—the fortitude to right wrongs of the rural South and to serve a community that had been bypassed by all the “safety nets” that America has established to provide decent shelter for all its citizens. That same Mississippi mud seeped up through his soul and sustained him after being stricken with leukemia. It rewarded him with three intense and productive years after his body-wrenching treatments. At that point in his life he understood that his last day was fixed and his time left brief. His bravery was multiplied tenfold. It was as if he had visited Hades and returned, as did Odysseus, to continue his journey with purpose and determination._
Sambo was a maker of community, and he endowed it with a shelter of spirit.”
I chose this quote and this example, because we have MANY heroes here at Tulane and in the city of New Orleans today. Some are big and loud (as Sam could be, especially after a few beers), and some simply work hard to advance their heartfelt commitments to making the world a better place through design.
I would like to close with a remembrance of someone who was a hero to quite a few of us here at TSA last year. For those who are new, you didn’t get the chance to get to know and work with Dominick Lang. He was a remarkable person. In his ten months with us at Tulane, he left an indelible mark. His spirit is still with all of us and with this place. At the end of the memorial service that students arranged on May 7, the spiritual leader of his Native American nation gave me a rope that was burned during the ceremony, wrapped in sacred cloth, to keep with me in my office at all times to help sustain his spirit at the school. It has been with me ever since, and it will remain in my office.
It is a privilege to be here and I am looking forward to the months and years ahead. When you go out this weekend, remember Dominick - in moderation, please.
Thank you and have a great year!
Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA
Dean
