Larry Klein and his wife were our next door neighbor in Evanston, IL, in 1976, when I was appointed to the ID Institute of Design in Chicago, IL. My wife and I moved into a carriage house that originally was connected to the Klein house. The long hall or covered walkway had been removed and […]
Influences
Christopher Alexander
Community and Privacy, with Serge Chermayeff (1963) Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) A City is Not a Tree (1965) The Atoms of Environmental Structure (1967) A Pattern Language which Generates Multi-service Centers, with Ishikawa and Silverstein (1968) Houses Generated by Patterns (1969) The Grass Roots Housing Process (1973)[46] The Center for Environmental Structure Series, […]
James F. Pfeufer
James F. Pfeufer was born in Comfort, TX in 1912. His grandparents were members of the German Freethinker movement who settled the area around 1848. He was raised in Harlem, NY, where he became an artist, scholar and clarinetist. He was high school class valedictorian, and attended City College of New York. A lifelong teacher […]
Frank Boas, Edward Sapir, and Philip Morrison
I have always been interested in trying to understand my loves, but even more importantly, to understand from where and whom my biases come. What is it that prompted me to prefer something over something else? Who lifted or lowered the curtain over my choice of realities, either tried to shield me or tried to […]
Robert Mann
Over the years, at MIT, I found that especially the more seasoned faculty members were always more open for discussion. One did not have to be enrolled in their classes. While Professor Edgerton was always available for a lively chat or the openness with which he showed his photographic work or provided descriptions of his […]
Charles Ives
One of my early discoveries was the musical work of Charles Ives (1874–1954), an American modernist composer of classical music. Oliver (Howie) Kline was a young designer who was hired by our office. He came from a family of opera and music performers, took me to some of the premiere performances of Ives’ work at […]
Kenneth Hiebert
It is my belief that Kenn Hiebert was the true founder of the American design school for Swiss Design in the US, even if he would fight me tooth and nail against this description. But it is my contention, that he was a messenger of a distinct way of evolving visual languages and solutions not […]
Ivan Massar
Real activists live their responsibilities. They don’t talk. They do. I met many important persons at MIT, but none were as significant as Ivan Massar, a Black Star photographer, who collaborated on many of the MIT projects, not just with me, but also with Jackie Casey and Ralph Coburn. From 1945 on, I grew up […]
Simmons Valz Project
It had never occurred to me that teaching is in my DNA, until recently, now that I am retired, and have the time to think. I understand there were other distant relatives of mine involved in education, but my grandfather (1865-1963) was a headmaster; his brother a music professor at a Berlin conservatory. My father […]
Alexander Nesbitt
Alexander Nesbitt, calligrapher, historian of typography, and teacher, was born 1901 in Patterson, New Jersey. He worked for many years in New York City as a graphic designer and teacher. In 1950, he published “History and Technique of Lettering,” which became a classic in the field. Later, he taught at the Rhode Island School of […]