Summary

The excellence of the KU Architecture Program and its students and alumni derives, in large measure, from the excellence of its faculty. Since Goldwin Goldsmith started building a program and a faculty ninety years ago, this faculty has been characterized by a living connection to the most important and respected intellectual trends and movements in architectural education, by a cosmopolitanism that includes professional experiences in architecturally important centers of activity, by personal contacts and experiences with some of the leading and legendary members of the field, by a diversity of training and experience that is international in scope and attitude, by an affinity for rational and scientific approaches to architectural design and an openness to experimentation, and finally, by an aesthetic sensibility that is at once historically cultivated and socially humane. In this next decade that will lead to our Centennial in 2013, we share a unique and remarkable heritage—the historical momentum of excellence in architectural education.

Ninety Years of Architectural Education in Kansas

by Stephen Grabow

In the fall of 1913, Goldwin Goldsmith became the first Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Kansas. The decision by the University to create a program in architecture originated in 1910 when Montrose McArdle, a prominent St. Louis architect, was hired by Chancellor Frank Strong to assist John Stanton, the State Architect, in designing a new Administration and College building in accordance with George Kessler’s master plan of 1904. (1) McArdle’s influence on the chancellor must have been significant because in 1912, at Strong’s request, the Kansas Board of Regents authorized the University to create an Architecture Program within the School of Engineering. Although McArdle, who had been appointed Professor and was expected to give a few public lectures on architecture while he worked on the design of the proposed new building, was offered the position to head up the new program by Dean Frank Marvin of the Engineering School, he returned to his practice in St. Louis. Upon Marvin’s retirement, his successor, Dean Perley Walker, was authorized by Chancellor Strong to conduct a national search. The University’s decision to fill this position was obviously a serious one because in 1912 Walker traveled east to New York City visiting schools in St. Louis, Champaign-Urbana, Ithaca and Boston before deciding upon Goldwin Goldsmith.

Goldsmith, a graduate of Columbia University, had been an apprentice of the legendary Stanford White in the New York office of McKim, Mead and White, one of the most prominent architectural firms in the country. After a year of postgraduate study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Goldsmith started an architectural practice with Joseph Van Vleck in New York City in 1897. Although appointed by KU in the fall of 1913, Goldsmith delayed his arrival on campus until the end of the year in order to finish ongoing projects in the firm but also, and more significantly, to attend the second organizational meeting in Washington, D.C. of the heads of eight of the then twenty-six schools of architecture in the United States. (2) This group eventually became the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, or ACSA, of which KU became a member in 1920. Under Goldsmith, Kansas joined a select group of fifteen “accredited” schools of architecture, out of the forty that then existed in the nation. Goldsmith remained active in ACSA and became its President in 1927. His early leadership in ACSA served as a model. Since then, five other KU faculty have served on the ACSA Board of Directors, including a member of the current Board in 2003.

Because of his training and orientation, Goldsmith adopted the American version of the educational methods of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in which all student design projects were juried in New York City with those of the students from M.I.T., Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, and Virginia. At that time, the reputation of a school became known by how well its students performed in these design competitions. In its first year of participation in the juries, 1917-1918, KU received twenty honors; in 1918-1919, forty honors; in 1919-1920, sixty-three honors; and by 1922, Kansas was listed among the top schools by the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. (3)

After becoming President of ACSA, Goldsmith went to the University of Texas to head up the architecture program in 1928. (4) After Goldsmith left Kansas, Joseph Kellogg, educated at Cornell and with professional experience in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, became Chair of Architecture. By then, and throughout the 1930s, KU, along with Cornell, Princeton, Yale and Southern California, began to move away from the Beaux Arts method of teaching design with its emphasis on juried competitions in New York and historical styles promulgated by Paris. Kellogg leaned more toward the practices of the so-called Chicago School of thought, influenced by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, owing to his contact with architecture faculty members George Beal and Vernor Smith, Wright came to KU to lecture in January, 1935. The Wright connection persisted at KU for over half of a century through Curtis Besinger, a 1930s graduate who went to Taliesin as an apprentice in 1939 and worked for Wright until the completion of the drawings for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1955. Professor Besinger taught at KU from 1955 until his retirement in 1984. Prior to his death in 2000, Oxford University Press published his memoirs, Working with Mr. Wright. (5)

In the decade after World War II, the Architecture Program under George Beal struggled to adapt to considerable growth and expansion within the School of Engineering. To cope, many new faculty came from the ranks of recent alumni of the Program; but in 1962, Eugene George became Chair of Architecture. George came from the University of Texas where he had once been taught by Goldwin Goldsmith and from Harvard where he had worked under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Under George, KU continued its orientation away from the Beaux Arts tradition and reinforced its intellectual connection to east coast schools such as Harvard and Cornell, to which Texas faculty were tied through the theoretical writings of Colin Rowe at Cornell. By the mid-1960s, most of the new faculty members in architecture at KU were coming from Austin.

In 1967, following an accreditation visit, the National Architecture Accrediting Board (NAAB) recommended that the conditions were right for the Architecture Program at KU to become an autonomous school of the University, with its own quarters, own library, and an administration directly responsible to the University administration and separate from the School of Engineering. In 1968, Charles Kahn, a Professor of Architecture at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and an M.I.T. graduate, became the first Dean of the new School of Architecture and Urban Design.

During Kahn’s tenure at Kansas the new school grew significantly in numbers of both students and faculty. Under his leadership, the modernist, Bauhaus-based and cosmopolitan orientation of the program expanded, with the additional emphases on social concerns and international relations. Kahn brought to KU the rationalism and scientific attitudes of M.I.T. coupled with the strong Bauhaus-based design orientation of North Carolina State that was derived from that school’s connection to the presence of ex-Bauhaus faculty members such as Josef Albers at nearby Black Mountain College. In addition, Kahn’s own social activism of the late 1960s influenced his attitude towards the curriculum. To Kahn, architectural design was a problem-solving activity that relied upon a deep understanding of human nature and social institutions, a movement that was gaining currency in a number of British schools of architecture. (6) In his recruiting of new faculty, Kahn sought young architects who represented these concerns.

By the mid-1970s, the faculty consisted of about two dozen individuals, many of whom were graduates of architecture schools (and professional firms) across the country that were actively involved in the problem-solving and social approach to design. At the same time, the School had started, under the aegis of a bequest from the estate of an alumnus, Donald P. Ewart, exchange programs for study abroad in both London and Edinburgh. Since then, there has been a steady number of British-educated and trained faculty members in architecture, including several faculty who, as KU undergrads, themselves participated in the Ewart Scholarship Study Abroad Program, two of whom received post-graduate degrees in London. (7)

In the 1980s, under Dean Max Lucas, the School received two additional bequests that created endowed professorships. The J.L. Constant Chair was filled by Victor Papanek, an internationally known Viennese designer who studied briefly with Frank Lloyd Wright and authored numerous books on rational and humane design. Professor Papanek died in 1999. The Don & Mary Bole Hatch Chair is currently filled by Wojciech Lesnikowski, an internationally known Polish architect who worked for Le Corbusier in Paris and who has authored books and articles on contemporary European design. This expansion of internationalism beyond the British connection became a mark of distinction for the School at the end of the Twentieth Century.

Other distinguished designers from Europe joined the School’s faculty in different roles in recent years. The prominent German architect Johanne Nalbach brought her expertise to the School as Adjunct Professor both in Lawrence and in Berlin. Juhani Pallasmaa from Finland, 2002 Pritzker Laureate Glenn Murcutt from Australia, and most recently, Peter Pran from Norway (who worked for Mies van der Rohe on Berlin’s new National Gallery and is now a regular member of the faculty) have held J.L. Constant Visiting Professorships that allowed them to work closely with students and faculty in the School. These important educational and intellectual connections have resulted in more numerous study-abroad opportunities for students and faculty. Today, the School has architectural study-abroad programs in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Spain.

The hard work and leadership provided by Goldsmith, Kellogg, Beal, George, and their followers eventually paid off. The KU Architecture Program achieved national recognition in the 1980s and was ranked among the top ten programs in the United States (out of 104 schools at the time). Through-out the 1980s, that reputation helped to secure a very talented faculty and student body. Today, under the leadership of Dean John Gaunt, the former CEO of the architectural firm of Ellerbe-Becket and a former student of Louis Kahn,(8) the student body in architecture is among the most highly selected group of undergraduates at the University of Kansas. At the same time, the faculty represent an impressive range of educational and professional experience. Many are considered some of the leading proponents of their area of specialization in the country through either their publications, their design work, or their awards. These areas of accomplishment range from the development of experimental techniques of design-build construction, to the recording of historical buildings, to the advising of health-care organizations on the design of medical facilities, to the creation of new techniques of computer-generated design methods, to the design of large-scale building projects such as the new Krakow International Airport, to low-energy building product development, to the development of award-winning residential designs, to historical and biographical research in architecture, and to recognized publications on design theory and criticism.

In summary, the excellence of the KU Architecture Program and its students and alumni derives, in large measure, from the excellence of its faculty. Since Goldwin Goldsmith started building a program and a faculty ninety years ago, this faculty has been characterized by a living connection to the most important and respected intellectual trends and movements in architectural education, by a cosmopolitanism that includes professional experiences in architecturally important centers of activity, by personal contacts and experiences with some of the leading and legendary members of the field, by a diversity of training and experience that is international in scope and attitude, by an affinity for rational and scientific approaches to architectural design and an openness to experimentation, and finally, by an aesthetic sensibility that is at once historically cultivated and socially humane. In this next decade that will lead to our Centennial in 2013, we share a unique and remarkable heritage—the historical momentum of excellence in architectural education.

1. A much reduced and modified version of McArdle’s design eventually became Strong Hall, the present administration building.
2. The oldest of the schools was M.I.T., started in 1865; the second was Columbia, Goldsmith’s alma mater, started in 1881. KU’s start in 1913 makes it one of the oldest architecture programs in the country.
3. Also in 1922, Elizabeth Rivard became the first woman to graduate from KU with a degree in architecture and today, women make up forty percent of the School’s students.
4. Today, the architecture school in Austin is housed in a building named Goldsmith Hall.
5. Many of the illustrations for Besinger’s critically acclaimed book were produced by Professor Steve Padget.
6. At the same time, the KU School of Architecture and Urban Design started a Graduate Program in Urban Planning with an emphasis on social policy.
7. Professors Kent Spreckelmeyer and Steve Padget both participated as Ewart Scholars and completed graduate work in London.
8. Both Dean John Gaunt and Professor Dennis Sander studied under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Grabow has been a member of the faculty for thirty years and was Chair of Architecture from 1979 to 1986.