In my mind, Sharon Poggenpohl is one of the very few design scholars and educators, that have earned my respect and admiration justly and through a yeoman’s commitment and hard work to aid students, graduate students, faculty colleagues, and practicing professionals to either apply sound available knowledge and tools for success or to develop them. […]
Biography
Płakowice Castle, My birthplace
I was born in the village of Plagwitz, close to Löwenberg, in Germany, now Lwówek Śląski in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship in Poland. Members of my family were evacuated in February of 1945 to escape the onslaught of Russian troops, ending up and finding refuge with in-laws at the Dutch/German border. The Löwenberg area became […]
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, made up of The Oregon Experiment (1975)A […]
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’s work at […]
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 openly show his photographic work or share descriptions of his South American research trips […]
Larry + Nancy Klein
Larry Klein and his wife Nancy were our next door neighbors 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 originally connected to the Klein house. The long hall or covered walkway had been […]
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 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 lift me up? […]
Fred Brink
Fred studied art history at Middlebury College and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was a professional photographer. A founding principal of Envision Corporation, Fred directed corporate communications media projects for Polaroid, The Boston Globe, Digital Equipment, Sheraton, and many others. Fred helped create Boston’s multimedia presentation bid to host the 1976 […]
Elmer Ray Pearson
When I arrived at the ID, Institute of Design, in 1976, very little of László Moholy-Nagy’s legacy remained. Jay Doblin, the next leading director of the school, as it is told, had rubbish trucks come to remove the emptied-out legacies of the Chicago Bauhaus and its traditions. There was a faculty revolt, and a great […]
Carl Zahn
When I became an associate at Leverett A. Peters, Associates, Carl Zahn dropped in one day unannounced, just to see what was going on in this new studio on Boston’s Boylston Street, across from the public library. Zahn’s professionalism was highly regarded. He knew the best set of printers from which one could choose for […]