THE HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, UNIVERSTIY OF OREGON, EUGENE, OREGON

by

Michael J. Clark

1848 Onyx Alley

Eugene OR 97403

mclark7@mindspring.com

1985

INTRODUCTION.

SETTING THE CONTEXT

I. THE FIRST AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

STUDENT

From 1845 to 1855, Richard Morris Hunt studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then worked in France upon his graduation. Hunt returned to New York in 1857, fired by his experience, and by his love of European architecture.

Hunt opened an atelier on 10th Street in New York City, and began what Professor Hamlin has described as "the nursery of architectural education in America." He attracted many promising young architects, including William Robert Ware, a graduate of the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard, and Henry Van Brunt, an architecture scholar. Hunt's passion for architecture and for the method of instruction he had learned at the Beaux-Art in Paris was dilligently passed on to his associates.

In 1865, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (then Boston Tech) determined to establish a professional school in architecture. William Robert Ware was appointed director of this school, the first in America, indeed, the first school of architecture to be established in an Anglo-Saxon country.

In Fall 1868, the department opened its doors to four students. Initially, few courses were offered, all closely allied to engineering. Over time, courses in architecture history, working drawings, specifications, and design were offered.

In 1872, Ware determined that a well-qualified design instructor could not be found in the United States. He turned to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, hiring Eugene Letang, a stone-cutter in his youth, and graduate of L'Ecole, as the first director of architectural design at MIT. The influence of Richard Morris Hunt's atelier had exerted itself in a profound way, and the importing of the Beaux-Arts method began at the inception of American architecture education.

In 1873, Henry A. Phillips was the first American to be graduated from an American architecture program, MIT. Ironically, he did not choose to pursue architecture as a profession.

Eugene Letang governed the design curriculum at MIT for 18 years. He emphasized the beauty of the plan, formal symmetry, and draftsmanship. He died in 1890.

Another Beaux-Arts graduate, Desire Despradelle, was hired as the Director of Design. Despradelle had entered the Ecole at the age of twenty, having won first place among 140 students. In 1889 he was awarded the premier Second Grand Prix de Rome, and was declared the Laureat de l'Intstitute de France. His reputation was international. After coming to America, his fame would reach its apex, with his famous design for "A Beacon of Progress," completed for the Chicago Exposition grounds.

II. THE INFLUENCE OF THE BEAUX-ARTS

SYSTEM

Other programs in architecture had begun to appear in America. In 1867, the University of Illinois at Urbana offered an architecture program, allied with its engineering department. In 1871, Cornell University also initiated a program in their College of Engineering and Architecture.

In 1881, William Robert Ware left MIT, joining his former Hunt colleague, Henry Van Brunt, in the architecture program at Columbia University.

By 1900, a large group of Beaux-Arts trained American architects (Hunt, Henry Hobson Richardson, Charles Follen McKim) were emerging as leaders of the profession. Their impact of the policies of architectural education was profound.

During the first five years of the twentieth century, at every important Eastern school, design was directed by a Frenchman, usually assisted by American instructors. Any school unlucky enough not to have a French director of design was considered second rate. This Beaux-Arts influence was not limited to eastern schools. It also had a major impact on educational thought in new schools emerging in the midwest and the south.

The cornerstone of the Beaux-Art system was the "design problem," assigned to students early in a term as an "equisse " (sketch problem) and ending "en charette" (from the French, meaning "cart," referring to carts in which finished drawings were placed, at the deadline, and then raced to the "master" for judging). The system relied on brilliant instructors, was highly competitive between students, resulted in beautifully drawn final projects which were judged by a set of jurors, often on the grounds of "good taste." Prizes were given to the top designs. The style tended to be neoclassical; the building type most often was the monument.

In 1893, a group of American graduates from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts formed the Beaux-Arts Society, with permanent articles of organization, and a president, William A. Boring, former director of the architecture program at Columbia. The goals of the society were set forth thus:

"The means we think wise to adopt to our end are as follows: by

preserving among ourselves the principles of taste required at the

Ecole des Beaux-Arts; by endeavoring to propagate these principles

among the rising generation of architects and the public in general;

by setting our face steadfastly against the vagaries and abuses of

architecture as it is too generally practiced in the United States;

by affording what encouragement we can to young men desirous

of availing themselves of the extraordinary advantages for

obtaining an architectural education so generously held out to us

by the French government; by enlising in our ranks, as fast as they

return, young men who have had the advantages of such an

education; and by working together for ultimate formation

of an American school architecture modeled after the Ecole

des Beaux-Arts."

Ambitious goals, to say the least.

In 1894, the first general competition was held, limited to society members and to students at local eastern schools. Also, that same year, the "Paris Prize" was established, to provide funds for study at the Ecole.

As a means to the educational goals sought by the society, ateliers were organized under leading designers from the organization. In 1903, 16 of the original 72 members were connected with ateliers. In 1905, 238 students were registered in the Beaux-Arts ateliers. Eight years later, in 1913, enrollment had increased to 1100.

The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design was incorporated in 1916, with the purpose of teaching architectural design, and sculpture and painting in relation to architecture.

The great plan of establishing a National School of Architecture, a Beaux-Arts of America, was not greeted without resistance. The American experience was not a mirror of France, with its history of royalty and centralized systems.

It is hard to imagine that a country founded on a doctrine of individualism, and peopled by a race whose first generative act, in choosing to emigrate to a New World, involved a severing of ties with Europe would for ever follow an Old World model of architectural education.

Indeed, the very act of rebellion, which had given America identity as a nation, had been a blow against centralization. And, after independence, when Alexander Hamilton proposed a centralized banking system in America, distrust of too much centralized power led inevitably to Mr. Hamilton's downfall.

That is not to suggest that all American architects obediently followed the precedents of France. Louis Sullivan attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for two weeks during the late 19th Century, before leaving with the understanding that his interests were not in re-creating French architecture in America, but in discovering an essentially "American" architecture. The "Chicago School" of architecture grew out of the premise that there existed a national architecture to be discovered and purveyed; the most famous "student" in this informal "school," of course, was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Still, by 1914, when the decision was made in Oregon to establish a school of architecture, the Beaux-Arts method of education seemed the unchallengeable guardian of the profession.

PART ONE.

SETTING THE FOUNDATION

I. ARCHITECTURE IN THE HINTERLANDS

In Oregon, in 1913, the dabate over a National School of Architecture went largely unnoticed. Afterall, early that year the State Legislature had requested the State Board of Higher Curricula examine the courses of study at the State colleges to avoid any unnecessary duplication in their course offerings. The State could not afford such luxuries.

The State Board decided that, because of a lack of funds, the School of Civil Engineering, at Eugene, would be discontinued; and that Electrical Engineering should be confined to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis.

The Board granted to the State University at Eugene schools of Architecture, Journalism and Music. And it assigned, as instructors of the new architecture school, those faculty it had just fired as instructors of Civil Engineering.

The conception of the school of architecture at Eugene had, apparently, an unlikely beginning. A local artist/craftsman, Allen Eaton, a graduate of the University of Oregon in 1902, opened an art store in Eugene the year after his graduation. He carried examples of fine arts and crafts, books and stationary. The store became a popular meeting place for the lovers of art in the town. Touring exhibitions were shown at the store; a visiting Japanese artist painted during a Saturday afternoon, discussing, as he painted, the principles of Oriental art.

Mr. Eaton was acquainted with Prince Lucien Campbell, the President of the University. It was a small town afterall; everyone knew everyone. President Campbell often came to his store. They became friends.

Campbell had graduated from Harvard; he had come west to teach at the Monmouth Normal School, and later he had become its president. In the Summer of 1902, he became President of the University of Oregon.

A friend spoke of President Campbell's early years at Oregon:

"His devotion to the ideals of art in architecture, sculpture,

painting and music filled an increasingly important place in his

life. His delight in good architecture, already noticeable in the

Harvard period, grew with his years. He believed in it profoundly.

To house an educational institution beautifully, he claimed, was to

provide a truly educational environment."

It was Eaton, although admitting he had never seen an architecture school, who first suggested the idea to President Campbell. Eaton had been elected to the Oregon State Legislature in 1906; and he served, as the only University of Oregon graduate, on the committee which funded higher education in the state.

To say that the legislature was not always supportive of the university at Eugene is putting it mildly. There were threats to merge the Eugene campus with the Corvallis campus (the political power in Oregon was predominantly agricultural; and Corvallis housed the agricultural college). There were attacks on President Campbell's currriculum. Finally, there was the restructuring in 1913 which transfered the "technical" schools from Eugene to Corvallis.

The residents of Eugene (many of whom were alumni) were outraged at this treatment. To direct this outrage at the legislature was useless. So the object of their distress became President Campbell. There was even a movement to remove Campbell from office. The Board of Regents, however, gave Campbell a vote of confidence.

In this fervid atmosphere, Allen Eaton suggested to President Campbell that a regeneration of the University might be served by instituting an architecture program. He admitted that he knew nothing about architecture; however, he was reminded of the Victor Borge line when, after having bought a Connecticut farm, he was asked if he knew anything about raising chickens: Borge replied, "No, but the chickens do."

The seed had been planted. In such a bold move, Campbell could re-establish the sense of destiny of the University, through a vehicle which would certainly be supported by the Eugene community; also, he could initiate education in the arts, a field of inquiry very close to his own heart.

Quietly, Prince Lucien Campbell began planning for a School of Architecture and Fine Arts, intending to hire a permanent architect to act as its Dean. The State Legislature had given him his cue in 1913; and he began to seriously consider to which architect he might pass his torch.

II. THE FOUNDING FATHER

Ellis F. Lawrence was born in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, on November 13, 1879. His father manufactured artists' and engineers' supplies, and ran a Boston artists' materials store named "Frost and Adams Company". In his earliest experiences, Lawrence became associated with architects.

Lawrence attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; then, despite the death of his father in a train accident, he studied architecture at MIT (Boston Tech). In 1902, Lawrence received his Master of Architecture Degree (he had been president of his senior class).

Lawrence's design instructor at MIT had been Desire Despraedelle, the Beaux-Arts master, who exerted a profound influence on Lawrence. In fact, Lawrence kept a picture of the master over his desk throughout his life.

Lawrence worked for the firm of "Codman and Despraedelle" for three years after completing his studies. He also worked for John Calvin Stevens, a second major influence in Lawrence's life, who taught him, through his firm, the value of devotion and loyalty and co-operation. This understanding would prove an anchor in later years when contemplating educational theory.

Lawrence traveled to Europe in 1905. At St. John's Chapel, in Chester, England, he was married to Alice Millett of Portland, Maine. In later years, Lawrence would advise would-be student travelers: "Don't spend too much time in the centers, but get out into the country."

Lawrence apparently chose to live by his advice.

In March, 1906, he traveled to Portland, Oregon, on his way to open an architectural firm for Stephen Codman in San Francisco. In April, the great San Francisco earthquake struck, marooning Lawrence in Portland. He liked it. He decided to stay in Portland. In 1910 he wrote home: "The West is the place for me."

Lawrence's professional life in Portland was varied and prolific. He worked in a series of firms, then independently. In 1913 he formed an association with MIT classmate and friend, William Holford, which would exist for over two decades.

Lawrence was both a public and private man. He was active in the Portland Architectural Club. He taught a night class for carpenters at the YMCA for two years; then, in 1909, the Portland Architecture Club elected him to begin a Portland design studio affiliated with the Beaux-Arts Society. This atelier offered Oregon's first formal classes to students interested in architecture. Among his first students were Fred Allyn, who later would become his partner; and Louis C. Rosenberg, who would later gain international fame for his architectural etchings, and whom Lawrence would hire as the first instructor of architecture at the University of Oregon

In 1909, Lawrence organized and chaired the first convention of West Coast architects. This convention approved his proposal to create American Institute of Architects chapters in the western states, called the Architectural League of the Pacific Coast. Lawrence was its founder, and later became its president.

He served as chairman of the founding group which established the Oregon Chapter of the AIA in 1911, and was elected the chapter's first chairman.

His private life was somewhat less frenetic. He was married, with three children. He designed his family home in northeast Portland, which may have been the first Arts and Crafts style house in Oregon. Later, he bought a 40-acre apple ranch near Hood River, where he built a summer house. In 1910, his apples won the sweepstakes at the Oregon State Horticulutral Show.

He loved to hunt agates on the beach, smoke good cigars, and listen to classical music.

III. THE CALL COMES

Lawrence's first association with the University of Oregon came in 1914, as a campus planner. He had been working in Portland with the Civic Improvement League since 1909, and had served on the mayor's 1911 Greater Portland Plan which commissioned Edward H. Bennett of Chicago to prepare a Portland Plan.

Lawrence's reputation as a designer (he would design hundreds of buildings in his years of practice), his knack for planning and organization, his commitment to elevated professional standards and to a refinement in the allied building trade, plus, of course, his education at MIT, made Lawrence a logical choice to head the new school of architecture at Eugene.

The impetus to hire Lawrence again came from Allen Eaton however. He had attended an exhibit of architectural drawings organized by Lawrence for the Portland Architectural Club. He was very much impressed by Lawrence. He suggested to President Campbell that Lawrence be considered to head the new program.

This is not to suggest that Eaton played the role of puppeteer, moving events quietly from behind a curtain of relative anonymity. Apparently he was a man of sensible tastes, who became, with time, a valued advisor to President Campbell.

Lawrence was hired.

Oregon, in the early Twentieth Century, was a sleepy frontier state, with no great tax base or private fortune to fund its educational programs. The University could offer Lawrence only a meager salary. To compensate for this, Lawrence was given exclusive commission to design all of the campus buildings as long as he continued as head of the architecture program.

IV. ARCHITECT AS EDUCATOR

Lawrence came to the University with strong foundations in the Beaux-Arts tradition. Essentially, in the beginning, he adapted his program from the MIT model. However, he was acutely aware of the opportunity he had been given to make the program "a genuine experiment in art education."

Encouraged by the ubiquitous Allen Eaton and by President Campbell, Lawrence decided to teach architecture in close collaboration with the arts allied to it--weaving, textiles, pottery, tile, terra cotta, modeling and carving, interior decoration, landscape design.

There was no engineering school at Oregon. Hence, this emphasis on architecture in the context of the building arts rather than engineering was a significant departure from existing programs. Indeed, it was also a departure from the Beaux-Arts system, which, as Lawrence wrote, was often indifferent to the arts "as (it)...does not care for final results as (much as it) does for...presentation and paper design."

Lawrence began surrounding himself with strong faculty members. First came Alfred Schroff, a painter and stained-glass artist, from Boston; then Roswell Dosch, a Portland sculptor who had studied under Rodin, was hired to teach drawing and modeling.

In 1915, Louis Rosenburg was appointed instructor of design. Rosenburg was born in Portland, educated at MIT. He had won a coveted traveling prize at school; but the outbreak of World War I delayed his travel plans. He would later gain international fame for his drawings and etchings.

Allen Eaton was also hired to teach art in the new program.

Later, noted faculty were added as instructors: Maude Kerns in Art, Ayard Fairbanks in Sculpture, Victoria Avakian in Industrial Art, P.P. Adams in Graphics, Eyler Brown in Architecture, E.H. McAlister, also in Sculpture, Brownell Frasier in Interior Design, and W.R.B. Willcox in Architecture.

About Willcox much more will be said. For it was primarily he, with his friend Ellis Lawrence, who gave drama and content to the program during the years in which its own educational principles were being fashioned.

Lawrence would write later in life (reflecting on a lecture given by Eero Saarinen):

"An ideal School of Architecture should be a happy home in

which the student is helped to educate himself.... The ideal would

be to cement all the individuals involved into a genuine cooperative

undertaking in which all are free to protect that freedom by a sincere

and deep appreciation of the rights of others. In such a group it

would be disastrous to one's own prestige to be selfish, intolerant,

or arbitrary."

If this was a conclusion Lawrence made after years of experience in education, its seemed to reflect his natural approach to education from the beginning of the program. Perhaps partly because the program was so small, Lawrence tended to view the department as his family. The atmosphere was quite different than what it had been at MIT.

Also, the influence of John Calvin Stevens was making itself felt: the emphasis on loyalty and cooperation in Stevens' office had made the workplace a haven of profesional commitment and mutual education.

Lawrence felt very strongly that the "building arts" and design were elements of the same process. Thus, from the beginning, he linked the academic program with the University's building program (his role as University Planner was invaluable toward this).

Especially during the the very active University building cycle (1919-1923), Lawrence made the University his personal lab of instruction. His part-time faculty became the chief of construction and the mechanical inspector; classes in construction and working drawings centered on buildings being designed and built for the University. Lawrence even held night classes at which the construction workers and students met to discuss each other's work. Social events ("smokers") were held for workers and students, with music, wrestling, barbecue and cider.

The ornamentation of campus buildings was produced by faculty and students working together on the campus.

In 1917, the first students were graduated from the architecture school: Mary Louise Allen, Eyler Brown, and Walter Church. Miss Allen was the orphaned daughter of an engineer. She wished to pursue a career allied to her father's. Her large drawing "A Model Dairy Farm" received first mention from the New York jury of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design.

Eyler Brown, of course, was soon after hired by Lawrence to teach at the school. Walter Church, the step-son of President Campbell, attended the master's program at MIT, and later became an influential West Coast and Portland architect.

The first order of business for Lawrence had been to build a ship that would float. This he had accomplished. Charting the course the ship was to sail would be a continual process. This navigation did not begin in a rejection of the compass or the sextant.

However, for a mind to be creative it must be willing to question its assumptions. Were the methods of architectural instruction, as inherited from France, appropriate to Lawrence's program?

Or, as radio technology had revolutionized navigation, so could a new idea or method help to enrich architectural education?

V. LAWRENCE AND THE BEAUX-ARTS SYSTEM:

PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE

Philip Dole, Professor Emritus at the University of Oregon, when asked about the historic break with the Beaux-Arts tradition, replied: "There was all that about cooperation versus competition, and non-graded studio courses, but the real importance of it, as far as I'm concerned, was that, for the first time really, context became important. That was not something that any other school was doing."

One cannot overlook cultural geography when considering the nature of the program at Oregon. Oregon was provincial. The current styles sweeping in from Europe, which so moved east coast schools, did not travel quickly in the west. Indeed, the impact of European movements seemed to evaporate with distance. The "transportation" of ideas was labored, at best, under the technology of the day.

Too, the independence from European thought, for good or bad, was more accentuated in the West. It was not space alone. Neither was it technology. For the East and the West Coasts of America are even today quite dissimilar in tastes and modes of living.

It has been suggested that the East Coast is influenced by its closest neighbor, Europe; and that the West Coast is influenced by its closest neighbor, Asia. Others suggest an explanation through myth: that the mythology of "rugged individualism" is inherent in the Western mythology, and in a promised "land of opportunity"--which is, itself, essentially democratic.

Whatever the reasons, it was no accident that the rebellion against the Beaux-Arts system (essentially, against European guidance, which some opponents came to consider cultural colonialism), began in Chicago, a western enclave, and proved to be strongest, initially, in the West.

Ellis Lawrence, in the beginning, accepted the Beaux-Arts tradition as a model for his department. It was the model he knew. He had reservations about it. The reservations grew.

In 1913, the Architectural League of the Pacific Coast had passed a resolution affirming their support of Beaux-Arats. Influential Portland architects, such as A.E. Doyle, believed strongly that Beaux-Arts was "fundamentally right."

Lawrence had no desire to alienate either local professionals or the established eastern schools at a time when he was just fashioning his craft.

In 1916, he wrote: "The Beaux-Arts Society...is full of faults (but) it will probably ultimately be the best medium through which to work."

Two years later, Lawrence justified the school's conformance to the Beaux-Arts System on the grounds that "it offers our best contact point with the East."

He feared that a total break with the system might create "outcasts" of his students and his program.

In July of 1918, in a letter to a friend, Emil Lorch, he wrote: "At first I felt competition was the very essence of success but...are we justified to make a sudden change in methods? I hope to go gradually at a reorganization... That does not mean however that I am altogther a radical against the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. I (would) rather correct its system, than to destroy it."

He was following his own course.

The war came. In April, 1917, President Wilson announced a declaration of war. More than 2000 University students enlisted in the armed forces.

At one point, only three students remained at the school of architecture, one being Arthur W. Weatherhead, professor of drawing at the University of Southern California, who had come to Oregon to study architectural education. Upon completion of his work, Weatherhead would return to USC to continue teaching. He would later write The History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the Uniter States, in which he would focus much attention on the program at Oregon.

Allen Eaton resigned his position in the school and traveled east to lecture on "Art in the West". He wanted to participate in the war effort more directly. While in Michigan, he accepted a position as Field Secretary for the American Federation of Arts. He worked to prevent strikes and lockouts in New England factories and shipyards, which might hamper the war effort. He later accepted work in research with the Russell Sage Foundation, working in the Department of Surveys and Exhibits.

Louis Rosenberg had moved to France, where he married Mary Louise Allen, the first female graduate of the program, and was working in army camouflage.

In 1917, Colonel John Leader, an officer in the English army journeyed to Oregon to begin work with the campus ROTC. He met Professor E.H.McAlister, structures instructor at the school. He described a problem to McAlister: the army had a great need of a portable bridge, which must be so designed as to be easily dismantled, and which could be carried on a 10-ton truck. Professor McAlister, in a short time, had designed and constructed a bridge, meeting all the government requirements, weighing only 9 tons. Leader and McAlister received letters of commendation from Washington, Ottawa, and London.

Lawrence received letters from students throughout the war years, first from places like Fort Stevens (Astoria), Camp Miller (Long Island), Edgewood Arsenal (Maine). His students were serving in gunnery units, aviation, infantry divisions, some in camouflage. Later, letters from France would inform him of miserable weather, of massing in the Argonne Forest.

On November 11, 1918, the Armistace was declared. Finally, as much as was possible, the school would return to normal.

In 1919, Lawrence traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Lawrence petitioned for his school's admission to the select group. His application was studied; and the School of Architecture at Oregon was accepted as a member in the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the first school ever admitted after only five years of existence. Twelve programs were selected out of 40 which applied for membership.

The local Eugene newspaper headline rang out:

If momentum had been lost during the war years, it was again being re-established.

Lawrence's comments, in responding to the program's recognition, are also noteworthy, especially in the light of an increasing sense of context:

"We feel that Oregon, in pace with all the rest of the nation in

the forward march of development, needs highly trained men

and women in its architects' offices. We are going to put them

there through the university school. To begin with, our

graduates are of the West, and understand the West and the

Western Ideals. They have as high a standard of training as

can be obtained elsewhere, and the advantage of obtaining it

in the Western atmosphere, and so they retain their touch with

Western Ideals. They will, of course, broaden their knowledge

and round out their education in the profession by travel and

experience in other fields. But when they return to Oregon to

help her in her development, it will be with a loyalty and spirit

to be obtained nowhere else. That is one reason why we have

raised our standards so high..."

An essential significance of this statement is the line Lawrence was drawing in his mind between East and West, essentially between national influence and regional form. That is, context.

Of Lawrence's architecture, Michael Shellenbarger, Professor of Architecture and Lawrence scholar, writes:

"Lawrence was deeply committed to modern notions regarding

informality and openness in plan, daylighting, functionalism,

spatially complex responses to complex sites, and architecture's

mission to society. He often ordered his designs with Beaux-Arts

formality, but then dramatically deviated from traditional formulas

with new spatial configurations rooted in American informality.

He dressed these forms in familiar details and ornament which

were often assembled in unexpected juxtaposition, for example,

at the Museum of Art at the University of Oregon.

A striking expression of this approach is the contrast of the

formal front and the informal rear of so many of this buildings.

The front of many of his houses is symmetrical and predictable,

but the rear breaks out in unexpected directions and planes.

Lawrence may well have pioneered this type of residential

design in the Northwest. His Spencer House of 1909 is the

earliest known example. He may have been the first architect

to introduce the Arts & Crafts style into Oregon, in his own

home of 1906. His Bronaugh house of 1911 may have introduced

the open interior plan into Oregon. These early experiments

suggest a role for Lawrence in the development of the Northwest

Regional Style which has yet to be described."

What a strikingly appropriate form of the architect's own quest for a balance of oppositions: a formal front, an informal back; a traditional, symmetrical fore; an untamed, very Western, "modern" aft.

In his work and thought Lawrence sought to merge his respect for traditional architectural values and his growing awareness of a Northwest vernacular form.

The 1919-1920 University Catalog, in describing Oregon's program, noted that, for the first time, the time spent on Beaux-Arts programs would be much less than called for by the Beaux-Arts Society.

In an article published in the The Spectator, April 1920, entitled "Experiment in Architectural Education," Lawrence wrote:

"The usual academic problems...have been largely supplanted

by practical problems given under much the same conditions as

exist in general architectural practice...(including) specific

conditions of site."

Again, context was becoming the issue. The more that context became the issue, and the more that "local rule"became a desire, the less influence would be played by the Beaux-Arts.

Lawrence continued to work in Portland. He caught the train from Portland each Tuesday. He would teach during the middle of the week., speding nights at the Hotel Osburn (later he would take a room at the Colier House, on campus). He would return on the train to Portland each Thursday.

His relations with Portland architects were not always good. Some felt his program was becoming too independent from the Beaux-Arts guidelines. Also, he had been very critical of the profession. He was considered by some an idealist who did not understand the requisites of the profession.

In 1916, Lawrence had written to W.R.B. Willcox: "There is a great hope (for) the profession in the West--absolutely... If I am able to do anything in the future in up-lifting the profession, it will be more through (the University) connection than anything else."

PART TWO.

THE GOLDEN AGE

I. LOUIS SULLIVAN'S AMERICA

In the 1880's, Louis Sullivan had written:

"Unless subjectivity permeate an art work that work cannot aspire

to greatness... To vitalize building materials, to animate them

with a thought, a state of feeling, and charge them with a social

significance and value, and to make them a visible part of the

social fabric, to infuse them with the true life of the people, to

impart to them the best that is in the people, as the eye of the

poet, looking beneath the surface of life, sees the best that is in

the people--such is the real function of the architect--understood

in these terms, the architect is one kind of poet, and his work one

form of poetry."

America in the late 1800's had been driven by a sense of its destiny. The Civil War had ended. The country had survived a brush with self-destruction; and an even larger sense of an "American" identity was again burgeoning. The railroad was assisting further expansion, broadening horizons, opening the West.

In literature, this heightened sense of national identity was exemplified by the masters of the American idiom, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and especially Whitman. Sullivan's ideal of an "American Architecture" was very much tuned to this energy for self-discovery.

The creating of "new" forms of expression, to replace what was considered to be outmoded ideals, was at the heart of this national expressionism (Vincent Scully would later call it "Romantic Rationalism"). This focus was an affirmation of the future; of course it was also anti-historical, in one sene, in that it assumed what was really a very optimistic value: that forms were improved in time and through experience.

It assumed, also, what was a very American idea: that the individual had the power (that is, the freedom) to create new and better worlds; and, even more, that the individual had a spiritual and a moral responsibility to do this.

A dialectic animating or circumscribing American intellectural history concerns the extent to which American cultural forms draw upon European models for guidance and inspiration. There is a significant inferiority complex among American intellectuals, with reference, especially, to Europe. American criticism seems to spend an inordinate energy apologizing that its native creative production is not more European. It is easy to understand, when comparisons are drawn between a cultural emanation representing a millenia of expressions and an incipient culture of merely two hundred years experience.

An assumption which is seemingly made in such a comparison is that the goal of American culture is to reproduce the art of Europe. This assumption was challenged by Sullivan, who believed in America's own personal (cultural) destiny would express itself through forms unique to its own nature; a "voice" would be found, inherently "American," which would itself incorporate and reflect the American Soul.

One should not waste time searching older continents for models, rather, through the power of the singular eye of creation, one should "create" these models from the archetype of a national existence.

II. THE ADVENT OF WILLCOX

The greatest influence in Walter Willcox's professional life had been Louis Sullivan. Ellis Lawrence wrote a "characterization" of Willcox in the early 1920's:

"The son of a clergyman who was president of a denominational

college, Willcox's early training was in a family of individualists

where life was rich in intellectual content and freedom of action

unusual in that day and in such families. His mother was a

woman of rare philosophic poise. One brother is a librarian

who believes so much in the use of books that he leaves his

stack room open to the public and does not lose books by so doing.

Another brother is a journalist; a sister is a producer of pageants.

Willcox was educated...at the University of Pennsylvania.

His early architectural experience brought him in touch with

Louis Sullivan and the younger Frank Lloyd Wright. While the

influence of Sullivan is strong in Willcox's approach, he never

adopted that master's style. He sought his own; to no other

could he be true. However, when he conceived the memorial to

Sullivan and tried to catch the master's individualistic ornanament

to express his personality, he showed a rare understanding of the

basic principles of the Sullivan manner."

Willcox was born in Burlington, Vermont; educated, first at MIT, as an "unadmitted" student, then at Penn and Drexel. After schooling, he returned to Vermont for 12 years of practice, executing some 200 projects. He traveled in Europe for several months in 1904. Upon his return, he moved to Seattle, where he practiced until accepting Lawrence's offer to direct the School of Architecture.

Lawrence came to know Willcox through the organizations of Northwest architects. They shared a love of city planning. Willcox had served on the Bogue Committee, which developed a city plan for Seattle, only to have it rejected by city voters in 192.

Lawrence admired Willcox almost immediately. Willcox was a very large man, that is, his personality was imposing. He was opinionated. He had something of genius about him. People were drawn to him. He had very strong feelings about education. Lawrence also admired his architecture: simple vernacular forms, asymmetrical planning, with great attention to craft.

Willcox believed in the unique quality of the individual; that, within each individual, there existed an inherent urge to create, latent energies which were rational and charged with poetic order. He believed in an architecture that was an embodiment of its time and place: the values, aspirations, energies and "history" of the society which creates it.

Again, context: an architecture which was, itself, Time.

Lawrence invited Willcox to Eugene to lecture his school. Several times he came. He liked Eugene: there was something remote, something pastoral about Eugene. There was almost a monastic quality.

Lawrence several times suggested Willcox consider a professional role in the school. Then, on May 13, 1922, Lawrence wrote:

"Dear Willcox:

I am planning to leave on the second for Chicago, via Northern

Pacific. Can't we tie up and go together? I am very anxious to

have a talk with you on many things. .. Could you be seduced

into taking the headship of the Department of Architecture in

our school at the University? I would retain my professorship

and appear on the books as the Dean of the School, but I am

earnestly seeking someone who would take the direction of the

Department, who would look at it as a life job.

We can talk a much larger salary than when we brought up the

subject before. You would have a good deal of spare time for

writing poetry!!! and I am sure you would get much pleasure

and inspiration out of the work.....

I hope you will give this your most serious consideration.

I have."

Lawrence met with Willcox on May 22, wrote a second letter on May 26. On May 31, Willcox responded by Western Union Telegram:

"HEREBY NOTIFY YOU OF MY ACCEPTANCE OF

APPOINTMENT EUGENE AS PROPOSED AND EXPLAINED

IN YOUR LETTERS MAY THIRTEENTH TWENTY-SIXTH

AND IN PERSONAL CONFERENCE TWENTY SECOND.

W R B WILLCOX"

In Lawrence, the School had found a father. In Willcox, the School had found a prophet. For 25 years this brotherhood would labor to clarify the nature of architecture and education.

III. A NEW AGE OF ARCHITECTURE

There is something in reflection which renders the most remote ages somehow grand and uncompromised--that is, mythological. Much as the child's eye sees adult forms in an early aspect of deity, so the pristine complexion of by-gone eras often glimmers with immensities inexplicable but ultimately real, as a dream is real.

The first year of Willcox's tenure was spent mostly in observation and contemplation. His observations helped to clarify "principles" he believed essential. He came to believe that the aim of architecture education was to produce in the student:

1. personal growth and maturity

2. a broad cultural understanding

3. fluency with basic skills of expression

4. basic knowledge in the fundamentals of the profession

5. a clear, rational problem-solving method.

As Lawrence scholar David Shelman observed: "These objectives point out that the focus of this approach was on the problem and the problem-solving rather than on the solution. It (was) this orientation that (set) it in sharp contrast to the Beaux-Arts System."

Some observers of these early years assume that it was the Willcox influence which ultimately led to the historic break with the Beaux-Arts System. There is reason to believe, however, that Lawrence had already broken with Beaux-Arts; and that he hired Willcox because of this decision.

Lawrence later wrote that it was Professor Avard Fairbanks who was the dominant factor in doing away with competition in design.

In fact, the break with the Beaux-Arts tradition had been a process of erosion; and a faculty had been assembled by Lawrence which was broadly or, in some cases, radically supportive of a new approach to design education.

The 1923 University Catalog read quite simply: "All design problems are given by individual assignments. The competitive system of teaching design has been abandoned by this school, accent being placed on honesty of thought and expression, and on stimulation of a spirit of cooperation."

If Willcox was not the "cause" of the break with Beaux-Arts, he was the dominant symbol of it. He was the vocal spokesman of it.

Willcox wrote, in his Autobiography:

"Education is a growth. It requires that the roots of one's being

go down into the soil of life. These cannot be forced down.

All that another can do is to fertilize that soil, to expose the

student plant to the sunshine of intellectal curiosity, water it

with sympathy and with insight into the nature of the

individual plant, prune it of dead or dying interests, and protect

it from the blights which either limit its contact with fields of

human thought, or constrain it to develop according to the

choice or limitation of the teacher. The cabbage cannot become

a chrysanthemum, but by regarding its peculiar nature it may

become a fine cabbage. By the same token, a chrysanthemum

cannot become a cabbage, but it may become a weak, ungainly

chrysanthemum by disregard for its inherent propensities for

growth."

The two major fallacies of the Beaux-Arts had been:

(1) it assumed individuals of similar levels of

training would also be of equal ability;

(2) it assumed that recognition was the highest

motive of creative aspiration.

In fact, the Beaux-Arts System was abandoned in America because it was a French construct, built from French experience; it did not fit in the American context.

Perhaps it was the remoteness from the East Coast schools which had make the break occur more easily in Oregon. It was not without repurcussions, however. Many influential architects in Portland were outraged. Pressure was exerted on the Univeristy President to reverse the decision. In 1925, a bill was drafted by William Knighton in the State Legislature to abolish the School of Architecture.

Arthur Weatherhead, who had attended the Oregon program during the war years, would later write in his History of Collegiate Education in Architecture in the United States:

"The School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the Univeristy

of Oregon was the first American school to abandon the

traditional Beaux-Arts methods... The readjustment represented

a very positive break with the current educational processes

and has since formed the basis for several similar experiments

in other schools. The reorganization effected may be resolved

along two general lines:

1. The competitive system in the major subject of design

was completely abolished...

2. Other schools of architecture have been organized in

connection with department of the related arts, but the

University of Oregon was the first to establish a positive

program of collaboration....

The individual non-competitive character of the system has

often been a factor in the success throughout the years of the

University of Oregon collaborative plan."

A decade later, nearly all the East Coast schools had followed the lead of the Oregon School of Architecture.

IV. THE CONTEXT OF THE "EXPERIMENT"

The rejection of an existing system of thought necessitates the emergence of the new system to take its place. Willcox became the prime creator, and primary spokesman, of that new system. The theme of the experiment was that democracy was to be trusted.

Willcox believed that for growth to occur, three conditions were required:

(1) an healthy atmosphere (environment);

(2) adequate and proper nourishment (curriculum);

(3) appropriate care (method).

An healthy atmosphere would best be described as one which allowed, even encouraged, the creativity inherent in each student and faculty to surface. An healthy atmosphere would be comprehensive in nature, synthetic in purpose, encouraging discussion of ideas, requiring, as Prince Lucien Campbell put it "the minimum of restraint and the maximum sense of responsibility."

The School's physical environment is suggestive of this desire for commonality, or family. It was, as it continues to be today, an amalgamation of buildings, built at different times. It included the old power plant and the burned out hulk of the women's gymnasium. These buildings were unified around a common courtyard, which was the actual and symbolic center of the program. It was a place of gathering, of resting, discussion. It was where students of the different disciplines met to exchange ideas on pottery, planning, architecture, painting, politics. Willcox would often encourage students to leave their drawing boards and gather in the courtyard.

Willcox insisted that all architecture students work together in one immense drafting room, one containing space for 125 drawing boards. The discipline of the room was based on individual responsibility. Willcox posted a "code of conduct" about the room, called "The Coin of the Realm:"

"The Coin of the Realm is Consideration for others;

the more put into circulation, the better for carrying on the

work of the school. The Coin is of three denominations:

consideration of amother's Time; another's Property;

another's Nerve."

This physical arrangement was to encourage discussion, to collect faculty and students together, with no artificial separation between the two. He encouraged experimentation, realizing that receptiveness to new ideas would enhance the growth of each member of the school.

The proper nourishment of the student came from a well-structured curriculum. First of all, Design was central. It would be through one's own design that the multiplicity of understandings involved in architecture would make themselves known, at an individual's own pace. Projects were so selected as to ensure that each student would consider a wide range of types of problems, scales and complexities. Over time design problems would move from elementary to increasingly complex. Students in a certain program level were given projects of a common type, to encourage discussion. In every level of complexity, programmatic elements were omitted, to be selected by the student.

All other parts of the curriculum, broadly listed as Theory and Practice, were generated by the design program. Theory courses included design theory/methods, history, ethics. Practice courses included media (clay modeling and life drawing), construction, structures, mechanical systems. An important assumption made in this curriculum was that application should precede abstract theory. Efforts were made to demonstrate the nature of a problem prior to engaging in the theory behind its solution.

Willcox also structured courses to require collaborative efforts by the different disciplines in the school: joint projects between painters, sculptors, architects, metal-workers. In this, he encouraged architects to learn painting from painters; to learn about the nature of metals from scuptors or metal-smithers.

Willcox considered himself Everyman. He considered his era a kind of Renaissance, in which students, by learning the arts, by learning how to think and live creatively, could be complete human beings, as well as practitioners of their art.

The third element of Willcox's order was appropriate care or method.

Elimination of the Beaux-Arts System, with its inherent motivations and inegalities, was the first step. Next, grades were eliminated.

It must not be understood that Willcox dictated these changes. As we have seen, other faculty were instrumental in developing and supporting this new order. Still, Willcox was now the leader.

Grades were not a true motive for education. Inherent in the human soul was a thirst for understanding, a motive to discover and express beauty , and a poetic logic needing only to be nourished.

Architecture was primarily problem-solving. The student must be supported in a personal quest through which he or she might "establish a set of values and principles by which any problem may be solved." The teacher was a sort of midwife; certainly not an autocrat. The function of criticism was to reveal problems in a solution, and to encourage a new perspective of thought concerning the problem. Behind it all was a spirit of good-will. Together they should live and learn and aspire.

The synthetic event of this era, combining atmosphere, nourishment, and appropriate care, for both students and faculty occurred every Wednesday night at the Willcox house. Posted around the buildings of the School were posters similar to the one here:

CLUB NIGHT

EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING THE

WILLCOX HOUSE WILL BE

OPEN TO ANY AND ALL CLUB

MEMBERS FROM 7 TILL DAWN

NOTE

ALL DEPARTMENT REGISTRANTS

AND STAFF MEMBERS HAVE

BEEN ELECTED CLUB MEMBERS

IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY,

COME THERE TO SAY IT.

IF YOU ARE MINDED TO LISTEN,

COME TO HEAR WHAT OTHERS

MAY HAVE TO SAY. IF YOU ARE IN

AN ARGUFYING FRAME OF MIND,

CALL AROUND AND DISCUSS TO

YOUR HEART'S CONTENT.

IF YOU HAVE A PICTURE TO

SHOW, A BOOK TO READ, OR A

STORY TO TELL, SPRING IT THERE.

TOBACCO IS NOT TABOO. CANNED

MUSIC OF A SORT IS ALWAYS ON

TAP. THERE IS A KITCHEN,

DISHES AND A RANGE AT

MEMBERS' DISPOSAL...

DROP IN IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT AND

BRING ALONG ANY NON-

MEMBER FRIENDS YOU MAY

HAVE IN TOW.

Every Wednesday night faculty, students and visitors would gather at the Willcox house on the Millrace, a calm finger of the Willamette River, and discuss everything from architecture to taxation to European political movements. This, from all reports, was the ideal "ideal environment." In fact, Lawrence once referred to it as "the backbone of the school." Often visiting lectureres or architects were invited. Bernard Maybeck came often. Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, and Serge Chermayeff also attended Club Night.

A photograph of Club Night shows the slightly imposing Willcox sitting in his den, in a large black leather armchair. Across from him is Lawrence, also in an armchair, smoking a pipe. Seated around the two giants are students eager to catch the real meaning of their exchange. There is the warm atmosphere of home: lights are bright; books are in the foreground, on the far desk.

It was an innocent era: the shared sense of a new adventure, a common quest for knowledge and understanding . Anything was possible here.

America in the 1930's. When a student was asked what he thought of Willcox, he replied: "Mr. Willcox? Yes, I can tell you how I feel about Mr. Willcox. If I didn't have a father; and if Mr. Willcox were looking for a son--well, I would apply for that position and pray that he would select me."

It was an era of innocence.

V. MOMENTUM AND FRUITION: A GALLERY

OF PLAYERS

Willcox was now the driver. But to gain and retain momentum he would need both faculty and students who believed in and could thrive within his environment of individual responsibility.

The supporting cast was not without color.

Lawrence wrote of Camilla Leach, the Art Librarian:

"Sometimes Miss Camilla made me think of an exquisite

cameo. Perhaps the impression came from the finely molded

face with the pallor, planes and lines of old age, sharp in

contrast with paisley shawl it was her habit to wear. But

when she came tripping down the campus path under the firs

and cedars, she made me think of a busy little rusty song

sparrow. When she emerged from the shadow and the sun

embraced her, I seemed to hear the beautiful song of the little

fellow -- 'Merry, Merry Sweet'! She invariably stopped there

to worship an imported Balm tree, at the entrance to the Art

Court. This rare specimen was fragrant and lacey pink with

bloom in the Spring, russet and garnet in the autumn, and

bronze, studded with red berries like rubies in the winter.

Likely as not she would come to my office with what was

in her heart. "Come," she would say, "see the Balm tree this

morning." And together we would look down upon it until

the spell had run its course. I think her special delight

in that tree was in early Spring, with the winter berries

in Spring bloom, the new leafage all mingled with the bronze

dead leaves of winter. Some special charm it had then which I

always thought was much like her own. "

Camilla Leach was the University of Oregon Librarian in 1897. With the creation of the School of Architecture she became the Art Librarian. She was in many ways the soul of the school. An artist herself, who exhibited her work in the Northwest, she was a lover of art and fine books.

On Lawrence's first day of work, he found a red rose lying on his desk, from Miss Leach. Later, when Lawrence was lecturing Miss Leach on the importance of art, she leaned across his table, and, in a snappy voice, informed him: "Sir, I was teaching art before you were born!"

There was a student in the program in the early days, from China. His name was Fook Tai Lau. He had been a young student in China, in 1911, when the democratic revolution against the imperial party gained its apex. He went to the revoltuionists and tried to enlist. They rejected him, telling him the country would be better served through his education. He went to his father, in Hong Kong, who was a successful merchant. He asked his father for $180, by which he could buy himself the material of war, guns, boots, khakis, by which he could help fight the emperor. No need. The emporer abdicated.

In 1914, he sailed to America, full of dread, for he feared he sailed to "a country full of Christians," where he would be in danger. He traveled as far as Detroit, where he worked in the Ford Plant, as a rivet driver, then as a draftsman. He decided to study architecture. He enrolled at the University of Washington; he stayed a short time, saying they had no true sense of "democracy." He enrolled at the University of Oregon.

When Camilla Leach discovered he was living on 10 cents of rice a day, she arranged a job for him in the Oriental Museum.

When a local newsman realized there was a "Chinaman" in the Department, he rushed to Miss Leach, crying: "I hear you have a new student, a Chinaman. I want an interview with him!" Miss Leach replied: "We have no Chinaman here; but we do have a Chinese gentleman. I will introduce you to him."

There were others.

Roswell Dosch, sculptor instructor, who studied in Paris at the Sorbonne under Rodin and Rodin's great pupil, Bourdelle. Dosch was selected by Bourdell from a class of 150 as one of four students to be his private pupil. His post-World War I work, entitled "The New Earth," a portrayal of Democracy, in the form of a young man, freed from the fetters of war (the Old World), won national praise. Dosch died of pneumonia in Portland at a tragically young age.

Avard Fairbanks, sculptor instructor, who at the age of 13 had won a scholarship in Art Student's League in New York, and by age 14 was exhibiting work in the National Academy of Design, produced his war memorium, "Idaho Doughboy," which Lorado Taft, a leading American sculpture critic called, "one of the best works of its kind."

There was the proud, beautiful Maude Kerns, a local daughter of Scotch-Irish parents. They traveled from Indiana, spent a year gold-mining in Spanish Gulch, then settled in Eugene. She studied art in San Francisco, Eugene, at Columbia University, in France. She came to teach at the University of Oregon in 1921. For 26 years, she was the most striking figure on campus, queen-like, with piercing blue eyes; she was nicknamed by other faculty "the Duchess." Her artistic output over the years was vast.

In quite another vein, there was Billy Rivers, the janitor. There had been a history of impressive janitors at the School. In 1922, there was a great fire, which had destroyed much of the old women's gymnasium, which was used by the school as painting and sculpture studios. In fact many of Maude Kerns' paintings and some scupture and studies of Mr. Fairbanks were lost.

The School janitor at the time, named Baird, apparently only Baird, like an English butler, had discovered the fire raging. The firemen had arrived and were trying to battle the blaze. Baird disappeared into the flames. He returned with Mr. Fairbanks clay sculpture entitled "Oregon Motherhood." He had saved it from destruction. Baird was not finished. He darted in a second time and returned with two typewriters (perhaps the smoke had been too thick for him to see things of real value--or perhaps he intended to save each piece of furniture, one by one). His attempt at a third excursion was curtailed by the firemen.

Billy Rivers came later. In the mid-1940's, Lawrence wrote about Billy:

"(The Dean) remembered the daily cheery greeting, with that

contagious, kindly smile: 'Why, hello Dean!," as he entered the

courtyard every morning at seven forty-five. For twenty years

that had been going on. What good conversations there were

before thestudents came streaming in, and how much common

sense and wisdom Billy gave to help keep the school a happy

home! It had been Billy's school all those years, as it had

been the Dean's. They both loved it.

Billy was interested in everything going on about him, but

the students' work and the students' play were his special

hobbies. In the early days, the Dean recalled once finding

Billy out in the Court, showing up two students on the

wrestling team, which he did by tossing both, amid the plaudits

of the boys and girls.

When the first big fresco was undertaken and no one knew

just how to proceed with the plaster, it was Billy who did the

trick. When easels or looms needed repairs, or canvas needed

stretching, Billy always seemed to be on hand and ready to

help. Billy was always asking about the old students and he

and the Dean enthusiastically shared the letters from Tai Lau

in China, Tominaga or Tsuboi in Japan, Pinedo in Peru, Van

Nice in Istambul, or Steven, now Captain in the Air Corps, and

all the others.

He thought of other times when tragedy had knocked at

Billy's door. When his wife was reported near death's door as

the last of their babies was born, the story somehow reached the

drafting room that a blood transfusion was the last chance. The

boys left their work, en masse, and marched to the hospital.

When his old father died in the middle west, Billy did want to

go to his funeral, but had no surplus for the trip. The faculty

found it out and they fixed it up at the bank so Billy saw his

father once more. Then there was the time when Billy was

having a siege of rheumatism and the doctor said he should

have his teeth out -so the faculty gave him a birthday present

of dental plates. It was really amazing, this expression of love

for Billy; and, as he thought of it the more, the old Dean muttered

to himself: 'Give human nature a chance and it's pretty fine.'"

In the early 1930's a fiery thin brunette was hired to teach in the interior decoration program. Her name was Brownell Frasier.

The program in interior decoration had been initiated in 1927 under N.B.Zane, a Portland artist who had won national recognition for his Oriental decorative panels.

Miss Frasier had been a student in the the University in the early 1920's, minoring in art. She had won several prizes for her drawings. She was a thin, sharp-witted woman, who chain-smoked cigarettes. She was very much attuned to the national and international styles of decoration, and very outspoken in her taste. She would soon become the program director in Interior Decoration, which would in time come to be considered one of the finest programs in the country.

* * *

And, of course, lest we forget the students: there was Gil Farnsnow. Farnsnow had enrolled in 1946. He was a student in Art Riehl's design studio course.

Reihl was an Oregonian, a German American, and a former professional wrestler. He was short, thickly built, with a flat nose and cauliflower ears. The students used to mimic his language, which was not always respectable in an urbane society. His favorite saying, as he would lean over a student's drafting table, considering the design work, was "Yes, let's analyze this."

The students, of course, after Professor Reihl had departed, would stride around the room, pugnaciously, edging toward one another, rubbing a chin, mimicking: "Ahh, yes, let us analyze this!"

Arthur Riehl had been a student at Oregon and at MIT. While a student at Oregon he had won the prestigious Ion Lewis Traveling Fellowship. In the late 1930's he traveled through Europe, seeing much of the continent: Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany. He had plans to meet a fellow student in Germany; then they would travel together, by train, to Paris.

It was April 4, 1938. He was in Stuttgart. He had left his clothes at a local cleaners the evening before. Early that morning he returned to the cleaners, knocked on the door. No answer. He walked across the street to a cafe and had a cup of coffee, feeling that the shop would open later in the morning. After his coffee, he returned to the shop.

He had noticed two men watching him as he had stood earlier at the shop door. This time, as he again knocked on the door, the two men approached him and told him he was under arrest.

This was Hitler's Germany.

Two days earlier he had been in Lubeck. He photographed a factory, for he found the architecture interesting. He had been stopped; his film was confiscated. He later assumed that this had occasioned his being followed.

Riehl was charged on 19 counts of high treason. He was brought before his accusers on many occasions; they demanded a confession. At first, he answered their questions in German; this, however, led them to assume he was a spy--afterall, what American, except a spy, would speak German!

He was held for seven days and seven nights in solitary confinement. Finally, the U.S. Embassy arranged for his release.

* * *

One night, late, the night before a sketch problem was due, the drafting room was filled. It was 1946. Riehl was now teaching at the School. There had been a call. Gil Farnsnow was at the train station. He needed one of his fellow students to pick him up. Who? the students asked. Gil Farnsnow. Oh, yes. He sat over by the window. Oh, ok.

Who had a car?

It fell to Sy Nance.

Nance drove to the train station at 2:00 AM to pick up Farnsnow. There was no one at the station. He waited. He searched everywhere. No one.

The next day, when sketch problems were due, each student turned in a project. There was one additional project turned in however, by Gil Farnsnow, which proved to be a very imaginative creation.

Who was this Farnsnow? Professor Reihl asked.

No one was sure.

So, Gil Farnsnow was born. Every now and then, in homage to the great Kilroy, a sign would appear on a wall: "GIL FARNSNOW WAS HERE!"

From that point on, for many years, whenever sketch problems were due, an extra sketch problem would be turned in, with Gil Farnsnow's name on it.

It seems that students in the program, fearing that Gil, whose attendence was spotty, to say the least, might not realize that the sketch problem was due. In order to save him from embarassment, or, even worse, failure, the students took it upon themselves, a different one each time, to submit a sketch problem of which even Gil Farnsnow could be proud.

One of the classic Farnsnow "solutions" came in a design studio given by John Briscoe. One of the Science Buildings on campus had a problem: the logging trucks roaring by on Franklin Boulevard shook the building to its foundation. The assignment was to create a design solution to this problem.

Farnsnow thought about it awhile. There was an open space east of the Science Building (where Oregon Hall now stands); it was used as a parking lot at the time. Gil's solution to the problem was to design a drive-in theatre for that parking lot location. The theatre would specialize in pornographic movies. As the truckers would pour into town, they would slow as they passed the drive-in, trying to see as much of the movie as they could in passing; some might even stop and buy a ticket to the show. Thus, the problem would besolved.

Gil Farnsnow has attended classes in the school for several decades. No one seems certain whether he ever received his degree. But there is some reason to believe he may have, perhaps even with honors.

(Gil Farnsnow's name came from a combination of the names of Gil Davis, who later became the Head of the Portland State University program; Neil Farnham, an influential Portland architect; and "snow job," which seems, in many ways, to describe the cool, somewhat existential attitude of the student.)

VI. AN ERA WINDING DOWN

There was somelthing mythological about the era, something which made it real and not real at the same time, something medieval: magical and clean and somehow like a dream. There is a state somewhere between waking and sleep, part dream, part wakefulness. It is the place where Time is born, the Dawn of the Idea: it is the place of Origin.

It is the place where one can remember quite clearly what was (the dream) and see quite clearly what is to be (the vision), poised in a magnificent moment in which all elements of the puzzle seem co-existent and coherently assembled.

Lawrence had desired the universal city: a medieval village, wherein Man was all things: builder, poet, artist, farmer.

That had been his dream.

* * *

Time passed. A depression. A war.

Lawrence continued his pattern, unshakably: three days in Eugene teaching, four days in Portland practicing architecture. He still ran a firm with William Holford. In the mid-1930's Fred Allyn would join them. The Depression hit the Portland architectural community very hard; yet Lawrence's firm continued to have work.

In 1931, Lawrence wrote to Willcox: "Yesterday was typical--first a cripple selling trinkets, followed by an old French draftsman wanting $2 to get his coat out of pawn, then three former students--no job--no way to get back, then a call from (an acquaintance) trying to find a loan."

In December 1933, Lawrence's proposal that the historic Portland Pioneer Post Office be replaced generated a virulent personal attack. Lawrence's motives seemed selfish to other Portland architects. He had designed a nine-story civic building to be financed with credit from the Public Works Administration. This would generate some one million hours of construction work, for a work-force which, at the time, was 83% unemployed.

The building proposed by Lawrence would provide museums of art, natural history, history, as well as a civic theatre and library.

The Oregon chapter of the AIA, in response, passed a resolution urging preservation of the Post Office. The resolution accused Lawrence of conduct "injurious to the interest of the Chapter," and suspended his membership (in the federation he had founded) for six months.

Three months later, a "Lawrence Day"was held by the Oregon Building Congress, honoring Lawrence for his efforts to generate work for builders in the Northwest, recognizing his contributions to their organization over several decades .

Lawrence had a long history of allegiance to the building trade. He had long been committed to a highly skilled and creative building "guild." In fact, when the School was founded, and Lawrence chose to allign architecture with its allied arts, he had said:

"One of the achievements of the middle-ages which, sad to say,

we have lost...is the craftsmanship of the workers. In those days,

every workman was not only a workman, but a craftsman as

well. Into those medieval cathedrals, they wove not only the

plan and the pattern of the architect, but also their own ideas

and expressions of mind and ideals. We would give much to

bring back the spirit of craftsmanship to each individual

workman on our buildings nowadays."

In 1911, Lawrence had founded the Builders Exchange of Portland, a society of builders, contractors and architects brought together to further the building interests of Portland. In November 1921, he presided at the organization of the Association of Building and Construction (later the Oregon Building Congress). The Oregon Building Congress consisted of a "round-table" of architects, craftsmen, material suppliers, realtors, builders, plus representatives of the governor. On several occasions, this round-table actually successfully settled labor disputes.

Lawrence had been the president of the organization during the first three years of its life, helping to pass a Code of Ethics for the Building Industry, drafting legislation for an Oregon arbitration court, as well as establishing an apprenticeship school and the Guild of Craftsmen. The Guild of Craftsmen, an idea of architect Charles James, honored selected craftsmen for exceptional skill in a craft, conferring upon them the title of Master Guildsmen.

The Guild was praised by both Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And guilds based on this model were begun later in New York and Philadelphia.

Lawrence often spoke of this work as the greatest undertaking of his life.

In September 1932, Lawrence had sent a telegram to Willcox: "NERVES SHOT, ABOUT TO ASK FOR LEAVE OF ABSENCE AS ONLY SOLUTION."

He had taken a year off. During that time he was considered for the position of Dean of Columbia's School of Architecture. He was not interested in moving back east.

The Portfland professional response to his proposal for the Portland Post Office Building had increased his sense of alienation from many Portland architects. He considered moving to Eugene.

At the 1935 Annual Report of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture, presiding President Roy Childs James, of the University of Minnesota, wrote:

"The great ferment of these present times has permeated the

schools of architecture to no small degree. The pats year, schools

everywhere are willing to experiment, willing even to tear down,

if necessary, to build a new and better (way). They can listen

without a shudder to certain voices that long cried unheeded in

the wilderness. They no longer so suavely turn that Rome- or

Paris-tailored cold shoulder on the Oregons, the Taliesins, or

the Cranbrooks..."

That year, more than a decade after Oregon's break with the Beaux-Arts, Harvard followed suit.

In 1937, Grant LaFarge, a New York architect, visited the school in order to gather notes for the reorganization of Columbia's program. That year , Columbia broke with the Beaux-Arts.

Willcox became, more and more, the flame lighting the school. The reputation of the school and Willcox's preseence became more and more interwoven.

Philip Gilmore, a student at the time, and later a faculty member at the School, traveled with other students to see the office of Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940's. As they were touring the office, Wright overheard that they were from Oregon; he looked up from his work: "Oh, they're from Oregon. That's where Willcox is. He's the greatest teacher of architecture design in the country."

Willcox taught, not by answering questions, but by asking them, and urging the students to ask these of themselves. For he believed that it was through the process of asking questions of oneself that one eventually could become an instructor of oneself.

Willcox idealized the poet. He believed in an architecture which was at once poetic and historical, personal and social.

Don Genasci, architect and Willcox scholar, has written:

"It is apparent that Willcox, in his own thought and work, is also

very concerned to offer an egalitarian basis for the understanding

of architecture. This is an architecture which is essentially poetic

in conception, in order to convey direction, emotional meaning to

people who are not educated in art. Meaning is to be conveyed

through a direct interpersonal expression or empathy, not by an

intellectual process requiring knowledge of conventions

of expression.

The academic traditions, literal acceptance of Roman and

Greek architectural references, and the structure of rhetoric as

opposed to the underlying principles of architecture, is, in

Willcox's view, a fundamental error. This insistance on particular

forms replaces cultural understanding determined by shared

experience with rules which depend upon a kind of artificial

knowledge, and, thus, removes the understanding of architecture

from members of a society not educated in art.

What he proposes...is that knowledge of architecture is the

result of a lived understanding of a particular culture. Thus, the

role of the artist is to 'express, unconsciously, the mind and

thought of his time.' This unconscious expression of personal

and cultural values is to be accomplished in juxtaposition with

the architects's formal training. The role of formal training is to

teach the architect to think fundamentally and rationally about

the lived culture rather than to learn rules or styles."

In 1941, Lawrence considered resigning as Dean but worried whether the ideals of the school would survive without his guidance. He took another leave of absence and wrote reminiscences, sketches, and two novels, The City of Good Will and The Red Tide. Neither were published.

Lawrence wrote: "I'd drop my writing quick if I could get a real job designing a worthwhile building."

He returned to teaching the following year.

On February 27, 1946, in his room at the Collier House across the street from the School of Archtitecture, Ellis Lawrence died of heart failure.

* * *

In the 1940's, Walter Ross Baumes Willcox wrote tracts on taxation and developed principles of economics.

In 1943, he retired as the Director of the School of Architecture. He continued to teach courses in city planning and office management.

In April, 1947, W.R.B.Willcox died quietly at his home on a Saturday afternoon. He had been 77 years old. And an era had ended.

PART III.

PERIOD OF TRANSITION

I. A PERSPECTIVE

The revolution in educational methods at Oregon under Lawrence-Willcox must be understood in the context of the culture in which these men lived, of which they, themselves, were that "unconscious reflection" Willcox believed all artists inevitably were.

The culture was "inward looking," even to the point of isolationsim. A running dualism in American history can be described by periods of "isolationism" and "missionary-ism."

The "isolationism" which was emphasized at Oregon (Willcox was even reported to have taken books away from students, informing them that the answers they were seeking would not be found in books)--that is, the concern with the local, in form, material, and content--was a reflection of that same spirit which permeated America at the time.

Inwardness; emphasis of the poet over the intellect (Europe was essentially "intellectual," in the worse sense of the word, in the sense of old, effete, academic, non-natural); a growing sense of a "national" identity: these were all elements of a cultural season. It was the season of the dream. The flowering of the myth.

America rejected Europe in a political sense also; there was no popular support to enter World War I, which was seen largely by Americans as a "European problem."

America perceived itself (and so it was really) as largely removed from the world, benefitting from reflection, indifferent to the styles and the tragedies of the worlds far away.

Eugene, too, was a sort of island, a sort of medieval city-state, almost monastic in quality, in which a quest for Truth could be unhindered by outside forces. The Lawrence/Willcox "modernism" was rooted in locale; it was very different than the European "modernism" which was rooted in style.

D.H. Lawrence, after moving to New Mexico to start up his own "Ideal City," wrote: "Why do we come to America...? There is all the talk about freedom and democracy, which is in some sense true...but the real motivation is to get away from everything, to escape what is old."

Isolationist America was imbued with the vision of itself as the "New World." The "Old World" was somehow false, somehow old and nearing its end.

In this sense, the New World Quest was anti-historical: for, from the conclusion that the Old World had failed, came most naturally the assumption that to follow its ways was to follow it to the graveyard. Life was more insistent than was History, afterall.

The "isolationism" continued after the First War; for, although America helped create the great International Idea after the war, the League of Nations, it did not vote itself to become a member.

Pearl Harbor was the "sound" which awakened America from its dream.

America was thrust into the world, force to recognize outside forces, really for the sake of its own survival.

When the destruction was complete, America stood, as a new-born giant, in a much smaller world, an "international" world, wherein ideas were being exchanged again. The local, national ideation had had its day, and was being replaced.

There was much to do in this world. This world was in need of re-creation.

The "practical" element of Time dethroned the poetic element of Space, which was, itself, the fabric of Thought.

The deaths of Lawrence and Willcox, similarly, awakened the Architecture School from its dream.

Phil Gilmore, a student in the program in 1939, then again in 1947, after the war, said: "The void was immense. Without the voice, the speaker, there was only an ideology. But empty, without the spirit of its creator."

The commitment to the old ideas remained. But the spirit was gone; the genius had evaporated.

In many ways, the "New Idea," which Lawrence-Willcox had embodied, had, inevitably, through the magic of Time (He Who plays tricks of perspective on His guests) become the "Old Idea."

Genius always is self-creating--always replacing itself with a mirror of itself.

II. CONFRONTING THE VOID

George Andrews, Professor Emeritus, who came to the School in the late 1940's, described the post-Willcox environment thus:

"An interesting symbol of the change was the School Library.

Before, under Willcox, it was housed in a very small room.

There was no real emphasis on reading about architecture.

Architecture was something one discovered by doing

it, in the Design Studio. With the new faculty that came in,

the intellectual aspect was more important. Where it had been

an architecture of feeling, and of art, before. In the late 1950's

it began to become an architecture of ideas."

Sidney Little was hired to replace Lawrence as Dean of the School: a sharp, intense man, with a full black mustache.

Little was educated at Cornell, received a diploma from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; later, he received his masters degree from Tulane. During the war he had been a Lieutenant Colonel in Burma and China. He had returned to his home in Auburn, Alabama, after the war; he was teaching at Alabama Polytechnic when he was offered the job as Dean.

It is hard to follow a legend.

An interesting accent on the nature of time and place: whereas Lawrence had been the Building Executive during his tenure, one of Little's earliest appointments was as Head of University Civil Defense. In 1951, he issued a study wherein the University community could plan for nuclear war: the student union would become a hospital; the swimming pool the campus water supply; the Faculty Club as military headquarters; the fraternity and sorority houses would become homes for evacuees.

Reality had changed.

The post-war reality was much different than the dreamy days of the Ideal City. World War II had significantly increased the tempo of the world. There had been a technological quantum leap.

Enrollment at the School soared. Military men, funded by the government to attend school, swelled the college campuses.

There were 75 students enrolled in the Architecture program in 1925.

In 1951, there were 410, which totalled 3.4% of all architecture students in the country.

To deal with this influx, the program had been modified into an "upper division curriculum"--that is, students took a general curriculum the first two years and then "transfered" into architecture in the third year. The idea was that only the best students would survive the first two years and pass into major architecture courses.

The program was especially demanding. In 1952, there was a 40% "mortality rate" in the program--that is, for every 10 students beginning the program, only 6 completed the degree.

As there was an influx of students to be taught, so there was an influx of instructors to teach them. A strong Allied Arts "Old Guard" remained: Eyler Brown, Wally Hayden, Maude Kerns, Victoria Avakian, Brownell Frasier, Andy Vincent.

In the 1940's came new architecture instructors: Marion Ross, George Andrews, Bob Ferens, Norris Gaddis, Wallace Treadaway, Stan Bryan.

In the 1950's, came an even greater influx: L.T. Chadwick, Donald Sites, John Briscoe, Earl Moursund, Doug Shadbolt, Philip Dole, Albert Poe, Walter Gordon, James Balzhiser, Dale Benedict, Ting-Li Cho, Lee Hodgdon, Art Edelman, Alvin Boyarsky.

The leadership of Lawrence and Willcox had helped draw talented instructors into the family, unting diverse interests through a commonality of vision. But there was a void in the School in the post-war years. It was no one's fault really.

It was as if a new actor had walked on stage after a great drama had been enacted. The audience was still present, still alert, even willing to be moved. But when the actor looked to find the script, he was told that the writer had taken it home with him.

A new installment of the script needed to be written.

III. THE FIRST BUILDING CONTROVERSY

In the early 1950's discussion began in the School about the state of the School buildings.

Lawrence had inherited an odd menagerie of buildings which came to house the School of Architecture. In 1921, before the fire, the composition was a broad configuration of loosely-connected buildings .

In an architectural sense, the fire of 1922 was not a great tragedy. It led to a recomposition of the building complex, designed by Lawrence, into a united plan, centered around a courtyard which acted as the heart of the school.

Lawrence spoke about the project:

"Great art is collaborative in its essence. Cooperation and

sacrifice were the keynotes of the Gothic period in which the

cathedral was the art school of the time, as was the workshop

of the goldsmith in the Renaissance. So the new university

arts building, with its workshops and its studios, has been tied

to the old architecture building by a simple ambulatory about

an internal courtyard. The effect of this plan is already being

felt on the espirt de corps of the art students and their outlook

upon the sister arts."

Miss Camilla Leach wrote in her unpublished manuscript:

"The new building was so arranged that a pleasant open-air

court is its center, with one side separated only by columns

from the University grounds. The principal entrance into the

new building is made beautiful by the panels of rich stained

glass in its two doorways, the pediment modeled in low relief

over the one on the western front and the corbels. There are

also a number of fine tiles in the floor of this entrance hall.

All of these decorations are the work of students: the stained

glass having been made under the direction of Professor

Schroff; the bas relief and corbels by students of Professor

Fairbanks; and the tiles in the studio of Miss Avakian. The

decorations in the courtyard have been developed in the same

way, and the plan will be carried out from year to year

by different classes."

The "collaboration" spoken of by Lawrence was with his faculty and the students in his School. Stained glass windows were designed and painted by the class of Alfred Schroff. Small windows, about 13 inches square, were made, eight for the large door of the museum, and three for the small door leading to the court. The windows represented the crafts: Goldsmith, Stone-Cutter, Embroidress, Printer, Ship-Carver, Potter, Weaver, Lace-Maker, Tapestry-Worker, Glass-Stainer, Scribe. Each was designed and fashioned by a different student in the School.

The architecture students developed the entrance to the court : twisted conettes, with capitals decorated with Oregon grape and pine-cone motives.

The class in applied design contributed a mosaic of soft grays, greens, and blues, using colored cement tiles as inlays, around the Univeristy entrance to the museum.

The use of stucco walls allowed for ornamentation of bas-reliefs, mosaics, scraffitto, cartouches and murals.

The theme of "Art Serving Truth" inspired a relief panel created by the advanced students in sculpture to be placed about the door of the museum. Truth, the central figure, the goal of art, was created by Kate Schafer, assistant instructor in sculpture. To the left of the panel was the spiritual side, a man and a woman uniting to raise the torch of knowledge, casting its light on Truth. The masculine figure was executed by Paul Walters; the feminine figure by Margaret Skavian. The right side of the panel represented the material side: the various allied arts, aiding Truth with materials of expression. A figure seated above an architectural capital symbolized Architecture; in his hand he held the pallett of the artist. Mildred Heffron executed this figure. Leaning over the shoulder of the seated figure was Time, holding an hour-glass (the work of Alicia Agnew). And, at the feet of the figures, was a sphinx, as representations of the crafts. Beatrice Towers modeled four separate heads of Painter, Sculptor, Architect and Craftsman for the four corners of the museum ceiling.

Later would come frescoes representing the Oregon coastal life, Oregon forestry, and Oregon fruits and flora. Byzantine tile-work from Victoria Avakian's class. A lunette, representing the unity of architecture and sculpture, placed over the doorway of the sculpture building. A mural depicting an incident in the battle of Silver Creek following an Indian uprising in the 1880's. A mural of Paul Bunyan. Designs painted on the ceiling rafters of the school patio, each design being created by a different student. Walter Pritchard's carved corbels of Japanese oak.

The building became a monument to the Lawrence-Willcox vision of a "renaissance" America, a fusing of art and craft. With simple elegance, Lawrence had united a series of discordant building elements into a unified entity, one with charm and dignity. A building which he envisioned as a laboratory for his students, for ever to be unfinished; each class would add an element to the motif; each decade would represent a new skin of the creation.

This "work-in-progress" was a source of much pride to the School. It was a living history.

So, when Sid Little recommended that the south wing be replaced by a new addition, it was taken by many faculty to be an attack of the School itself, and the School's history, through Lawrence.

Some faculty felt it was Little's way of trying to firmly establish control of the School, to wrest authority from the past, and carry the School into the future.

The building was run-down; no renovation work had ever been done. Some faculty called for that: renovation of the deteriorating conditions. The building had a charm, a personality. It embodied the principles of the School.

Other faculty felt a new addition made perfect sense and represented progress.

The faculty divided over the issue.

Students in the Architecture School also sensed a political struggle in the form of the new building. In the Spring of 1955 a Student Proposal was written and presented to the faculty. The essence of this proposal was an expression of concern that educational principles which had been the basis of the program at its inception were being forgotten.

There was no strong awareness of the issues of preservation in the early 1950's. With the end of the war, the future again became promising. American belief in the future also carried with it the premise that created forms improve with time. The old was replaced by the new simply because the new was better suited to its time.

In many ways that was very similar to the ideas of Willcox who had found architecture an "expression" of time.

The "times" now were different.

An "International" architecture was now exerting its will. Europe was being heard again, exerting its influence on American architecture, mainly through the influence of Mies Van Der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

These were new ideas. And not necessarily ideas with which the followers of W.R.B. Willcox found much agreement.

The proposed demolition of the Lawrence wing and design of a new south wing came to a faculty vote. The faculty vote was deadlocked, 14-14. Landscape faculty member, Fred Cuthbert, as head of the Building Committee, voted to break the tie. He voted in favor of the new building.

The building became a symbol to many faculty and students who felt that Dean Little was unsympathetic to the philosophies upon which the school had been founded. Dean Little had been educated in the Beaux-Arts tradition, even taking a diploma at the Ecole. He was a practical man, who seemed impatient with Willcox's dreamers.

From Little's perspective, the expansion was necessitated by the dramtic rise in enrollment. The School's enrollment was nearly 6 times what it had been when Lawrence designed his 1920's building complex.

Demolition of the old building began October 6, 1955. The legislature had appropriated $500,000 for the new wing (31,585 square feet) and remodelling (28,415 square feet). An auditorium seating 200 people would be an essential part of the addition; this would serve as a lecture room, and also as a large lecture classroom. The library in the new building would be twice as large as the old library. The new building would also provide four seminar rooms, class rooms and an audio-visual room.

The three-story south unit would be the prominent feature of the project. It would be constructed of glass, concrete and metal, and would connect to the north portion of the building with a two-story gallery. The main entrance of the school would be in the south unit, with a public exhibition space in the entry foyer.

Some art-work of the old south wing would be preserved, and incorporated in the new expansion. Of course, not all of it could be preserved.

The architects were Annand, Boone and Lei of Portland. Dean Little also had been hired as a consulting architecture for the project.

In January, 1956, Dean Little made an administrative change which invoked a storm of controversy. Dean Little abolished the position of Director of Curriculum, up until then administered by Wallace S. Hayden, Professor of Architecture. In place of this position, Dean Little created the Chairmanship of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design; he appointed Frederick A. Cuthbert, a professor in Landscape Architecture, to fill this new position.

This move wore two sinister heads to many in the School:

(1) it removed Wallace Hayden from curricular

authority;

(2) it seemed to reward Professor Cuthbert for his

vote on the new building project.

Wallace Hayden had been with the School as an instructor since the early 1930's. He had attended the program in the early days, under Willcox. In fact, he, more than any other instructor in Architecture, represented the "Willcox method" of instruction: emphasis upon a socratic approach to problem-solving, which placed ultimate responsibility upon the student to find"solutions" through a personal quest.

There was faculty outrage.

Fifteen students in the School wrote the following letter to the University President, O. Meredith Wilson:

"We students consider the recent readjustment of the staff to

be more than routine processes for achieving departmental

efficiency and harmony. Rather we consider the current activities

to be a turning point in the philosophy of architectural

education at the University of Oregon.

We feel the direction established in the latest staff

reorganization, if pursued, will inevitably resulty in the

training of technicians in a craft rather than the education of

creative individuals to operate in the profession of architecture.

Such a direction would damage not only the distinguished

reputation that the school enjoys but would be a breach of faith

to those of us who have invested, or will invest, our time and

energy earning degrees from this university.

We also feel that the present administration changes will

set in motion patterns of policy that will be felt for years to

come, and, as such, merits your most thoughtful examination.

We would like to go on record as opposing what we feel is

a philosophy of education determined by administrative

convenience, and as favoring the philosophy exemplified

by Mr. Hayden--that of unfettered personal inquiry as a basis

for education.

Reaffirming our belief in the ideas set forth in the Student

Proposal of Spring 1955 for a return to a program based on

the principles upon which the School of Architecture was

founded, we, the undersigned, express our belief in Mr. Hayden.

We feel he is the only member of the architectural staff qualified

by longstanding background, integrity and devotion, to assume a

position of leadership in the administration of a program suited

to the best interests of the students.

The very encouraging program initiated this fall term under

Mr. Hayden's direction has provided the first and only steps

sympathetic with last spring's Student Proposal.

However, the position to which Mr. Hayden has been

relegated leaves him without authority or direct responsibilities

and therefore renders him ineffective both as a teacher and as

an influence in the formation of school policy.

We want to be sure that Mr. Hayden is not held responsible

for the dissention and discontent in the architectural area; the

student action of last spring was neither directed against Mr.

Hayden nor instigated by him."

President Wilson issued a statement that stressed his administration recognized only the deans of the professional schools; therefore, any organization below that level was the responsibility of the school's dean.

Dean Little responded to the letter stating that the administrative change represented no change in philosophy: it was merely a procedural matter. He was not surprised that the students were aroused. He believed that the students felt Professor Hayden was treated unfairly. He stressed the difference between educational philosophjy and operational procedure. He thought there had been "a good bit of misunderstanding ...but most of the students understand now."

Professor Cuthbert called the change an administrative simplification which did not affect policy. He had issued a statement shortly after the appointment, saying the reorganization represented only a procedural change.

In 1956, construction of the new building began.

The house had grown larger, and the home more fractionated. If the Lawrence-Willcox era had been as uncontentious as it is portrayed (Time sometimes cleanses portraits miraculously), then the rites of accession, in the post-war epoch, had brought to the School a new drama, which would become, itself, ultimately vivifying.

IV. EUROPEAN INFLUENCE: THE BAUHAUS

I have spoken of the early Twenty Century in America as an era of "isolationism," a period of cultural nationalism, through which "self-expression" gained dominance over "style".

At the end of World War II America had been thrust upon the world, a giant filling a silent void. The League of Nations, which America had not joined, was replaced by the United Nations, a federation created and funded and housed by the United States.

The world had become small. Technology had changed the pace of movement. A political internationalism had returned.

The "experiment" at Oregon had not been an isolated experience, free of historical movement, untouched by causal or typal parallels. Ideas circulate; those who grasp the newest ideas are prophetic.

In Germany, in 1919, the new idea was the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was a school of design, building and craftmanship founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. Gropius took over with the intent to unite art and craft. He also believed that a building should be the result of a collective effort of architect, potter, furniture-maker, artist.

A significant difference between the "experiment" of the Bauhaus, and the "experiment" at Oregon, was in the relationship of each to the "machine." Initially, Gropius, although he did not oppose the use of the machine, stressed the need of maintaining the subservience of the machinery of building to the will of the designer.

The influence of Marx was strong in Germany. Gropius linked design with social movements (he was a sociologist as well as an architect). He came to feel that, through the use of the machine, designers could be directed, not toward hand-craftmanship, but, toward the creation of type-forms which could serve as models for mass-production. The architect, as such, could re-make society through creation of prototypes, which would generate products which would provide for the masses a better way of life. It was an architectural manifestation of the factory.

The founders of the program at Oregon, had, as a foundation, the belief in the West, in Individualism, in the power of democracy to transform the world. A world of prototypes was as far from their considerations as was possible: for each student and each problem there was a unique solution. Afterall, the answer was not the only issue; the question was also an issue.

Individualism was inherently capitalistic; for it assumed that the best world resulted from free individuals assuming responsibility for creating their own worlds. Unique forms of expression resulted as a consequence of this responsibility.

In 1923, a Bauhaus exhibit was held, entitled "Art and Technics, a New Unity."

The Bauhaus seemed ultimately "modern" in approach; the program at Oregon seemed more dreamy, existing in a sort of renaissance aura.

The Bauhaus was moved to Dessau in 1925. Buildings already existent were appropriated for the school. In addition, Gropius designed a building for the school. It consisted of 3 principal wings: a school of design; workshops; and student hostelry. The first two were linked by a bridge over a roadway. Within this bridge were administrative rooms, club rooms, and a private atelier for Professor Gropius. The student hostel was a six-storey building consisting of twenty-eight studio-dormitory rooms. The building was constructed partly of reinforced concrete. In the workshops' wing, reinforced concrete floor slabs and supporting mushroom posts were employed with the supports set well back to allow a large uninterrupted glass screen on the facade extending for three storeys. This was probably the first time so ambitious a use of the glass screen was employed in an industrial building; it helped to lead the way to similar constructions throughout Europe and America.

Here you have another parallel between the founding of the two schools: Lawrence and Gropius, the fathers of their respective "experiments," each essentially inheriting a cluster of buildings as a home, with a free hand to design the unifying element of the complex.

Lawrence chose the "hand-crafted," ornate stucco building, with a central emphasis on a courtyard which brought together all the disparate allied arts for cooperation. It was more a medieval monastery than it was a monument to technics surely.

Lawrence's favorite description of the School, "Harmony through Diversity," described his essential belief in human-ism; and so the technical solution was never really a consideration in the Oregon context. Of course, there were great contextual differences between Eugene, Oregon, and the urban centers of Western Europe.

The Bauhaus was ultimately "modern;" modern technics was a major philosophical issue.

In 1928, Gropius resigned to devote more time to his creativity. He ultimately hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to succeed him as director.

Mies was the son of a master mason who owned a stone-cutting shop. Mies did not receive a formal education in architecture, but came to the profession by way of the building arts, especially cabinet-making.

In the early 1900's he apprenticed with Peter Behrens, the most imaginative architect in Germany. Behrens design of German factories was essentially modern and industrial; his design using exposed metal structural frame infilled with glass was compatable in the mind of Mies to his cabinet-making experience.

Next, Mies worked with Hendrik Petrus Berlage, who derived a theory of architecture from the 19th century moralist theory of "honesty" through revealed expression of materials and structure.

After the First World War, Mies' career as a "modernist" hit full flight. In two glass skyscrapers (1919 and 1920-21), Mies sought to dramatize the reflective powers of glass in free-form curvatures. These glass towers were powerful examples of the non-classical principles of naked, unornamented expression of structure and materials, and were types which Mies continued to develop.

Modernist influences in Germany were powerful; and Mies sought them out. Expressionism from Holland; Constructivism and Suprematism from Russia; Frank Lloyd Wright's impact from America. He helped found a magazine dedicated to modernism, "G" (Gestaltung: Creative Force). He joined the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 in celebration of the Russian Revoltuion.

In 1930, Mies became director of the Bauhaus. Nazi pressure almost immediately forced him to move his school from Dessau to Berlin. Continued political pressures led to the closing of the school in 1933.

Both Gropius and Mies left Germany to escape the Nazis. Gropius went to teach at Harvard; Mies, ultimately, went to teach at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Armour Institute). Both Gropius and Mies were drawn to Chicago, which, in many ways, was the cradle of American architecture.

V. LE CORBUSIER: BUILDING AS MACHINE

Another great source of the new style of architecture, which later came to be called the "International Style," was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. At his school in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and later in travel throughout Europe, including a period working with Behrens in Berlin, he was very early concerned with the issues of mass production and standardization.

Different from the American mind, which equated "democracy" more with individual "freedom," the European mind tended to equate "democaracy" with group "equality." As such, the "International Style" in Europe became an intellectual social movement; whereas, in its inception, the "American Style" of Sullivan and Wright became a personal expression of a physical/cultural heritage.

European "internationalists" sought to change the world through architecture; American "nationalists" sought to express the world through individual form (architecture).

Mass production and standardization was seen as a method of achieving equality (in the political sense).

To his social commitment, Le Corbusier married his passion for Cubism. He wrote the journal "L'Esprit Nouveau" of an uncompromising reduction of all buildings to the basic geometrical shapes of rectangle, plane surface, cube and cylinder. The architectural means employed by such reductionism to true (anti-ornament) form were free-standing columns at ground floor level, continuous strips of fenestration, glass walls, flat roofs.

His radically functional renovation of the house he spoke of as "machines for living in."

In 1932, a book entitled "The International Style" was writen, from which the "movement" took its name. (In Europe it was a movement; in America it was a style.) In this early manual it is written:

"There is, first, a new conception of architecture as volume,

rather than as mass. Secondly, regularity, rather than axial

symmetry, serves as the chief means of ordering design. These

two principles, with a third, proscribing arbitrary applied

decoration, mark the prooductions of the International Style.

This new stule is not international in the sense that the

production of one country is just like that of another. Nor is

it so rigid that the work of various leaders is not clearly

distinguishable... In stating the general principles of the

contemporary style, in analysing their derivation from structure,

and their modification by function, the appearance of a certain

dogmatism can hardly be avoided."

VI. THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE: THE

AMERICAN INFLUENCE

In the rebellion of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and other American architects against European form (the so-called "Chicago School"), a new "style" was born. These architects sought a typically American "style" of expression.

Sullivan's often misunderstood "Form follows function," was more a statement supporting context than an appeal to reductionism. Form was not reduced to its function. Form was inspired, even molded, by its function, its definition--that is, by its physical and cultural heritage.

This American "rebellion" was not a dogma; it was essentially "anti-intellectual". It was not a system of thought (as it became in the European useage); rather, it was an understanding, which did not dictate process but informed it.

Lewis Sullivan would never have conceived of a building as a machine. To Sullivan, a building was a manifestation of the soul.

Frank Lloyd Wright eschewed ornament in his buildings. Yet, with Wright, each form was an individual expression of a specific context. The content of the building was the context of the building--which is another way of saying "form follows function."

Wright revolutionized house design in the early 1900's. His characteristic plans in X, L and T shapes exhibited a free flow of movement between major living spaces; the organization was generally horizontal, spacious: the buildings almost carved from the earth. Wright's houses appear fluid, almost solid elemental-forms (none more so, of course, than the Kauffman House--"Falling Water"--in which the house itself seems a higher element of the waterfall below).

In terms of their construction systems, the dramatic use of cantilevering, free-standing mushroom columns, the creative use of reinforced concrete, all were new at the time, and would become essential parts of the "modern" style.

Wright's use of material (stone, concrete, glass) was essentially sculptural; his intention was more in having his work emerge from the earth, from its surroundings. He was not motivated, apparently, by the European premise that a building which showed its structure was more "true" or moral than a building which hid its structure.

Wright began publishing his work in 1901; and by 1910, his work had been brought to the attention of European architects. This work included the Prairier House series, the Willitts House (1902), the Martin House (1904), the Glasner House (1905), the Robie House and the Mrs. Thomas Gale House (1909). At least as influential were the non-domestic work, with its use of reinforced concrete, and complex cubic forms: the Larkin office building in Buffalo, NY (1904), the Unity Church in Oak Park (1906), the small hotel in Mason City, Iowa (1909). The younger architects of Europe were very much moved by this revolutionary approach to design.

The impact of Wright's architecture on European thought is sometimes considered dubious. One cannot look at Mies' Farnsworth House and not see the impact of Wright; or even the German Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Barcelona (1929). Certainly the monumental "high rise" type of architecture in Europe in the 1920's and early 1930's was influenced by the work of Sullivan and Wright. Sullivan's emphasis on function (while often misunderstood) was a major element in the subsequent ideology of the International Style.

Wright sought to discover, through his work, a universal "organic" architecture however; his approach had very little in common with the European notion of architecture as "machinery". While Wright's use of materials was sculptural, in the highest sense of the word, his architecture was never sculptural, in the sense of being an object placed in the landscape. His buildings seemed to grow out from the landscape; his search for elemental structure was more an aesthetic, architectural issue than it was a moral issue.

The ideas of Sullivan and Wright in many ways helped to provide an intellectual foundation for what came to be called the "International Style." With Sullivan and Wright, however, it was not an intellectual system. When it returned to America, especially in the 1930's, to exert such an influence educationally as well as professionally, it had returned as an ideology: "poetic" thought standardized had become architectural dogma.

The Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture describes the International Style thus:

"Foreshadowed by the domestic building of Adolf Loos, the

early industrial constructions of Perret, Behrens and Gropius,

much work by engineers, European and American, and even the

Futurist visions of Sant Elia, the new architecture of the pioneers

among the second generation of modern architects, particularly

the French-Swiss Le Corbusier, the German Gropius and Mies

van der Rohe, and the Dutch Oud and Rietveld, representing a

convergence of social and aesthetic aspirations characteristic of

the second decade of the century, found early expression, mostly

in projects, in the years 1919-23 immediately after the First World

War. The large-scale projects of Mies (his glazed towers of 1919

and 1921), the Chicago Tribune Tower design of Gropius and

Meyer (1922), and the spaced cruciform skyscrapers of Le

Corbusier's "City of Three Million," also projected in 1922,

indicated a generic debt to American achievement in building,

and by the mid century the International Style would even come

to seem to many a characteristically American style."

VII. RETURNING TO EARTH

The building addition to the south wing of the Architecture School complex at Eugene was designed very much with regard to the principles of the so-called "International Style": exposed structural elements; lack of ornamentation; standardized, mass-produced concrete panels as a construction system.

The wing was very much a "modern" building; it was also very much in opposition to the principles of Lawrence and Willcox.

The building was opened for the academic year 1957-58.

On the eve of the new school year, the flier below was distributed around the building:

"To all 4th and 5th year students, graduates and instructors in

the School of Architecture & Allied Arts.

It is our belief that nearly all the student and professors of

the school object very strongly to the new working environment

that has just been provided for the students engaged in the creative

arts.

A sentiment of disgust, discouragement, and bitterness rates

high among us, because we have known something better and

expected something more from a new school of Arts. Should

these feelings remain in the rumor stage, half-buried within us,

expressed only in small conversation groups, it might be thought

that our opinion is not unanimous, that it is just another one of

those art quarrels where half of the people hold one opinion and

half the other.... In this case it is not so...

We believe that good architecture can only be taught in good

buildings.... This action is not intended to bring the new building

down. We realize that it is up and will stay up... The purpose

behind it is not aimed against the staff, or the dean of the school.

Being students we are not in a position to know what

circumstances made this building possible, who are the guilty,

and to what degree. It may have been just "mere chance" that

took an unguided course, and produced it...

Let, with a minimum of sacrifice, each one of us show our

feelings... Let no upperclassman or instructor appear in the

school Monday the 30th and Tuesday the 1st.

GIL FARNSNOW."

The general strike was not observed. However, the sentiment expressed in the Farnsnow epistle was shared by many.

In February 1958, Sid Little resigned as Dean, in order to devote more time to practice and to instruction in the School. In a matter of months he would accept the position as Dean of Architecture at the University of Arizona.

His administration of 12 years had been an era of contention. The School had grown profoundly, in terms of the physical site and in terms of enrollment. University enrollment now totalled more than 6200.

In terms of the School's philosophy, there had been a slight modification of emphasis, portending the coming era of "environmentalism." The School published a brochure in 1958 with the following description of the program:

"As an artist, planner, technician and economist, the architect is

largely responsible for the physical makeup of his community.

In his broad professional role he must have an understanding of

the nature of people and the landscape in which they live, and,

in the light of these things, develop an appropriate architectural

language. In our democaracy, he creates for many people. The

influence of his professional knowledge has direct bearing on

the physical and mental health of society. As such, the architect

is an environmentalist."

VIII. TOWARD AN AWAKENING

In the Autumn of 1958, Walter Gordon was hired to succeed Sid Little as Dean.

Gordon had studied architecture at Princeton; then he had taken an MFA. He studied at the University of Paris, and was a Carnegie Fellow at Yale. He was the curator of the San Francisco Museum of Art from 1936-1939. He then worked with Pietro Belluschi for 7 years, before opening his own office in Portland. He taught courses in art history at Reed College during those years. Then, in 1957, he began teaching at the University of Oregon.

Gordon was generally well-respected by his peers. He was a sensitive man, artistic, with a broad knowledge of architecture history.

Two interesting trends later emerged in the School and seemed to have appeared in the figure of Walter Gordon: first, architecture history was deemed worthy of study. Much of the modern movement eschewed historical study as inappropriate to the creation of modern form. Willcox had de-emphasized history; Gropius, at Harvard, had abolished history for a time, then, when threatened with loss of accreditation, had allowed only the teaching of the history of Egyptian and Medieval Architecture. Gordon was primarily an architectural historian; in fact, with his promotion to Dean, more courses immediately were offered in art history.

Second, an administrative "Princeton Connection" began. The School would hire no less than five faculty from Princeton in the next two decades, four of whom would play major administrative roles in the School.

There would prove to be a persistent "connection" between Oregon and three schools over the next two decades, in terms of interchange of ideas, faculty, and other intangible influences. These schools were Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California at Berkeley.

The new building was dedicated Ellis Lawrence Hall in April 1958. Pietro Belluschi, native Portland architecture, and Dean at MIT, presided over the dedication. A statement writted by Frank Lloyd Wright was read as a part of the dedication to Willcox, whom Wright called "a man of vision...a beacon of light for the young architects long before general recognition came (to him)."

Richard Neutra visited to lecture on "Recent Contact with the New Architecture." Robert Wilmsen and Charles Endicott, graduates of the program, were commissioned to develop a 50-year master plan for the State Capitol in Salem. Jack Wilkinson, the nationally-recognized painter, a balding, muscular, intense man, was beginning a mural of hieroglyphs on the south face of the new wing. Bruce Goff visited, scoffing at the new architecture as mere boxes wearing hats. Will Martin graduated from the program. George Andrews attended an 8-week course at Penn State on the design of fall-out shelters; a year earlier he had spent a year studying Mayan ruins while on sabbatical. Bob Ferens took a leave in 1961 to work as the supervising architect on the Volta Dam project in Ghana. Earl Moursund had been awarded a nationally-funded grant to study the influences of land ecology on village patterns as an architectural expression. Walter Creese, a Visiting Professor from the University of Illinois, gave a lecture on the role of history in the discipline of architecture. Walter Gordon offered a seminar on ethics in the practice. Eugenio Batista, professor of architecture in Cuba, had been forced to flee his homeland after Castro's revoltuion; he was hired by the School after spending a year at MIT. Stan Bryan presented a lecture on the architecture of Finland.

Gordon, following Lawrence's example, sought to return some of the local influence to the program by hiring graduates of the program who were working in Eugene.

He also sought to bring in new ideas by hiring three fresh intellectuals from the East Coast: Peter Land, Alvin Boyarski, and Lee Hodgdon. These three brought with them the philosophies from Europe: Corbu, Mies, Gropius: that is, the "new" architecture.

Land had been educated at the Royal Academy School of London; he had then taken a Master's degree in city planning from Yale. He had been teaching at the Carnegie Institute of Technology when hired to come to Oregon.

Boyarsky studied at the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada; then at the AA in England. He was teaching at Cornell, a member of the Organization of Cornell Planners.

In 1962, he gave a lecture on "Camilla Sitte: The Art of Building Cities." Sitte's late 19th Century book on "city building according to its artistic fundamentals (had) burst like a demolition bomb on the city planning practices of Europe." Sitte had helped set the Germans on the path to a national style; his influence had swept through France, then to England. The lecturer regretted that his influence had remained negligible in America.

Boyarsky, with Land and Hodgdon, exerted a strong but short-lived influence on many of the young architecture students in Eugene. They arrived as proud (some said arrogant) Eastern spokesmen of the new architecture, carriers of European ideas. The ideas seemed new and exciting to many students. They helped to vitalize the School through a heightened debate on the relative values of "modern" and "traditional" architecture.

They did not stay long. Each would go on to a distinguished career, returning to practice and to teach on the East Coast.

Buckminster Fuller visited the School again in 1962. He lectured on "The Invisible Trend", proclaiming: "I predict that within 10 years our present cities are going to become university-dominated centers." Fuller claimed that 99% of modern technology occurred on the invisible level; that the world stood on the threshold on a new civilization which would banish all forms of darkness through the harnessing of this invisible technology.

Walter Gordon resigned as Dean in January 1962. He wished to resume his practice, and teach part-time again at Reed College.

IX. A NEW BEGINNING

Walter Creese was selected as the fourth Dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Creese had studied at Brown University; he had received a master's degree and a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard. He had taught at the University of Illinois before accepting a position as a Visiting Faculty member at Oregon. He was the current President of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Walter Creese circulated his "Goals for the School" among the faculty after his appointment:

"As teachers of the arts, it is inevitable that we be concerned

with the quality of life. That is our particular obligation...

Your school intrigued me from the first because it exists in

a natural surrounding which, so far, has not been completely

occupied or transformed by man. This brings us close to the

original tradition of American romanticism. The sense of

developmental exploration which I detect in your discussions

of teaching appear as American as anything can be. It is

considered within a framework of informality which has its

architectural counterpart in this region in a tendency to work

from the house upward toward the monumental building, which

in turn goes back to the 17th Century tradition in America.

As Americans, in general, we are wanderers, adventurers and

improvisers, free individuals upon the open stage. In our

structures we have sought wider spans and more frequent

turns, and always a sense of spatial release internally through

open windows, and winged plans, and outside a pervading

consciousness of the landscape.

The Northwest is the only part of the country where this

romanticism remains virtually intact. Swelling populations

and a growing urbanism have so far not rooted it out. This is

when and where we ought to make a last and searching test of

the possibilties of romanticism. It would require one crucial

change in attitude, however, which I hope we might be ready

to make. We would have to accede to a crystallization of

romantic ideals, bringing them into better focus, rather than

depend alone upon the open-ended drive and momentum of

our culture to carry us on to yet happier solutions...

One of the first things which struck me about Oregon, long

before I had any inkling of permanent association with it, was

the marked character and individuality of its faculty. This I

regard as an extremely favorable condition. I also agree

with those who contend that the state university is the

educational form of intrinsic originality in America. The

problem is, however, that with the exception of the revolution

in painting instruction at the University of Iowa in the 1930's,

no new vision of artistic education has come out of

any of them. This opportunity has been left to the private

institutions. Isn't it high time we generated some new leadership

in our state institutions? I do not see why Oregon, with its past

of individualism and originality, could not be outstanding if it

takes time to think its program through. My thought tends

presently to linger around the conviction that the Pacific West is

a visually new and promising country."

Post-war America had been profoundly influenced by the ideas inherent in the "International Style". To say 'profoundly influenced' suggests causality; to suggest that the "ideas" of the imported doctrine drove the society is misleading; the generating Idea, of which "modern" architecture was a reflection, was also reflected in the other forms of American society.

No symbol of this Idea is more telling than the suburban tract home: standardized, compartmentalized "machines for living," functional units in a fabric of life which found as its generating image "the factory". The units of society (the "living" in the "machines for living") were cogs in a machine, each essentially interchangeable, mass produced, without distinctiveness: function and sameness were ideals. The Individual did not matter. America was still at war, afterall. Korea had come. Joseph McCarthy had flushed out treason from the State Department. The War was cold perhaps, but bomb shelters were becoming a standard item in the design of houses. Sputnik had arrived. Russia was building an arsenal of nuclear warheads and the world was in danger.

As a new energy would come to America in 1960 in the figure of young John Kennedy, to help provide purpose and a sense of direction for the country, so the Department of Architecture would be visited for a short time by a young dynamic figure who would, largely through his energy, re-invigorate the Department and set it moving again upon its course.

Also, the first signs of rebellion against a scientific standardized view of life was appearing in the form of "beatniks," bearded, anarchistic youth, idealistic in some cases, degenerative in others.

George Boas, Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, spoke at the Oregon graduation ceremony in 1960: "No one will reform society by growing a beard, putting on a dirty t-shirt, and going to the woods. Let them go to the woods. We are better off without them."

PART III.

REGENERATION

I. THE CONTEXT OF EUGENE

The remote physical context of Eugene, set at the southern tip of the Willamette Valley, some 110 miles south of Portland, had proven to be both a major strength and a significant limitation of the School. Removed from major urban areas, the School had proven resistant to (some might argue unaware of) topical "styles" of architecture animating many cities.

The "atmosphere" of Eugene had always been somewhat reclusive. The "romanticism" of the Northwest, of which Walter Creece spoke, was a characteristic of the place, and had been since Lewis and Clark first "discovered" its foggy, forested mysteries.

The School at Eugene had always emphasized the human scale, the human involvement in the act of architecture. The social movement misnamed the "International Style" in Europe became, in America, a generalized "style" emphasizing technology as an architectural solution. It was not, in America, a social solution; in Eugene, as a style, it spurred very little folowing largely because of its de-emphasis of the human role in Architecture as an act and as a result. And because of that aforesaid "romanticism" which found in traditional and vernacular forms more merit than in the modern style. Romanticism is esentially anti-technological, as it is usually anti-modern.

To say that the Architecture School had stagnated in the post-Lawrence/Willcox era is perhaps unfair. The School was looking for direction however. A new kind of energy was needed to rekindle the School.

The program was quite demanding. Where Dean Little had spoken of the high "mortality rate" among architecture students (that is, the high percentage of students who did not finish the degree), he was describing a fairly lock-step 5-year curriculum which culminated in an individual thesis studio, in which each student worked independently, with faculty advisors, on a project chosen and defined by the student.

At the end of the year, the "thesis" work would be reviewed by a panel of faculty. A very small percentage of students in thesis studio completed the requirement. In fact, Don Genasci, a student during the learly 1960's, and now a faculty member, recalled that of his class of 90 students only about 15 completed the degree.

A high level of design skill was required by the faculty. Some students found the criteria of review somewhat arbitrary. Some students who did not complete the degree entered the profession and began distinguished careers, such as Fred Coeder. However, as Genasci remembers it, it was a very rigorous program, with a very high set of design standards. It was generally accepted by faculty and students that almost no one would complete the degree in five years.

Another factor which led to the slow completion of degrees (the University President's office had released a study showing the average time required to complete the B.Arch five-year program was 7 2/3 years) was the variable credit system. This system assigned a percentage to different parts of the thesis, from initial site and program research through design development and presentation of the finished product.

If a student completed only part of his thesis project, that student was given a percent of credit. A student could, in theory, return each year, complete only part of the thesis, and continue to amass credit for unfinished work. In fact many students did repeat parts of the thesis for partial credit.

II. RESTRUCTURING

In 1963, the ACSA visited the School of Architecture as a part of its five year accreditation review. Wallace Hayden, Head of the Architecture Curriculum, had informed the faculty of the visit the day before the visit was scheduled. He told the faculty it was a simple matter; there was nothing to worry about.

The Board of Visitors found the Architecture Program disorganized, unprepared for the visit; there was no clear structure to the curriculum (there were too many students floating in the program, somewhere between 5th year and graduation).

Accreditation of the program was placed on probation.

This was a major blow to what had been considered one of the top ten schools in the country.

This rebuke provided an opportunity for restructuring. The School had become too large. The small family setting of Lawrence-Willcox, the interdisciplinary school, had been transformed into a metropolis of competing and even contradictory interests. Administration of the School, from one office, had become too unwieldy.

The faculty had already begun a process to break the School into administrative units or departments. This would be highly beneficial. The main administrative tasks of each department would be handled by that department; and each department would be administered by a department head and departmental committees.

Creese needed to revitalize the Architecture Program. He could not do that from his position as Dean. He needed to find a department head who could lead the program with some new bold initiative.

III. THE PRINCETON CONNECTION

The Architecture Program at Princeton, in the 1950's, produced a series of architect/educators which would affect quite proundly the profession of architecture and architectural education in America, especially on the West Coast. Students in the Princeton program included Ken Venturi, Chalres Moore, Bill Turnbull, Del Hylands, Dick Peters, Bill Kleinsasser, Robert Harris, Wilmot Gilland, and Donlyn Lyndon.

The guiding spirit of the Princeton program was Jean Labatut, a direct product of the Beaux-Arts System, a runner-up in the Grand Prix. Labatut was a large personality, a primary sun, around which revolved the other (lesser) faculty and students. Labatut was the director of the graduate program; but since all students worked in the same room, his influence touched everyone.

Wilmot Gilland, a student in the program and later Dean at Oregon, remembers Labatut:

"Labatut was an extraordinary teacher in the sense of challenging

you to think about your work... Architrecture was not being

considered only as building but as cityscape too...the tissue that

connects, the space that connects buildings together.

One of the things that Labatut said as a way of working

was 'learn, assimilate, forget, create'. This was a set of four stages

towards thinking about design...

Labatut was always very supportive in the studio and had a

great sense of humor about your work as well... One of Labatut's

favorite words was 'spectacle'. He was always talking about this

'spectacle' he had designed for some festival or international fair.

It would have fountains and jets of water and searchlights and

everything. I think Charles Moore was very much swept up in

all of that too, and a lot of his subsequent work has been involved

with thinking about the full range of possibilities."

Bill Kleinsasser, Professor at Oregon, remembered Labatut mostly as a "charming Frenchman." He was the strongest influence at the school, but mostly for his personality. "He was a wonderful Frenchman," Kleinsasser said. "But, no, he was not a designer."

Louis Kahn visited Princeton often, lecturing, critiquing design work:

"I found that the things Labatut would talk about have really left

me, by and large. I remember them as being fascinating a the

time...he was fascinating... On the other hand, I remember very

many things that Kahn said, very important, insightful discussions

of things that he would express with a very strong conviction.

It came out of his making of buildings, and out of his

understanding of particular design situation. I think the difference

was that one man was very close to the act of making real

buildings and the other one wasn't."

There was a bitter rivalry between Princeton and Harvard, of course. Harvard, with Gropius, was the famous program, with students regularly winning competitions. Many of the Princeton students were envious of the glamor of Gropius's program. But, Kleinsasser recalls: "The Princeton 'modern dogma' was different than that of Gropius and Harvard. It was more humane, more experiential. Over time, most Princeton students were relieved that they had not attended Gropius's school."

Besides the influence of Kahn, there were other strong faculty. Bill Shellman taught media courses with a very human approach, tending to define architecture as places seen by other people. Enrico Peresutti, an Italian architect, offered a course in designing and building a chair, with a keen emphasis on detail. Mario Salvadori taught courses on the infleunce of structural systems on design. Buckminster Fuller was a regular visitor. Donald Egbert taught a course in the history of modern architecture; and George Rolle on oriental art and philosophy.

Charles Moore went to Princeton because he wanted to be an architectural historian. He attended graduate school after working for years in the profession. He remembers:

"The fall term of the year I was an assistant to Lou Kahn -

I had just finished my doctorate and was teaching - was a class

of four, of which Bill Turnbull was one. The spring term

was a class of eight, of which Don Lyndon was one, and

Bob Harris was one, along with some others. It wasn't long

before several of the members of this very small group had

become heads of schools at some place or another: the so-called

"Princeton Conspiracy." I think it happened because education

was a very interesting thing at Princeton then, so we all ended

up being educators."

Bill Kleinsasser felt the program at Princeton was not strong, the curriculum was weak; but the students were strong:

"Most of the people at Princeton were privileged people in

one sense or the other. They were privileged either because

they were intelligent enough to get in; or wealthy; or

intelligent and wealthy; or confident for other reasons,

because of talent or skills. A school like that had a very

selective admissions office. I don't think there is any doubt

that that contributed a great deal to the reason why so many

successful people came from the school."

II. DON LYNDON

The finalists for the position of Department Head at Oregon in 1964 were William Wurster, former Dean of University of California and MIT; Walter Netsch Jr., chief designer of SOM; Robert Marquis; and Donlyn Lyndon.

Charles Moore had completed his doctorate, then taught at Princeton. He was hired as an instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had opened a firm which became Moore/Lyndon/Turnbull/Whitaker, one of the most prestigious young firms in the country. By 1964, Moore had become chairman of the program at Berkeley. He wrote to Walter Creese, concerning Don Lyndon's application:

"I have known him for rather over nine years, first as an

undergraduate at Princeton while I was there in graduate

school, later as a graduate student while I was on the

faculty there, and most recently as an instructor and

assistant professor here at Berkeley, where he and I have

taught in the architectural history program and in the design

sequence, and have together developed a new course in

oriental architectural history, which he has this year taught alone.

About three years ago I found myself writing: 'I can say without

reservation that Don's capacity to understand, create, develop,

relate, and transmit architectural ideas surpasses that of anyone I

know,or know of, but that carries the inaccurate suggestion that

he is a critic only, in some way incapable of making a creative

contribution himself. This is far from the case; he is an

extremely gifted designer, whose gifts are all the more worthy

because they are not hemmed in by any too rigid assumptions or

hasty stereotypes... The immense advantage to us of Don's

attributes is that he brings the same sort of creative insight to bear

on ideas about and theories of architecture that he brings to

architectural design problems--and this makes him just about

unique."

Lyndon was 28 years old at the time of his application. He was the son of Los Angeles architect Maynard Lyndon; he had worked with the Olgyays on climate-design research; he had been a Fulbright scholar in India, studying Hindu temples; he had worked on the Sea Ranch Condominium design with Charles Moore. He had lectured on topics as wide as "Le Corbusier's Hellenic Landscapes" to "The Drawings of Eric Mendelsohn" to "Organization of Form in Hindu Temples."

Lyndon was hired.

Many faculty at the School teaching during the Lyndon years remember him as a force of regeneration in the program. He was young, energetic, positive. He offered new courses; he placed a great emphasis on history; he was willing to make administrative decisions.

The program, after the early days, had been lacking a strong will to leadership. The ship had drifted; the wind (the Ideas generating motion) had been listless.

A group of faculty had resisted the restructuring of the School into departments on the grounds that it broke with the Lawrence/Willcox legacy. When Lyndon proposed further changes, some of these began a resistance. Lyndon fired several of them. Students protested the firings. Lyndon met with the students and explained his reasoning for the firing. The meeting calmed the students' protest.

He was concerned with the small percentage of students actually completing the program. He understood, from his work in an offic, that there were many jobs within an architect's office. Not every architect must be Frank Lloyd Wright to complete a degree, or to be useful in the profession. He expressed these views to faculty, with the conviction that the rigorous judgment of thesis studio work should take into account this understanding. Also, he abolished the variable credit system.

A higher percentage of students began to graduate.

Morale improved among students. Gary Moye, a B.Arch student at the time, remembered: "Students could feel a cloud lift when Lyndon came. There was just a general sense that things were improving."

He encouraged new courses and research for faculty. He was an active force. He hired new faculty.

Mike Pease was one of the first of a series of faculty hired from Berkeley.

Bill Kleinsasser was the first of a series of faculty who had worked in Louis Kahn's office in Philadelphia. David Rhinehart came in 1965. He stayed a short time before moving to the University of Southern California. He recommended the hiring of Pat Piccioni. Thom Hacker came next, followed by Richard Garfield, then Gary Moye.

Lyndon felt that, to achieve the quality of program he and Walter Creese desired, exceptional faculty must be brought to the department. He expected faculty to be committed to this role. He was ambitious for quality in the program. Many faculty were excited by this conviction.

In a statement of objectives written for the faculty after his appointment, and later distributed to students, he wrote:

"To have a department of architecture sufficient to its task

depends heavily on the quality of the faculty assembled...

There is, in my view, no 'ideal' teacher of whom all others

are pale shadows. In a complex society it takes many kinds

of men to teach, as it takes many kinds of men to build. It is,

however, imperative that teachers be men of commitment and

perspective, capable of articulating and demonstrating their

point of view...

To profess architecture, teachers should also be sufficiently

committed to their field to continually check their ideas--to

review their relevance and test their validity through design of

scholarship. We all need periodically to meet the challenging

circumstances of situations outside the university, to struggle

with unassimilated ideas and confront old theories with new

observations... The pace of change and development in the

whole of our society is now very rapid, and it is important for

faculty to have a background rich enough to enable them to

keep pace with events and understand their significance...

It seems to me fruitless to attempt to distinguish what is new,

what old in these objectives--we should, rather, try to be sure

that they are inclusive, appropriate, feasible and sufficiently

far-sighted."

Lyndon brought architects up from San Francisco, Moore, Turnbull, others, to lecture and to teach. He put a high priority on good relations between the department and local architects.

He was young and impatient. There were not many opportunities to sustain a significant practice in Eugene. Because his reputation as a "young Turk" administrator was growing, he began to be courted by other universities. The University of California at Los Angeles offered him the position of chair of their architecture department. Then came a similar offer from MIT.

There was a growing strife in the School. It had begun with the restructuring into departments, which had been opposed by many in the School on philosophical grounds.

Dean Creese began to consider budgetary needs on the basis of the major-count of each department. The Fine Arts Department offered many courses to university students, and, especially, to architecture students: however, these were no included in the Dean's accounting for budgetary needs; the Fine Arts major count was small.

The Head of Fine Arts was Jack Wilkinson, a proud, likeable, but intense man who considered himself a revolutionary. There was revolution in the air. The free-speech movement had awakened Berkeley; the war in Vietnam was becoming a major political issue on college campuses.

Wilkinson felt his Department was being treated unfairly.

Walter Creese was a proud, small man, who, because of polio, walked with the aid of braces and a cane. He was very strong-willed. He and Wilkinson readily became adversaries, political and personal.

Creese and Lyndon were close friends; there existed almost a father-son type of relationship between them. The Fine Arts faculty resented what they saw as favoritism toward Architecture. Lyndon was also outspoken about his belief that Architecture, since it was a larger program, had greater needs than the smaller departments. A schism between the disciplines was developing.

Lyndon, when being courted by UCLA, wrote a letter to Creese identifying reasons for his considering the offer:

"It is my distinct sense that there is inadequate recognition

of the great difference in need brought about by size differentials

between departments. Further, it should be clear to all concerned

that the only group in the university with wihich I have not

enjoyed working are the assembled department heads of the

School. Indeed, the self-seeking conservatism, shading into

paranoid mistrust, which has characterized the actions of several

members of that group has been the major source of any

impatience that I may have with the School. The barriers which

have been established to rational discourse, intellectual exchange,

and thoughtful consideration of common goals and needs, show

every evidence of being so firmly embodied in the minds of some

as to negate the benefits (which I had hoped would be numerous)

of a common school."

He listed other problems: the Department was desperately understaffed; there were significant gaps in the collective competencies of the faculty; there was no budgetary recognition of the immense administrative tasks in the Department; physical facilities were insufficient; the library was inadequate; faculty must be encouraged or required to engage regularly in practice, travel or scholarly endeavor.