…avanti, avanti, avanti,
you avant garde architect…
have gall, guts, audacity, cheek…
jaunt gallantly onward… 
just don’t gallivant from gala to gala…
don’t lose, but guard your integrity…
because in your exuberance
wanting to be the center
of notoriety or the toast of town, 
a household word…
it’s beginning to show…
that you are lagging behind…
your cupboard stands bare…
now you must play catch up with 
your principles…begin again…
to not further slip into entertainment 
and then skid into 
Disney’s amusement park…
Jaunt gallantly, but move on…now…
and that is just some personal advice…
take it or leave it…

To say the least, I had a very weird relationship with Nicholas Negroponte. He had been a long-time friend of the office, especially with Ralph Coburn and Jackie Casey. Coburn had been like a mentor to him. When I arrived at MIT, Negroponte was a graduate student in architecture, focused on issues of computer-aided design. His advisor was Leon Groisser. Quite often Negroponte joined Coburn, Casey, and me for lunch. Maybe because I was much closer to his age than the other two, he felt obliged to give me short shrift, even though he knew nothing about me. I hope it was not true that he disliked my German ethnicity, but I guess he could not accept that I already had a successful career behind me before joining MIT, and I had accrued an armful of professional recognitions, including the 1962 Art Directors Gold Award. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “For an American to be chivalrous with a German is a spiritual impossibility, a contradiction in terms.” I always wondered when, in Switzerland, if he had not picked up his disdain for anything German from that age-old cultural competition between central European countries. Maybe that is why he always had to make sure to point out that I knew nothing, which was most likely true. But in the same ways, I had blind-spots in my general knowledge, so did he—some pretty big sinkholes for any person in the early twenties. I did not care, because I saw him as a very spoiled juvenile, self-centered, who because of his background—his family were Greek shipping magnates in close relationship to Onassis. He had attended the Institut Le Rosey, a boarding school in Rolle, Switzerland, which catered to the children of prominent families and was interested in preparing international diplomats; Rosey’s list of alumni is significantly long with generations of dynastic families. He spoke French fluently (while my German was considered impeccable, the sophistication of use of English could have been interpreted as needy). His brother was a staff member of the then-ambassador to Vietnam George Lodge, so on and so on—and through his financial power connections he projected his values. I had none of this and no need of this. I never cared for European aristocracy of any kind and wondered why so much time and attention was paid to them: “The Queen of England does not ever consider to invite me to her house, why would I invite her to mine?”

All I remember, he did not care much for literature, music, and theater, and was pretty uninformed about both art and design. Even his thesis in architecture had little to do with any aspect of aesthetic philosophy. It was purely technical. He lived and breathed computer programming and would talk about punishing his computer for not behaving as he had ordered. I always wondered about persons enjoying punishment and at the same time questioned the computer program that would innately reflect those punishments. It definitely would be human but not necessarily different from a Neanderthal.

MIT did not shower its staff with extravagant salaries. In retrospect, I saw salaries as close to meager. But Negroponte would lecture me on how to invest in real estate or the stock market, and if I did not follow his advice, I was just an idiot. He reminded me very much of some of my cousins who had grown up in a textile empire, owning outright the small town of Schüttorf, Germany, lock, stock, and barrel. They and Negroponte walked the same walk; talked the same talk, but I never cared for them either. Looking back, I think, I have not done too badly and am pretty satisfied with my achievements. Power, notoriety, and money were never my gods.

I am still intrigued by the many claims of MIT alumni of having worked closely with Negroponte, as he was often away from campus traveling to one lecture and then the other or to raise money for his lab. From my experience, he was not easily assessable. I could get more easily a moment of Robert W. Mann’s time, a very distinguished MIT professor, and often and on short notice. Not like Negroponte, Mann was, at that time, a ranking institute professor, an engineer, and rocket scientist who developed the world’s first biomedical prosthetic device. Through the many discussions in his office, Mann strongly influenced and changed my approach to design, no longer just celebrating the aesthetic image but the functioning application of contents to very specific contexts.

The same was true of Harold Egerton, who would open his lab to show me his many experimental strobe photographs. I understood their humility and civility. I never saw the same in Negroponte. To him, I was not just important enough. In 1973, I invited him to lecture in the new Visual Design program which I had inherited and revised at Southeastern Massachusetts University. He first refused, until he found out that both Wayne Anderson, MIT professor in architecture, and Robert Mann had agreed to be part of this lecture series.

I also question his references to Christopher Alexander, because I am sure, Alexander would not agree with Negroponte’s approach of dealing with human environments, especially because of the different individual cultural needs, histories, customs, and ceremonies.

Now, it is also true that a much softer Negroponte emerged in time, but I question the depth of his commitments to the humanities. As a young MIT faculty member, he was an outspoken autocrat, standing decidedly for or against something, without room for compromises. Some decades later, at Dartmouth College, he represented the opposing position to “Liberal Arts” education as outdated and useless, preferring experiences in business and commerce. At the same time, he would talk about the goal of human-literacy in computing or technology coming to the aid of humanism: “Toward a Humanism through Machines.”

Technology cannot be the primary root for Humanism if it doesn’t reflect a specific philosophical core. Of course, from the times of Mesopotamia on, each technological invention or refinement supported the sophistication of a culture, but the value lies in philosophy, literature, art, and music. The technology just got us there. “Technology is good for you and exciting” may not be enough. Maybe the social networking can give hope of civics and civility, but the over-simplification of twittering, makes it clear that the old “Liberal Arts” education still provides a much sturdier common base for discourse, especially in the United States, where the scientist usually knows little about art and the artist little about science. Sometimes, complexification has its merits.

Negroponte achieved everything, he prophesied in his book, because those goals were quite easy. He had taken his clues from Varnevaar Bush, who always claimed, that if universities propose, and government and industry can read themselves into the idea, it will materialize. The early projects like his “ménage à trois” (human, computer, environment) or the developing concepts of spatial environmental sensors interacting with a person through the “smart dress” of the lab’s “wearable computing” projects, gathering the vital signs of the human body, was just not more interesting than the “smart social shoe” gathering and exchanging personal information from others who subscribed to the same technology and levels. 

That is also most likely the reason that the National Science Foundation turned down every grant request for nearly a decade. There was no real research going on. Instead there was the application of known technologies to different projects. I always believed that projects like “Put It There,” a military resource interactive program, could have been implemented by any masters-level design program. The “Self-Designing Magazine” was just a rehash in a different format of J.C. Penny’s self-designing package system that Jay Doblin of Unimark is said to have introduced to this chain store.

Negroponte had the ideal bully-platform by being a major investor in Wired magazine to which he became also a major contributor as well as a mouthpiece for any new way of applying technology to any computing endeavor. Wired was never a scientific journal. It was totally biased in positive ways toward him, and I always regarded it like as Negroponte’s “vanity press.” Over the years, he became more and more removed from physically participating in true research. He became a futuristic design and research talker in a cloud of possibilities, and the digital industry hung on to every word. One was reminded of the rhetoric of old time politicians: “A digital chicken in every pot.”

I worked only once creatively on a project generated by Negroponte and regretted every moment. He was involved with so many different corporations and start-up companies that I was never quite sure how deeply he was committed to them. He asked me to work on a project for an associate in one of his ventures. The idea was to eliminate all preprinted stationary and, through Macintosh technology and advances in the digital printing, to generate the full document each time from each secretary’s work station. We worked for about half a year, meetings after meetings, until we developed a mutually acceptable solution of quality typographic aesthetic and ease in secretarial implementation, when I received a phone call that the associate’s wife did not like the color of “yellow.” I have to admit, I did not receive the message with great kindness. After all that time, efforts, and expense, I told him to never bother me again; no charge (which meant eating about $15,000), but just stay away. How can one respond to totally irrelevant commentary, coming in sideways from an outsider of the process who was totally unaware and inconsiderate of the long process of evolving a solution, not separately, but step by step, with communication at each stage and phase. It was impossible for me to rip out every yellow flower of a meadow just to satisfy a diletant’s personal preference, without offering a functional and constructive alternative. As I said, power of decision making means little, when it is irrelevant.