Dialogues: Sidney K. Robinson

Architect Sidney K. Robinson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a house designed by his father, Richard Robinson. After attending Carleton College and graduating with a BArch from Columbia University in 1965, he spent two years in Iran as part of the Peace Corps, where he built his first building: a fire station. Upon returning to the United States, he worked at Alden B. Dow Associates before attending the University of Michigan.

His academic career started in 1973 at the Iowa State University, where we taught for twelve years, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1985. There he would have a dual appointment, teaching at the Department of Art History and the School of Architecture. Robinson has also taught at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, University of Michigan, and Carleton College. Throughout his career, he has authored or co-authored several books, including The Prairie School in Iowa, Inquiry into the Picturesque, and Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led to Architecture.

In 1986, he purchased the Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House in Aurora, Illinois, designed by Bruce Goff. For almost four decades, he has been the steward of this unique and historic home, opening its doors to architects and students close and afar, and sharing its lessons based on a dialogue of differences.

Iker Gil: We are here to conduct your oral history, and we are going to do it in chronological order. When and where you born?

Sidney Robinson: I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 9,1943, because my dad had a job as a construction estimator in Indianapolis during the war.

IG: Can you talk about your father? What did your father do?

SR: My father, Richard Robinson, was an architect. He had his own firm in Ann Arbor for twenty-five years. He was the son of a machinist, went to the University of Michigan, and joined the cultural world of a university. The phrase I have used to describe him is culturally aspirational. He made sure that he got an usher’s job for the concerts at Hill Auditorium. He happened to room with a librarian, so he learned about literature. He was very active in acquiring culture, which his home life had not provided.

When he graduated, he went on an archeological dig in 1936 in Iraq and then traveled through Europe in ’36-’37. He went to Germany and saw the autobahns and bought wonderful books, and he went to Paris and saw the International Exposition. It was the first time Alvar Aalto had shown his work, and he was quite taken by that. When he got home, he ended up buying furniture through Artek-Pascoe, who was the source for Aalto’s furniture in the late ’30s. He went up to Stockholm to have lunch with Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish people in Budapest at the end of the war. My father knew him because he was a classmate in architecture in Ann Arbor. This Swede went to Michigan and ended up in Budapest. It is quite an amazing thing. My dad has wonderful photographs of architecture in Europe in the ’30s. I gave all of those to the library at the University of Michigan.

When he came back to the United States, he worked at a couple of offices. Because he had met my mother, who was a nurse at the University of Michigan, they decided to live in Ann Arbor, and he ended up having his own firm. I went to architecture school and, as a young man, I was making judgments all over the place, which you do. I went into the office, where I didn’t spend a lot of time as a child. I looked at some work on the wall and I said, “How come this office doesn’t do more work like that one and that one?” At the time, I didn’t know, and I don’t know just how he found a way to tell me, but they were both his work. The point was that my father was not a forceful person. The obituary in The Ann Arbor News in 1990 cited Richard Robinson as “architect and humanitarian.”¹ He saw his role of architect as a member of a community with certain useful skills that contributed to a better society. I instituted a student scholarship at the University of Michigan, where we both graduated from, that rewards an undergraduate architecture student who sees the profession in a similar way, not as an exercise in self-expression [The first scholarship was awarded in 2017]. He was very big on responsibility because he was a very particular fellow. He ended up writing specifications because someone had to do that to make the office work. Because he was not a forceful designer personality, he could have done more work, but it wasn’t who he was. Their office was not a design leader. They educated a lot of students from the University of Michigan who went to have their first jobs in this office of five or six people. After the war, you didn’t have to market. There was the university wanting work, and there were schools, churches, and houses. They did everything. It was a wonderful career in that respect. As he aged and the whole market changed, he realized he could not have started his career in the conditions where he ended it because it was a whole different world. He understood architecture from a service perspective rather than from an architecture perspective.

IG: What was the name of the office?

SR: It was called Colvin Robinson. The other partner was Tex Colvin. They made a perfect pair. They weren’t social friends. My dad used to get upset with Tex because he was loose, and my dad was precise. And he said, “But then I remember in such-and-such a meeting, things got very tense, and Tex was able to say the thing that made it all comfortable again.” My dad said, “That is not what I can do.” They complemented each other very nicely.

IG: Did he ever teach?

SR: No. He had very little use for academic architects. He would go up to the university occasionally, as you would invite a practitioner to sit on a jury. My dad was not a voluble man at all. He didn’t speak a lot, but I remember when he did speak. He just didn’t think those people were worth very much. Of course, I had to become one to prove him wrong. I had colleagues at the University of Illinois say, “We forget that you don’t have an office because you critique like somebody in an office.” That is because I grew up in the home of a practicing architect. I had that perspective, and it had an impact on my career. I could never take my colleagues that seriously because of my father’s attitude.

IG: Did you ever visit the construction sites for any of the projects that your father was working on?

SR: Occasionally. The one construction I remember, however, was the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Ann Arbor, the Palmer House. He wanted to take me to see that. The contractor was a guy named Erwin Niethammer. Perfect for constructing a Wright house. But I didn’t spend a lot of time intersecting with my father’s professional activities, whether it was in the office or whether it was at a site. I rather spent time reading books about architecture.

IG: At what age would that have been?

SR: When he was traveling in Europe, he bought the issue of Wright’s work published by the Dutch magazine Wendingen. I remember looking at that as a ten-year-old. I have memories of what I liked as a child architecturally. I remember there was a house that became the Storer House, one of the concrete block houses, which was not designed for that technique, but I liked it because it was simple. I remember there were a couple of Greek Revival little houses in Ann Arbor, and I liked those because, as a child, subtlety is not what you are after; you are after clarity. The clarity of the Greek Revival house. I can remember looking at my dad’s history book from Michigan, which was Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. I remember looking at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul compared to Hagia Sophia. The plan of the Blue Mosque is bilaterally symmetrical. In other words, it is very diagrammatically clear, and Hagia Sophia is not. I remember liking one and not the other until I went to Istanbul and loved Hagia Sophia. Now I was seeing it differently. I thought Hagia Sophia was wonderful, and I was completely bored with the Blue Mosque.

IG: You mentioned your father met your mother in Ann Arbor.

SR: Yes.

IG: Can you talk about your mother?

SR: My mother, Alma Miller, was what is colloquially known as a PK. She was a preacher’s kid. My grandfather was a minister of a Pietist German sect called the Church of the Brethren. My mother grew up in a preacher’s house, and I have one cousin from that side. Grandma Miller had an eighth-grade education, but she was curious. She found the world marvelous to know about. For instance, she had a parrot in the home that talked, and I just can’t imagine those little ladies thinking it was all right for her to have a parrot. I wonder what the parishioners of her husband’s church thought. But she made sure that her husband came to Chicago. They came to Chicago for the summer so he could go to a Bible school, so that he could get a better pastorate back in Indiana.

Grandma Miller had three children; the infant was my mother. My grandmother taught herself photography and developed them in the bathroom down the hall in Chicago. She was the kind of grandmother who, when you were talking to her, there was no one else in the world but you. I remember that she wrote a letter that just shows her capacity to project. She said, “I will just quietly come into your room and watch you study.” That was so touching that she would project herself in those terms. My father’s cultural aspiration and my mother’s inheritance of curiosity, I think, played together to produce who I am.

IG: Do you have any siblings?

SR: It looks like I am an only child, but I had an older brother who died at age four, and then a younger sister who died at one. In the first years of my life, I was the youngest, then I was an only, then I was an oldest, and then I was an only. The first ten years of my parents’ married life were just grief-stricken. They did something for me, which is unbelievable. They walled all that off from me completely. I mean that picture of us at Christmas when I was three was taken six months after the older brother died. You would never know that from that picture. They kept their distance. In other words, my mother could reasonably have smothered me, and she didn’t. My father’s supportive attitude was a great gift. The dedication of this book [Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led to Architecture] says it all: “To Alma and Richard who gave me life and the freedom to live it.” The dedication of my book Inquiry into the Picturesque is: “To my mother, who gave me the love of words, and to the memory of my father, who gave me the love of liberty.” Rather than being a disciplinarian, my father somehow inculcated a sense of self-discipline in me, so he didn’t have to do it. I did it myself. I’ll never know how he did it. It must have been based in trust.

IG: You were born in Indianapolis, but did you grow up in Indianapolis?

SR: I probably left when I was one, so I ended up in Ann Arbor when I was three. Ann Arbor, I feel, is my hometown.

IG: Did your father design the house that you grew up in?

SR: Yes. They were renting in a post-war development outside Ann Arbor. Two children had died in that house. My mother, quite reasonably, said, “Rich, we have to move. We have a new life now. We have Sid, and that is what it is, and we have to have a new house.” In the midst of starting a business, my dad built a house; the Thermopane windows were seconds, not choice products. He was cutting corners all over the place, and it was a very economical house, except for the carport because the house was up from the driveway by probably six or seven steps. The roof folded down like a moth wing. A kid I remember said, “It looks like somebody sat on your house.” It had character to it. I sold it when my mother died. The guy who bought it still lives in it, and he is collecting the furniture that he sees in the historical photographs to put back in my dad’s house. He did an addition, which is quite reasonable because it was originally only 1,200 square feet. He put the addition exactly where my dad would have put it. He has been to this house [the Ford House]. I sell my parents’ house to a guy, and he comes and visits me in Aurora. It is just unbelievable.

IG: That is very unique.

SR: Isn’t that amazing? It is just amazing.

IG: Do you know when the house that your father designed was completed?

SR: 1951.

IG: Can you describe a little bit the neighborhood that you grew up in?

SR: We always lived on the edge of development. Across the street was raw land or forest. As a kid, I spent time across the street. There was a little stream that was 18 inches across, and there was a little waterfall that could have been 18 inches. I pretended like it was a Japanese garden. I would go look at that because, maybe because of the picture that I saw on my grandmother’s table. I was a Japanophile when I was like ten. In seventh grade, when I was twelve, I built a Japanese house out of Balsa wood using sliding panels. I could show it to you, but it is like a tsunami hit it. It’s 60 years old and it is a mess, but I just can’t throw it away. I was interested in the poetry and philosophy. Japan was a very important interest for me. I was able to get to Japan in 1969 and spend a month there on my way home from Peace Corps in Iran.

IG: You mentioned the picture that you had in the house. Tell us about the history around it.

SR: On the table next to the front door in my grandmother’s house, my father’s mother’s house, was this print of a Chinese ink painting. For some reason, I decided that it was important. From the very beginning, it was Zen ink paintings and the very reductive quality of Japanese culture that I responded to. My father helped me build the roof of the Japanese house because I couldn’t find the angle for a tilted roof. We had cork tile floors in our house, so my dad put pins in the cork and set up the planes of Balsa wood. He was willing to help his kid do his schoolwork, but only as an instructive activity.

IG: Seems like a healthy way to do it.

SR: Yes. He was very good at that. He was not interested in my going to architecture school straight out of high school. It is very wonderful to have a parent who knows who you are and thinks that is all right. I was allowed to develop completely on my own terms. My father was right to send me to undergraduate liberal arts at Carleton, but I could only last for two years. I wanted to be an architect, I thought. I ended up at Columbia University because Columbia was the only school out East that would take me as an undergraduate with only two years. The reason they did that was because they had a deal with Columbia College. There were a couple of people in my class who were finishing their bachelor’s degree in the architecture school. I don’t have a master’s degree; I have a bachelor’s degree in architecture. I love to say that I have two degrees that are completely defunct. Columbia does not offer a BArch anymore, and I have an ArchD, architecture doctorate from Michigan, which is now a PhD. My degrees don’t exist anymore, which I think is perfectly wonderful.

IG: Let’s back up a little bit. Did you go to high school in Ann Arbor?

SR: Yes.

IG: What was the name of the high school?

SR: Ann Arbor High School. As you can imagine, a high school in a university town is a different high school. There were 630 in my class. It was a relatively new building. It was called the Taj Mahal because the voters thought too much money had been spent on it. As an indication of the kind of school it was, most high schools had college prep curricula. Well, Ann Arbor High had a university curriculum, and that is an interesting point. As a child, I played Hansel in a city theater, and I painted, and so on. When I moved to high school, all my friends were AP academic types. I ended up continuing to play the violin, but I stopped doing all my artwork. A parallel choice was not to participate in theater, but to join the debate team. When it came time to draw at architecture school, I was not very good because I hadn’t kept it up. That was a fork in the road that happened. My father said he had trouble learning to read. I think he was a little dyslexic, like every architect. My mother was quite verbal, not that she chattered all the time, but words were important. My parents had a wonderful thing. When the Metropolitan Opera had a touring company, they went to Cleveland. They also went to Detroit. But my parents said, “Rather than racing into Detroit, let’s go to Cleveland and spend several days there.” My mother would go to listen to the opera, and my father would go to the Stratford Festival in Canada. Language was important. I can remember my father was doing Toastmaster, learning how to speak publicly, at the same time that his thirteen-year-old kid won a speech contest in junior high school. For a thirteen-year-old to be awarded something at that time means a lot. I was in competition with my friends, and I won. That, I think, was very important. Without knowing it, for the rest of my life, I was trying to figure out how I could get paid for talking.

IG: What year did you graduate high school?

SR: 1961.

IG: What happened after graduation?

SR: Since I couldn’t go to architecture school after high school, I ended up at Carleton College in Minnesota, which is rated very highly. I keep track of it and US News and World Report have it ranked eighth or ninth in the country. I was an intellectual person as a high school student, so going to college was just more of the same. My best friend was a roommate, and he came from a family that didn’t have a college tradition. He never felt at home at Carleton because culturally, he was not used to it. For me, it was just the same. I enjoyed it. I flunked physics because I made a stupid mistake; they offered physics for poets and then physics for scientists. A classmate said I should take the physics for science, which was a mistake because I didn’t know what I was doing. If I had taken the other physics course, I am sure I would have passed.

I wanted to go to architecture school. My dad said, “Okay, you have done your two years.” I ended up at Columbia because it would accept me and I can remember, my parents, they just kept their lips buttoned. I mean, they were so careful. I am going off to meet Dean Kenneth Smith, acting dean at Columbia’s Architecture School, on my own. I took the train because you could take the train from Detroit to New York that went through Canada and Niagara and Albany. I get there and I find a hotel, and it was a beautiful day. It was the only time I went on the top of the Empire State Building. I got on the bus. Broadway forks away from Amsterdam, and it turned on Amsterdam and I didn’t know whether that was a good thing, so I got off the bus. I had a nice conversation with Dean Smith, who was a very dour engineer-type with a hearing aid. On my way out of the office, he just casually says, “You’re in.” There had been no indication of that during the conversation. I walked down the hall saying, “Oh, my goodness! I just got in!”

IG: Was that in 1963?

SR: The visit was spring of ’63.

IG: And you started in the fall of 1963, correct?

SR: Yes.

IG: What was the degree in Carleton College?

SR: Well, I only stayed two years.

IG: You didn’t receive a degree?

SR: No. I’m an alumnus; they claim me. They want money, of course. But they kept away from me for years because I got a call, and the message was just so disturbing that I really got mad. They sent me some kind of publications, but they never asked me for money until I got Third Coast Percussion to play there. I went down to the development office and wrote them a $10,000 check. Now I’m back on the list, let me tell you.

IG: You started in the fall of ’63 at Columbia University. Did you apply to any other school?

SR: I think I tried Penn, but they said you had to have an undergraduate degree. I went up to Minnesota, obviously, since it was just up the road from Carleton. I said I was interested in history and theory, and a guy said “We are a very workaday school. You want to do that? Go out East.” When I was finally accepted, I was like, “Okay, I did!” To get to the drafting room at Columbia, you have to go in the front door and Avery Library is right there. You got the feeling that all that stuff was just filtering up to the upper levels of the building.

IG: Do you remember who was teaching?

SR: Yes. Eduardo Terrazas de la Peña, a Mexican architect. He did the posters for the Mexico Olympics in 1968. He was a visiting person. He was a very young man.

Because of reading and so on, I had a large cache of architectural images. I walked around and I could tell my classmates’ sources. “Oh, you were looking at this. Oh, you were looking at this.” Of course, it made nobody happy.

IG: You were like an architectural snitch.

SR: Exactly. I did reasonably well. I mean, I wasn’t a star by any means, but I enjoyed it. And being in New York…The funny thing is that the University of Michigan has a lot of New York students. As an example, we could get The New York Times Sunday edition on Sunday morning in Ann Arbor, the one that you could buy in Manhattan, because they put them on the overnight train and brought them to Ann Arbor. We were also out-of-town members of the Museum of Modern Art, so we got all the publications. That was an indication of how my father brought me along with his aspirations. I was part of that.

But the person I remember the most was a guy initially from Chicago, whose name was Alexander Kouzmanoff, who had taught there for a long time. He was wonderful at the time, but I questioned his pedagogy later. He was so intuitive that he could tell where you were going with a design project and could help you get there. That is different than being a critic, that you should try something else. As a student, it was very nice to have someone who was encouraging you to do what you were doing, but he could have been a little more critical, I think, to our advantage. But he was a lovely person.

When I was at Columbia, somebody had given a big chunk of money for European travel, and it had usually been meant for several months, meted out for one or two people. James Marston Fitch, who taught there—we called him Tennessee Jimmy—was basically a journalist who was also a historian. Classes with Jimmy Fitch were basically what he had read in The New York Times that morning. He had this wonderful Tennessee accent. He was something. He read the terms of the gift of this money, and it said it had to be a member of the graduating class. He went to the lawyers and said, “Successful completion of the third year makes you a member of the graduating class.” Suddenly, this pile of money was distributed across the whole class. We got to do three months in Europe on their dime. And that was wonderful. It was structured beautifully. The very first part, we would meet in London, then in Edinburgh, then in Oslo, and then in Leningrad. Between these meetings, you were on your own to figure out how to get from one city to the next, but you knew there was a hotel waiting. We got our sea legs learning how to travel. When that ended, for the next month and a half, we were on our own. By then, of course, we knew how to do things. We ended up at Reid Hall, Columbia’s house in Paris. We were hanging around Paris and, in fact, I was in Paris on Bastille Day in 1966. It was the one time that I was a member of a crowd that was completely out of control. In other words, I had no determination of where I was going. And that was a bit terrifying.

[Georges Robert] Le Ricolais, the engineer from Penn, came and talked to us in Paris; Aldo van Eyck came and talked. Of course, van Eyck had seen all the important things in Paris, so he wanted us to accompany him to places that nobody ever goes to. One of the cool places we went was a museum that has models of cities on the borders of France that were built for the military in the nineteenth century; a museum with these wonderful models of these cities along the German border and so on. No one else would ever know to go there, but Aldo knew to go there, so we got to go to places like that, including looking at the Maison de Verre.

IG: Did you visit other architects in their offices while you were traveling across Europe?

SR: Yes, occasionally. Because it was architecture and planning, we also had meetings with planning people. The ’60s were a time of megastructures. There was a megastructure built in Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow, Cumbernauld Town Centre, and we made a pilgrimage. The first indication that this was a problem was that the rail stop was not in that building. I went back there forty-five years later, and the place was nearly abandoned. That project was a failure. It was just amazing to walk around these empty rooms of this big, concrete thing. Talk about a lesson in history that taught us a lot.

We had to write an essay as part of the requirement for doing the trip. How do you do research when you are traveling? I mean, that is ridiculous. But I hit on an answer: boundaries. I could sit in a cafe and notice the difference between public and private. I could go to a church and notice the sacred and the profane. On the train, I could see the rural and the city. I found a subject that I could do while I was traveling. I ended up writing this little essay in 1966, which I wrote in the hotel across from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The subject of it was boundaries and I mentioned Wright’s work. And then, fifty years later, I write a book called Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright to prove that I haven’t had a new thought in fifty years.

I was very proud of my essay. I did little drawings showing overlaps and so on. I was very interested. There was a lot of talk in those days about field theory. I was thinking of boundaries from a field theory standpoint. I didn’t understand what I was talking about. I am not using that anymore, but it led me to think about boundaries.

IG: When you went on this trip, was that the last year you were studying at Columbia?

SR: Yes. I graduated in 1967 because I was a member of the graduating class in the previous summer.

IG: You went back and you did another year.

SR: Yes. Right.

IG: How did the trip influence your last year at Columbia?

SR: It was more the culture of the time. I did a kind of megastructure for housing at University of Michigan because the last year, we were able to choose our own project. That was in the days of Rapidographs. It was a big building, wedge-shaped. The drawing, I would cut and show sectional changes. In the surface, there were a lot of lines. My classmate said, “Who drew that?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, every time we looked up, you were talking to somebody. We never saw you sitting at your desk making those drawings, so who did that?” I said, “I did, of course!” When I ended up going back to school in architectural history, all my classmates said, “Of course! We knew that was what was going to happen!”

IG: It was the natural evolution.

SR: Of course. “We saw that happening. You may not have noted it yet, but we knew.” I think my dad knew too, by the way.

IG: I think sometimes it takes others to see what your destiny is.

SR: Exactly, yes.

IG: Before we move from New York, I am interested to hear how the city itself influenced you while you were at Columbia University.

SR: Well, it was primarily a cultural thing. The thing I was starting to say and didn’t complete is that my parents and I learned about events and music in New York sitting in Ann Arbor. Now I’m sitting on 116th street in Manhattan, and I don’t have any money. My relationship to the events just down the road was similar to when I was sitting in Ann Arbor because I couldn’t go to them anyway as I didn’t have any money. I mean, I did, and so I went to Philharmonic Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, and so on.

I think it wasn’t so much that I was absorbing patterns of urban life or whatever. Although one of our classes suggested it, and we did it. Before they moved the market that is now at Hunter’s Point, it used to be on the Lower East Side, and the rail cars with the food would come to New Jersey and they would float across the Hudson. We went down at three o’clock in the morning. The cobblestones and the steel wheels, I mean, it was like another time. We missed the tomato auction by an hour. We were too late. We were sort of mad, because we saw the pit of where that had taken place. It was pretty amazing. That was before we went to Les Halles in Paris to see something similar, but we had seen a little touch of it in New York City.

IG: New York was a cultural influence in general.

SR: Yes, right. We also had visitors, obviously, who would come to Columbia. Lou Kahn came to visit and gave a talk. I mean, that was, again, the real advantage. I heard Bucky Fuller, too, stand up with his Coke-bottle glasses and talk for an hour. You wondered if he had any idea there was anybody out there. But Lou Kahn had this wonderful talk. He was talking about white light/black shadows, yellow light/blue shadows. He was talking about the aging of modernism, that it went from black to white, from yellow to blue. It was poetic.

I can’t remember who gave this talk, but they were talking about the integration of non-rectilinear geometry into a rectilinear context. I think it was Victor Lundy. He used Wright, Corbu, and Aalto as examples, primarily as a plan thing. I had the Wendingen issues with these beautiful photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright and these crippled sketches of Corbu. As a kid, those sketches meant nothing to me. They weren’t attractive on any level. Corbu is an acquired taste for me, coming from Wright. In the Armée du Salut [Cité de Refuge], where the geometries are just jammed together, there is no adjustment on either side. The opposite is Frank Lloyd Wright who, when he does a stair, he makes the trim along the stairs do this [makes a zig zag gesture]. There is no diagonal line in that geometry. He pointed out that the hanging stairs at Fallingwater are held. In other words, it is a rectilinear stair. There is no diagonal of any kind. Aalto merges the two, so there is this transition zone where the angled incorporates the rectilinear. It was an interesting discussion.

Serge Chermayeff came down from Yale. He was visiting up there. He came down and sat in the drafting room at Columbia with five or six of us, just hanging out. He was a very elegant fellow. He was talking, and he said he was thinking of architecture as an iceberg: 10% visible above the water, and 90% invisible below the water. He had decided the important part of architecture was the 90% invisible. I begged to differ with him. I said, “No, the important part is the water line.” He gave me a look. He didn’t say anything, but I think he never told that story the same because I was right. That is the hard part, where you go from the invisible force to a formal expression. To me, that is architecture.

IG: That is the threshold, right there.

SR: Exactly. It’s the transition. It is crossing the boundary. So, “No, I’m sorry. I think the water line is the important part.” I felt very proud of myself, of course.

IG: You graduated in 1967.

SR: Yes.

IG: At that point, you have to make a decision. Do you want to go to practice? Do you want to stay in New York? What were you thinking at that point?

SR: It was 1967: Vietnam. That was on all our minds; the possibility of having to go fight. The solution for two of us in the class was the Peace Corps. We signed up and we were accepted. Somebody from the FBI came to Avery Hall and interviewed us. We took a language test and whatever. All architects at that time knew there was one Peace Corps architecture program, and it was in Tunisia. Everybody wanted to go to Tunisia. It just happened that the Shah of Iran had instituted a program with Peace Corps the year before. All of a sudden, Iran was an alternative to Tunisia. I ended up going to Iran. We had culture and language study in Utah; they wanted to get us used to a theocracy. We had three months of language, and that was an instructive time. Apparently, I scored very high on the language test.

My mother was so sweet, she could make observations to her kid that were not judgmental. They were simply observations. I took them as observation. One of the phrases she used was, “Did you ever think what you could have accomplished if you had really worked?” What she saw was a guy who was talented enough to not have to work very hard. And that is true. I did not reach my potential because I was lazy. I mean, I’ll just put it that way. Well, that came to pass in language class in the Peace Corps, because here I was coasting along doing nothing, and all of a sudden, I was dropped out of the top class, and I had to go to the language lab and listen to tapes. I can remember how humiliating that was. “I don’t have to do that.” “Yeah, you do.” My father, who always worked hard, I think in his last months, made this observation, “You have had a very easy life, Sid. I hope if it gets difficult, you can meet the challenge.” The funny thing is that my dad is the one who set it up so that I did have an easy life. Now he was wondering whether that was a good idea or not. I can work, but I can work in small bursts. I mean, when I look at this book, I can barely remember writing it, as my other books. Did I write that? It was done so casually. That approach has curtailed my career, in other words, what I am able to do. If we are looking for somebody to be guilty, that would be my dad. He always said he believed in a broad base. Well, broad base and passion don’t go together; one focuses, the other scans. As a result, I was able to do this, and this, and this, but never that. When I got the Wright Spirit Award from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy—they give out five or six a year—John Waters did a three-minute summary. I thought the thing that was interesting was to have your whole career compressed in three minutes. I don’t think there was anybody else in the room who had done work with Alden Dow, Bruce Goff, and Frank Lloyd Wright. That is an indication of how I think and work. I am not a Goff fan; I am a Ford House fan. There was a wonderful description of the city of Alexandria. It was described as a Hellenistic barge docked on the coast of Egypt. A further description was that Alexandria was always by but not of Egypt. Well, I have been by, but not of a lot of things. And that describes Sid.

IG: That is a great description.

SR: There are some advantages to that and there are some disadvantages, but that is true of every choice anyone makes.

IG: Of course. You worked two years in Iran?

SR: Yes.

IG: What were your tasks there?

SR: The reason there was a Peace Corps program in Iran was that the educated people didn’t want to go back to the provinces. They wanted to go to Tehran. The Ministry of Interior was getting tiny little projects that had no business being in Tehran, in the main office. They were establishing branch offices in the provincial capitals. One of the ways they were going to up their presence was to put Peace Corps people in those branch offices. I guess the office had been in existence, I don’t know, for two or three years, so now they had Peace Corps people in those offices. I was in the provincial office of the province of Gilan, which is on the Caspian Sea.

It is unlike the rest of Iran because of the Alborz Mountains. It looks like Southeast Asia because of the rain and the rice paddies. All the rice is grown on the Caspian littoral and there were no crafts. They were farmers, so I couldn’t buy a carpet or anything. They didn’t do that. I had a friend who was in Shiraz, and his office and his house were on opposite sides of the bazaar. For two years he would walk through the bazaar and check out the carpet dealers. They had no idea how long he was going to be there, and slowly he was figuring out which ones he wanted and the right pricing. He came back with beautiful carpets. I just ate the rice and the sturgeon. We had fish and caviar. They were state fisheries; it was a state-run organization. When they were catching the fish, we went with the Peace Corps English teacher, and we stopped at one of these little places where they catch the fish and they caught a sturgeon. We had a bowl of caviar right out of the fish. We had sandwiches like peanut butter. As a result, I am a caviar snob. If it’s been out of the fish for more than an hour, I just can’t eat it.

IG: You have been spoiled.

SR: Totally. It hadn’t been preserved with salt, so my description of fresh caviar is marine butter. You can tell it is from the sea, but it is butter. It was just amazing. Iran was perfect because it had architectural history, and I fell in love with the brickwork. The tile is wonderful. There is a non-tiled room—the North Dome Chamber—in the Friday Mosque in Isfahan, which I think is the loveliest building in all of Iran.

We became bus riders. A six-hour bus ride in Iran is like nothing. Other people were, “oh, no.” You have twelve hours, that is getting up there, but six is nothing. I was close enough that I could get a five o’clock bus in Tehran and be in my bed at eleven o’clock in Rasht; that was luxury. I could go to the big city, but I didn’t live there; much like me in Aurora going into Chicago.

IG: Was the other student from Columbia that also went to Iran in the same city as you?

SR: No, he was on the Persian Gulf.

IG: Okay.

SR: My first building was in Iran, and it was a fire station. It was the first time I drew something and saw it built. It was mostly what I expected. But there was one thing that surprised me. It was a fire station, so there was an office part and a garage part, and there was a corridor along the back of the garage, which I had not thought of as having a tall section, because they didn’t put a ceiling in. Suddenly, that corridor felt like it was like two inches wide. If it had a ceiling, it wouldn’t have felt like that. It wasn’t finished when I left. A friend of mine went back and took pictures. Because it rains all the time, I made sure that there was a deep stepped porch with an overhang, because what people do is they hang out at government buildings. There were a lot of places to sit, and they were sitting there, so that worked. I googled it and it is gone because, after fifty years of growth, that fire station didn’t work anymore. There is a much bigger one in the same location. But my first building was in Iran.

IG: Was that the only building that you did while you were in Iran?

SR: I did a little tea house too.

IG: Did you ever go back?

SR: No. That is interesting because a member of our group was contacted by somebody saying they were planning a trip to go back to Iran, and he contacted three or four of us friends. All the Peace Corps people said no. The reason was that we wanted to have that memory pure and not add anything to it. I thought it was interesting that all three or four people said, “No, we don’t want to go back.”

IG: Interesting. That was 1967 to 1969.

SR: Yes.

IG: After that, you moved back. And again, you have to make a decision: where you are moving back to? And where you are going to work?

SR: Exactly. I guess we traveled for six months with another Peace Corps friend. We went to Afghanistan, and we went to India. We spent a month in India and saw Chandigarh, the temples, and the Mill Owners’ Association Building in Ahmedabad by Corbusier, which was lovely. I mean, that is a wonder. That, the Shodhan House, and Ronchamp are the Corbusier that I like, because they have that three-dimensionality. Ronchamp is great because there is a cantilever, right? I immediately liked it. Then we went to Angkor Wat, Singapore, Hong Kong, and then Japan. A couple of months after being back, I read in the paper that the hotel we stayed in when we were at Angkor Wat was now the headquarters of the Khmer Rouge. It was a matter of months. It is like my dad being in Nazi Germany in 1937.

The wonderful thing is I was in Iran exactly thirty years after my dad was in Iraq; we were both twenty-four. We leave architecture school and go to the Middle East, father and son. It is really quite remarkable, the complete parallel there. I finally got to Japan, and it was wonderful. I was just thrilled we got to Katsura and went to all the places. But the problem was figuring out where to go because I was aware, sitting in Iran, that I was in an information desert. I had my father going into the bookcase in my room looking up books so that he would write recommendations. The travel arrangements were done by writing to Ann Arbor from Iran what to do in Japan.

I can remember that I was sitting in the airport in Detroit, the first leg to fly to New York and then to Iran. I talked to my mother, and I realize now the control that she had to exert to not just completely fall apart, sending her son God knows where. I appreciate it now, but of course, at that time, I was thinking about where I was going, not what she was thinking. I realize now how powerful she was to not lay that on me. She withheld that completely. I made sure that I took pictures and sent them back. My mother said, “You will never know how important it was for us to see where you were living and the town you were in as reassurance.”

IG: I can imagine that.

SR: I had a little house and a pump in a squat closet for a toilet, and an Aladdin heater, because you had to boil the water and all that. It was fun. Other Peace Corps people identified with Iran and are very active in that. That was not the case for me. I mean, I enjoyed it as an experience, and the fact that I could go and see places and so on.

IG: I can imagine that going to Japan, with your interest in the country since you were a young person, was an important moment too.

SR: Yes. There was a wonderful moment when I was in Iran. We had a month off and I went to Turkey. I went to Didyma and Ephesus and all those places. I arrived in Istanbul by boat from the Black Sea, so I arrived at Istanbul from the east.

When we stopped at these ports on the Black Sea, I saw these brass finials. I thought they were wonderful. I am traveling with a little French cardboard suitcase that was this big [makes a small rectangle]. Peace Corps people are great travelers; we can travel with nothing. We do a lot of laundry along the way. I had an umbrella strapped on. Thanks to Atatürk and the Roman alphabet, I can read a map and a phone book. There was a bus company that went from Munich to Tehran that we knew in Tehran. I said, “I’ll bet they have an office in Istanbul, since that is where they would go.” I looked it up and I have this box, this wooden box. That thing is like a shish kebab. It is in sections. You can make it shorter than that. The box was about forty pounds of brass. What was I thinking? I’m traveling. And now I have 40 pounds of brass. What do I do? Wear it around my neck? I go to the bus company to ship it back to Erzurum, the big city at the eastern end of Turkey. I speak English; he speaks German. I don’t speak German, so I try French. No French. Then, I have a brilliant idea: I bet he speaks Persian, and I did. He practically leapt over the counter to embrace me. It was the last language he would expect me to know. He couldn’t do enough for me; he was so happy to help. It got put on top of a bus and went from Istanbul all the way across Turkey to Erzurum. I take a train through the headwaters of the Euphrates up in Turkey. The Turks can cook. This guy on the train had this kitchen that was as big as this table, and he was making the most wonderful things. When we got to Erzurum, I gave my receipt to the guy and he went back, and he came out with my box. There it was.

IG: It made it there.

SR: The challenge was getting it into Iran. At the border, they have this long table and on one side are the Turks, on the other side, the Iranians. We have to take everything off the bus and put it on the table. All the officials want to know what that box is. I have a receipt in Turkish, obviously. “Oh, okay.” Next question. Do I have receipts for legal conversion of money? There was black market and bank. Then everything gets shoved across that table. Now the Iranians are looking at it and they want to know what is in that box. I don’t know what to call that in any language, so I come up with the answer, “It’s decor.” And they say, “Oh, okay, decor.” It was all fine. I could have had drugs in this box, but it was decor. It gets put on the bus, and I have ended up taking it home.

IG: Here it is [pointing at the object in the room].

SR: And here it is, right.

IG: How about the trip to Japan?

SR: Oh, yes. I’m in Japan. Seeing all the things I had looked at in pictures: architecture, gardens, and paintings, all confirmed my delight. I went to a Noh play and was completely transfixed with the 2 percent of what I could get; it was just wonderful. I remember seeing the Bunraku puppet theater in New York and thought that was wonderful too. But an important thing I did in Tokyo was write to Alden Dow. I had gotten a summer internship at Alden Dow’s office in 1966, which I had to decline because I was going to Europe. Alden Dow’s sister [Dorothy] lived in Ann Arbor. My dad’s firm and Dow’s firm sometimes competed for work in Ann Arbor. One was the City Hall, which Dow got. My dad’s office was in Ann Arbor; you could practically do a construction site by looking out my dad’s window because it was right down the street. They didn’t get it because Alden’s sister was a contributor to the Republican Party. Another thing about my dad and his partner is that, at one point, they were looking for state work, and they got a notification from the state that there were conditions you had to contribute. My dad and his partner said, “Then, I guess we’ll never do state work.” There was no question; ethically they were exactly the same.

When I arrived in Japan, December 1969, my mother couldn’t wait to see me; they came to Japan to meet me. They were being hosted by two or three Japanese people, because of somebody that we knew in Ann Arbor who had worked for MacArthur. She had befriended Japanese people. They took off work and shepherded us around. It was really nice. We got to see cool places. I had to write a letter to Dow asking for a position, and I had to write it from Japan. All of a sudden, when the letter arrives in Midland, this guy asks for a job from Japan. Dow loved Japan, and I think that meant something.

IG: That sealed the deal.

SR: It did. I get back to Ann Arbor. The transition back into the States, as everyone said, was much harder than the transition to a foreign country.

IG: What made it difficult?

SR: The expectations of home after being away in a strange culture were challenging. It was winter, it was January, and my mother had wanted to go to Hawaii on the way back from Japan. After two years in Asia, the excess of Hawaii just really pissed me off and I wouldn’t shut up about it. In fact, I heard from my cousin that my parents told his parents that they were afraid I had turned into a communist. I was just overwhelmed by the excess that I was seeing in Hawaii. I come back and, in three weeks, I am driving for the first time in two years. I am driving my mother’s car up to Midland for an interview. I get a job, and I come back. I can remember driving up and I was looking for a cop to take me home. I have no business doing this. This is ridiculous. Here I am going 65 miles an hour in a car that I haven’t been in for two years. What the hell am I doing? My dad was so funny, because he knew what I knew and didn’t know. He said, “Well, we wouldn’t have given you a job.”

I was a very junior designer, but I was in heaven. You know what Dow’s office looks like. I mean, it’s a beautiful place. To actually work in that office and have a key to the front door. I worked to reclaim what little skill I had on the violin, because I hadn’t played for several years. Dow was the patron of the Midland Symphony, so I wanted to impress him. I did, and it worked. At one point he came by, and he stopped and said, “Now, you are the one who is playing in the symphony?” “Yes, I am.” It worked.

IG: Were you hired as a junior designer?

SR: Yeah.

IG: What projects did you work on?

SR: I did a preliminary design for a little church; others took it over. I ended up doing ceiling tiles for a hospital. They kept me on because I had accrued time to study over the summer for the licensing exam. They knew I was going down to the University of Michigan. The architectural historian at Michigan was Leonard Eaton, and I had met with him. The ArchD program was new; it was three or four years old. Leonard had never had a historian in the ArchD program, and he is the kind of person who said: “You are my man.” Just like that. When it came time for admissions, there were seven spots, and one that was already claimed, because it was Leonard’s. The others were competitive, but not this one because Leonard had tapped me on the head.

The only summer I worked in my dad’s office, which was not particularly comfortable being the boss’s kid, I went along on a job meeting for a township hall they were designing, and they were having trouble satisfying the staff. It turned out, which often happens if you don’t control your client, that they saw Wednesday night as entertainment as the architects showed something new. As the non-architect, I knew what was wrong: office politics. The township treasurer was a woman, the secretary was a man. The only thing they wanted was for their offices to be exactly the same size. When I told the architects, the staff loved the new design we showed them. The architects thought it was design, which is what architects do. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn’t. They wanted two offices the same size.

IG: You returned to the University of Michigan in 1971 after you left Dow’s office. You had gone around the world to then come back to your hometown.

SR: Yeah. My classmates at Ann Arbor High, we all applied to Michigan and got in, but that is not where we wanted to go. In fact, Carleton was perfect because it is a small school. I was accepted at the University of Chicago, which would have been a disaster because I was an innocent kid, really. By the time I went to New York two years later, I had grown up a little bit, but to go straight out of high school to the South Side of Chicago would have been a terrible thing.

IG: Those two years helped you with the transition.

SR: Yes. They helped to be able to handle New York.

IG: What was the work that you did at Michigan?

SR: I had a teaching assistantship. My parents were not paying anymore, and we had to write a dissertation. I can remember we had a class where we met every week restating our dissertation goal. We used to think it was so painful, but it was so necessary. If we had started to write without that, we would have been all over the place.

IG: The dissertation was about Taliesin and Dow’s studio. Obviously, Dow’s studio was something that you knew very well.

SR: I had seen Dow’s office in 1959 when I went up to Midland with my parents to see the last exhibit of Wright’s work that he had a part in. Since my father knew and appreciated the place, we went over and I saw this amazing, low building resting in the snow, and was fascinated. It is a beautiful merging of architectural geometric texture and arranged nature. Seven years later, while I was a student at Columbia, I applied for a summer job. I was accepted but had to step aside because of the Europe trip offered by Columbia. After I had worked with Alden, I had seen people approach a wealthy man with their hand out. When I did my book on Dow, I couldn’t ask him for money for color plates. I just couldn’t, so there are no color plates. One thing I did ask him for was a letter of introduction to Mrs. Wright, which he was happy to do. I went to Wisconsin, and they said, “Oh, Mr. Robinson, we thought you were coming last night.” There was weather, and I had stayed in the motel. “We’ll go tell Mrs. Wright that you are here. You’ll probably be staying down there.” They came back with this stunned look on their face. “You will be staying in the house!” For the next three or four days they were trying to figure out who the hell I was.

IG: Those privileges are not given to everybody.

SR: Oh, no. This was a high honor to stay in the house with Mrs. Wright. I knew completely it had nothing to do with me. I was the representative of a man with money, and my job was to go back and tell him that his minion had been well treated. That is what it was all about. I ended up having dinner with Mrs. Wright in the living room. Not everybody can say that. I was staying upstairs, and the bathroom was not acoustically isolated from the little living room, the loggia downstairs. Wright and Mrs. Wright’s daughter Iovanna was not emotionally well. I was sitting on the toilet more than biologically required with my ear to the wall, listening to the conversation downstairs between Mrs. Wright and two psychiatrists. “She has had trouble sleeping,” and all this. I don’t remember a lot, but it was just interesting to be privy to a very private conversation, as the little guy upstairs listening in. That was the personal experience of being at Taliesin. The next year, I went down to Arizona to the archives. For a while, the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives were in the Beacons warehouse in downtown Phoenix, and there was an hourly rate for consulting the archives. I walk in the door, and it feels like Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer [Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archivist] pulls down this meter: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—so much money for an hour. He had made up a list of the drawings, which I was also paying for. I wasn’t there as long as I would have liked, but I knew what I was looking at. I had done all the research. One of the fun things that I discovered when I was at Taliesin is that I noticed that there was an error, because I had redrawn it. Jack Howe had done a very detailed plan that was published in the 1938 Architectural Record fold out of Taliesin, and he had made an addition. He had added another set of columns to make the loggia between the house and the workspace wider because he thought it looked too small now that the building was bigger. The rest of the drawing is accurate. I was doing some measuring, and I said, “This isn’t right.” Later on, I talked to Howe and he said, “Yeah, I added another ten feet to the opening.”

IG: That doesn’t seem like a good thing to do.

SR: Yeah. Writing the dissertation about Alden, you can imagine that a man who was shy and wealthy did not talk easily. Talking with him, I didn’t do any recording. I didn’t take any notes because it had to be just a conversation. After the conversation, I would immediately sit down and write up everything I could remember. I got things out of him. The book I did on Dow’s architecture was critiqued, a reasonable critique of the book, because I did not position Alden in the context of American modernism as a historian would do. I am not really a historian; I don’t think that way. In high school, in AP English, we did a lot of poetry writing, we did a lot of writing. The book that we used was this first edition of the book called Sound and Sense. This is a copy from high school. It was written by Laurence Perrine, who was at Southern Methodist. This was published in 1956, and we were using it in high school in 1958–59. This is for college kids, and we were using it in high school. That was a period when English literature theory was called New Criticism. New Criticism was based on the fact that you started looking for the meaning in the artifact itself. You didn’t need to know what the context was or the biography or whatever. You look at the thing, then you move out from that, but you start with the thing. That is how I have done all my research: I start with the artifact. When I wrote the Dow book, the artifact was all in Dow, and other people wanted me to do other things.

IG: But this book was defined by the way you looked at the object.

SR: Exactly. We were sitting on the elevated porch at Dow’s house, and I know he thought about this very carefully. It was a beautiful August afternoon. We were looking out over this pond and this little Japanese lantern, and it is just lovely. He said, “It’s lonely here. It’s like the English gentleman who looks out and sees everything is his.” For a man to tell you that. I knew that he had thought very hard about whether he was going to tell me that. It was presented like this, hoping that I would know what to do with that. I think a historian might have missed that. But, by being very focused on the artifact, I could pull things out. I think that, in that book, I have represented Alden accurately. Don Kaleck, who taught at the School of the Art Institute and was a Taliesin fellow, read my dissertation on Dow’s Studio and Taliesin and said, “I had to keep reminding myself that you were never there at Taliesin.” I had thought myself into the situation to the point where someone who was there thought I had been there. That was a tribute. That is how I work, and it was recognized. That was very, very wonderful.

IG: It is interesting to see how that sentence by Alden Dow was so important, but so subtle. It touched more on the human condition than any academic aspect.

SR: Yes.

IG: You were able to recognize that. I think that really is very telling about the way you are looking at things.

SR: Yeah.

IG: We’ll get to the house that we are in, but it is the same way that you ask people to look at this house: not within a bigger context or trajectory of the architect or the discipline, but how they are experiencing it in its own terms.

SR: Yes. How you are responding to it.

IG: When did you present your thesis?

SR: It was probably spring of 1974 after my first year at Iowa State that I finished writing. Before I got the job in Iowa, and had completed course work but not the dissertation, was the one moment in my career when I had no idea what was next. I sent portfolios to North Carolina among other schools and all the responses were: no, no, no. I was thinking, “I’m going to end up sitting at an office in Detroit doing toilets.” I mean, I had no idea. Then, and I can’t remember how this came about, but the chairman of architecture at Iowa State University in Ames was somebody from Ann Arbor who knew my dad. Architecture was in the engineering college, landscape architecture was in the agriculture college, and the art department was in the home economics college because it was called Applied Art. It turned out, and I can’t remember the timing, but it was like June, July of 1973. They put out an ad for a position that would be non-departmental. In other words, these three departments wanted to form a new college because they were the odd man out in their own colleges. They were going to form a college of design, and they wanted to start representing that entity in the university by offering non-departmental classes to anybody. My first twelve years of teaching were to non-majors. They were open. They wrote the description, which happened to fit me. I got a job in Ames, Iowa, and that was fine. That is when I finished the dissertation, the first summer in Ames. The book on Dow was published in 1983. The teaching was fine. I enjoyed that.

IG: What were you teaching at Iowa State University?

SR: I was teaching survey kinds of courses. I had colleagues who were sort of rented out from the other departments. I mean, the joke is my academic career started at the top and slid downhill forever because I had my own budget, my own secretary, and I decided what I was going to teach. It was whatever I wanted to do. I was able to grow, and I was there twelve years, which was probably five or six years too long. In other words, I had used it up. But the one thing I had done was, I met this landscape architecture student. Greg Martin’s parents lived three blocks from the Goff house we’re sitting in, in Aurora. I visited his family, and I knew about the house, and I was totally uninterested. Stanley Tigerman came as a visitor to Ames. In the first studio he had, he asked students who should be on the jury, and I was selected. That was the first indication to Stanley that students thought well of me. I was trying to cram deconstruction in my mind the weekend before the jury. The first student project goes up, and a woman, also a visitor, starts to critique. She says, “This plan reminds me of the plot of Odyssey.” “Oh, really?” I realized to just be me, which was of course, the right thing to do. After it, Stanley said, “You are not going to be here forever. Could I ask you to consider the University of Illinois Chicago?” In other words, I got Stanley to ask me.

IG: That’s impressive.

SR: I ended up here. I didn’t know where to live in Chicago, but I knew somebody in Aurora. I got a townhouse, got used to the commute. I was here for a year. On a Friday afternoon in August, I get a call from Greg’s mother saying, “Rich and I are going out for dinner. And by the way, the round house is for sale.” She turns to her husband and says, “By noon tomorrow, Sid will be on our front steps with a big grin on his face.” She is one of these people who saw where I was going. I called the realtor at eleven o’clock. I walked through the front door and like Saul on the road to Damascus, I was changed. This is it. I won’t talk on the telephone, I’ll eat beans, whatever. I’m basically a fairly conservative person, but man, I can make a decision fast if I need to. And I did. I talked to Don Berk, the owner, and he said, “The roof leaks.” I said, “I would expect it to.” Later he said, “That is when I knew it was your house.” I am sure the realtor went back to the office and said, “He is going to buy a house with a leaky roof, and he doesn’t care.”

IG: That was in 1986.

SR: Yes. Five minutes to twelve, I was on her front steps with a big grin on my face, and she said, “You are going to buy it, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes.” But think about it, if Greg’s family had lived anywhere else in Aurora, it wouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t walked into my Oriental art class on March 5, 1980—I can remember that moment exactly—it wouldn’t have happened. We are still very close friends forty-four years later. He has a family, and I have supported him in his work as a very successful golf course architect. Since I have no siblings or family, you can imagine how comforting that is to have someone to back me up.

IG: We were talking about your time at Iowa State University. During that time, you were also prolifically producing books.

SR: Books, yes.

IG: I’d like to start with the Prairie School in Iowa that you published with Richard Guy Wilson in 1975.

SR: Wilson was an important mentor, because he was a consummate professional, and I needed help to at least try to become that. He had always been interested in the Prairie School, so he said, “Let’s do an exhibit of Prairie School in Iowa.” We drove around Iowa, and it was wonderful. I can’t remember the date or the year, but it happened to be one of those long falls that went all the way into the end of November. We drove all over the state, taking pictures. One of the differences about an architect and an architectural historian is that I liked taking pictures late in the day and the morning when the shadows are long, and he liked them in the middle of the day, when there weren’t any shadows. He was doing record-keeping, and I was doing art, shall we say. We drove all over and took a lot of pictures. Then he said, “Since we have this material, let’s turn it into a book.” That’s how he thought. One of the most interesting challenges about the difference of our backgrounds was deciding what constitutes a Prairie School building. We had two very different ways of thinking about that. He was interested in the lineage of the names, and I was interested in how it looked. There are a couple of buildings in that book which are justifiable because of the name of the architect. But I would never have included them because you would never, looking at the building, have any sense that they had anything to do with the Prairie School. I let him as he was the lead. I did the cover of that book. I think that book may have gotten me tenure. I’ve gotten tenure twice, once in Iowa and once in Illinois. When people say it is very hard to get tenure, I say, “Then you must not be doing it right, because it is possible. I did it twice.” Wilson also got me my first Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) presentation. It was in Los Angeles, and I talked about Dow. In fact, David De Long, who wrote the book on Goff [Bruce Goff: Toward Absolute Architecture], presented too, and he presented drawings, which are very uninteresting in that setting. Mine were all these beautiful pictures of Dow’s office. I felt very positive about my impact, but I thank Richard for it.

IG: It is interesting that there are two ways of looking at a building. One is the genealogy of the building, the way that the architect fits within a certain lineage, versus looking at the attributes of the building itself.

SR: Yeah, right. Which fits into this, right?

IG: Exactly. You are looking at the object and evaluating it by its own quality. But it seems that this book was perhaps also helpful in setting your academic career. In a way, it became a little bit of a pivotal time for your grounding in the US as an academic.

SR: Exactly. The Dow book was suggested by Denis Schmiedeke from the Michigan Society of Architects, the state version of the AIA, who wanted them to do some publication. He said, “Let’s do a book on Dow.” I was asked to do the book. I didn’t initiate the Prairie School book, and I didn’t initiate the Dow book, just like I didn’t initiate your project. I just sit and wait for people to make suggestions, right? I guess you have to be prepared for opportunities.

That is when I started to talk with Dow and work with the editor from Wayne State Press. I don’t know if you noticed that the paper on that book is really heavy. She was very interested in it being long lasting. She also made an interesting suggestion that all the photographs are grouped at the end of a chapter. Her thought, which I thought was very interesting, is that the captions for photographs could be the story. If you just wanted to look at the pictures, you could get the story and read it.

IG: You used long captions to have enough information that you could piece things together.

SR: Exactly, which I thought was an interesting approach. That worked out very well. She was a very good editor. We were going to have a book opening at Dow’s office, and he died the week before. I had to wear my father’s suit to the funeral, because I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t dressed for that event. Mrs. Dow wanted to go ahead with the book signing, which was interesting. As I told you, these people are very reticent. But she met me in the walkway in one of the parts of the house, and she leaned over and gave me a kiss, which is further evidence of the human connection. I was never told, but I think my talking with Alden from time to time was seen as a way to keep him going and that she appreciated that. I think Dow did, too.

IG: Did he see your book before he died?

SR: No. He did see parts. He saw my dissertation. In it I had a picture of Wright’s Kindergarten. He did three of them for Oak Park in 1928, and they really looked like Dow’s office. He didn’t see the book, but he saw this comparison. I had photographs, and he turned to that page, looked at it, looked at me, smiled, and looked down. That’s all he said. Later, I was going through papers in his office, and he had saved the tear sheet from Architectural Record that had that picture in it. It was further ratification, again, that I had thought my way into what he was doing. I was confirmed by that.

IG: Your contributions were valued.

SR: Yes, right. But the most wonderful thing, can we go to the Picturesque?

IG: Of course.

SR: When I was working with Dow, I was also reading Japanese poetry that led me to the Western pastoral tradition, pastoral poetry. That led me to the picturesque as a way of thinking. Dow’s place is very picturesque, and I realized how it was, because the picturesque is not natural. It’s all arranged. The stream at Dow’s place is all dammed to create the pond. The plantings are all placed. The fact that the conference room floor is eighteen inches below the pond level means you have to control the water, which means that it is hardly natural. There is a dam, and there is somebody who, when it rains too hard, runs down and opens the dam. It was part of that tradition. The pond was dredged with horses in the 1930s and, at the top, there is a rise, not high, but so you can look down on the pond and the house. Buried in the ground at that point are several rows of concrete blocks that make up the house and the stepping stones in the pond. The implication is the blocks are an artificial geology. It is a complete reverse of having a site, then you dig it, and you find something. This was actually placed there, but it was placed on this promontory that overlooks the house, very intentional, obviously. One day, he walked me up to that point, stood there, and said, “Isn’t that a beautiful picture?” It was like, “Yes, I knew it.” I never discussed picturesque with him ever, but I saw him as a contemporary user of that way of thinking. He didn’t know anything about British gardens, but he was part of a tradition. When he confirmed it by saying, “Isn’t that a beautiful picture?” Again, it was like, “I knew it. I knew it.”

IG: Did he work with a landscape architect?

SR: No, he considered himself the landscape architect. But as a teenager, Alden did converse with a Japanese landscape designer, Paul Takuma Tono, a graduate from Cornell, who was consulting with his father on parks for Midland.

IG: He was the one directing where things needed to be moved and placed.

SR: Yes, what trees to plant and all that. He was a short man. By the entrance to the office, there was a trailing mulberry tree that was maybe 10 feet high with very long, trailing branches. He looked around and he said, “Come here.” We stood inside and he said, “I’ve tried to take a picture, and I just can’t capture this.” It was like a little kid. It was just so personal. Later in that day, we were at another site, and there was a trailing apple tree. There were other people there, and he caught my eye and looked at the tree as if to say: “See? There is another one.” It was so sweet.

IG: He understood this landscape, and the joy to experience it.

SR: Yes. There is a large garden as part of his father’s estate that he didn’t design because his property is on the edge of his father’s estate. Later, Dow spent a lot of money on his own garden, including a waterfall driven by a pump. There is a pile of rocks, and there is water coming out of it. There is nothing natural about it. One of the problems of the stream was that it didn’t flow fast enough to keep algae from appearing. By pumping water, we could increase the rate of that movement. The artifice resulting in this beautiful composure was just overwhelmingly an example of the picturesque. I said, “I need to write about the picturesque.”

I took a sabbatical leave in 1983 and went to England and resided in Bath, which I remembered as a student when we went during my time at Columbia University. Frank Lloyd Wright’s perspective would be that it’s just awful, right? Well, no, it is not. I came to understand it. I loved being in Bath, and I used that as a base because most of the gardens that are talked about in the Picturesque literature are in the West, sort of along the Welsh border. I would rent a car, live in Bath, do my walking, walk down to the lower part of town, rent a car, and drive out of town. Parking in Bath is impossible. You think it is bad in Chicago; it is impossible in Bath, as you would imagine. My joy was I would drop off the car and walk home. I went to all these sites and took pictures. But again, a circumstance: there was a lending library that had the catalog book for the British Museum Library, which had things pasted on. Talk about pre-this sort of world. I was able to, in a sense, go through all the books that I was going to need and make all the notations of the call letters. When I went back to London, I went to the British Museum Library, which was an amazing experience. It was overwhelming; I could just get to reading. Because I was so taken, I sat and read for probably ten hours almost without a break. This must be eye strain. I have never had this before. There is a second room behind, a square one, where all the old books are kept, where everybody is wearing gloves. No liquid, all pencils, and there are people walking up and down monitoring this. All this was very exciting, as you can imagine. I put together this material for the Picturesque book, which was fun.

IG: Did you illustrate the book or include your photographs?

SR: It has no pictures.

IG: No pictures?

SR: At all.

IG: It is kind of ironic.

SR: Exactly. There was a reviewer in a British art history journal who couldn’t get over the fact that the title of the book is Inquiry into the Picturesque, and there are no pictures. He was so frustrated. “What if you had this one and this one?” You either have pictures or you don’t, as I say in the introduction: this Picturesque is a category beyond the retina. I submitted this to, of all places, the University of Chicago Press, and they accepted it. My tenure process at UIC was at the university level when this contract was signed. That is why I got tenure.

IG: At UIC, correct?

SR: Yes, because the University of Chicago had said they wanted to publish this guy’s book. The story is the end papers, because they are different. I don’t know how many people read this, but do you know the book Tristram Shandy [The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman]?

IG: I do not.

SR: It is an eighteenth-century book. It is often thought of as one of the first novels. It is a challenge, because it is not linear. It almost looks postmodern. It was written, as so often these books were, as serialized in monthly publications. He will start a story on page 50, and he won’t finish it until page 75, which drives some people just crazy. But in there, he has a diagram which he says shows the pattern of the story. He also inserts into the pages a page of marbleized paper that he says: “This is an emblem of my work.” I seized on that. The point is, the endpapers are different, the front and back covers. [Shows two books] This one is early, same publisher, same publisher of Tristram Shandy. That is early and that is late. The people who were designing this book, which I think was done beautifully, wanted to switch the two because the early one is not as pleasant and the later one.

IG: It has a very nice presence: the way the column is set up, the typeface.

SR: Yes, and interestingly enough, they let me participate. They said, “We never let authors participate because they get in the way.”

IG: Was this the first book where you participated in the design?

SR: Yes. They edited it, I won’t say lightly, but they let it stand. There is a book called The Musical Picturesque, and there was a footnote. It listed four books that you had to read about the picturesque, and that was one of them. Of the academic public recognition, this is the most important one I did. But there are people who misunderstood it. “Oh, you are working in the eighteenth century now.” “No, I’m not. I am writing about a way of designing.” People misunderstood what I was working on.

IG: You are working on defining a way of approaching design, not necessarily looking at the past.

SR: Exactly.

IG: You think that this is the one that, out of the books that you have done, has received the most recognition?

SR: Yes, the most prominence. I love the cover. The designer said, “Rarely, you get two Qs.” She designed the Qs. Look at how much overlapping, the breaking of frames.

IG: Both Qs go over the frame.

SR: It was all intentional. The point was that she understood the book. And guess what that is? It is crossing boundaries.

IG: Going back to your book.

SR: As I said, I haven’t had a new thought in fifty years. It is just one thought, variations. I was always pleased with the design; it looks like custard.

IG: It looks very nice. You mentioned you took a leave of absence to start the book.

SR: A semester.

IG: Was that when you were teaching in Ames?

SR: Yes.

IG: What was the timeframe between the start of the book and its publication?

SR: I left Iowa in ’85 and the book was published in ’90.

IG: You started sometime before you left Iowa, correct?

SR: Oh, yes. Obviously, I was doing the picturesque study and accumulating the material, and then I wrote it here. I have to tell you, Iker, I was sitting at that desk [pointing at a desk in the room], typing, and I looked up, I looked at that rough coal wall, and I thought, “Oh my God, I live in a picturesque grotto.” I had kept those completely separate, and then they just collapsed right into each other. “Oh, no, this is more serious than I thought.”

IG: You said before that Stanley Tigerman was a visiting professor at Iowa and you were in the jury of the class he was teaching. He got a sense that there was a next step for you, and he asked you to go to UIC. Tell us about the context of that move.

SR: Well, someone was very kind. A colleague at Iowa said, “You were looking to learn things, and you were here long enough that you ended up teaching colleagues,” which was the problem. I needed to be challenged more, and I had reached the limit at Iowa. It was a lovely place, but I needed more. I think Stanley knew that. He said, “You won’t be here forever.” He was right. The woman who critiqued a student project as looking like the plot of the Odyssey was writing things. She hung around Stanley’s door and said, “Would you read these things?” And he said, “When they are published, I will.” I never hung around his door. Now that I think about it, I was so strategic. I kept setting it up that he had to come to me, rather than the other way.

IG: You were creating the conditions and letting them unfold.

SR: On a visiting professorship at UIC, I sold my house. I moved to Aurora. I was given a year’s leave. If I had to go back, I would have had a position. Stanley was not the director of the school yet, but he was the next year.

IG: Did he know that he was going to be the director?

SR: Yes. I also contacted the art history department. The art history department looked at my resume and said, “Those are the people we hire. You would fit.” I ended up, in the years that I was at UIC, straddling art history and architecture. The best years of my teaching—there were probably four or five shortly before I left—were the ones when I would teach history to the incoming grads through the art history department. They were happy to have me. Then, I would teach theory to the graduate students. Then, the third year, I would teach a studio. I would have people in my studio who had followed two years of the way I taught. Those studios were fabulous, because we were all working together. I had somebody who hadn’t followed that, and they said, “We don’t know what Sid wants.” And they said, “Don’t you get it? That is not the right question. It isn’t what he wants.”

IG: Having the opportunity to teach the same student two years in a row means that, by the time they get to a studio, they already know the way you think.

SR: Expectations and the context that we are working in.

IG: Were there other people while you were teaching at UIC that also straddled architectural history, art history, and architecture?

SR: Martha Pollack would come over and teach art history, architectural history for the architecture department, but she didn’t do studio. I was the only one who did all three of those things as a sequence. I can remember when Doug Garofalo became [interim] director, he invited his friend from Syracuse: Mark Linder had a seminar the preceding semester, and so he was going to teach a studio. The students got to vote: one, two, three preferences. And his guy was not first. I was. It was an uncomfortable moment that the director had set somebody up, and this renegade guy got the position. Anyway, it was delicious.

I had not taught architecture at Iowa. I was teaching these general courses, so I was immediately thrown into a graduate studio. It was like, “I guess I remember how to do this.” The first year was a bit of a challenge to me because it was teaching in a different way. Stanley was already moving in this deconstructive mode, but it intensified. Roberta Feldman had been there a year. When UIC was at Navy Pier, it was a two-year, very professional program taught by practicing architects. Stanley wanted to elevate the curriculum. All of a sudden, he had Roberta and Sid who had the orientation and the credentials to teach architecture less as a pure practice activity and more as a discipline. He relied on Roberta and me to help him achieve that goal. As I said, those first three or four years were really wonderful. I was well thought of and successful.

One of the things that I loved about him was this question of grades, because he would monitor all the class grades to make sure that the median for undergraduate was C plus or something, and graduate was B plus or something. I don’t know if you remember, but he had the circular office and there was a line of files. If you appeared in the front door, the worst thing you wanted was to see his beckoning finger. If your grades slipped up, you were in trouble. There was a time at the very end when things were falling apart that I had somebody go in and get my mail, because I didn’t want to stand at that point. If a student wanted to challenge a grade in studio, he would say, “Oh, yes, by all means. We’ll meet in my office, I’ll have some other professors, and we’ll look at the work. And you realize, there is a possibility it could go down.”

IG: I guess that was a good way of making sure he was not getting too many students asking for a grade change.

SR: Exactly. I was very good, and I kept right at that level. One semester it drifted up and Stanley called me in, even though it was the first time.

IG: It was Roberta. It was you. Who else was teaching at UIC at that point that you can remember?

SR: Now you are testing me. Bruno Ast, Michael Gelick, and Ken Isaacs. He had had a flurry of recognition twenty years earlier doing tiny houses or small things. And Ken Schroeder. The person that is the most significant related to this was Ujjval Vyas. Ujjval Vyas was a PhD student at the University of Chicago, and he had had an undergraduate degree in religion from Dickinson College. Anyway, very smart guy. He was interested in architecture. He came, he spoke very well, and his perspective was interesting. In fact, that moment when the studio was selected beyond Garafalo’s chosen one, it was Ujjval’s and my studio. Ujjval had no architectural background whatsoever. It was all academic. He could never have taught a studio without working with me, and I was willing to do that. After the first or second day of class, I knew this was going to be very difficult. I couldn’t get to sleep that night. I almost never have a problem getting to sleep. But that night I just couldn’t. It tells you who I am. At 3 am, I finally came up with a sentence to describe Ujjval. Once I had that sentence, I went to sleep.

IG: What was that sentence?

SR: Ujjval likes architecture the way a predator likes his prey.

IG: Did he like that sentence?

SR: I don’t know if I ever told him. I may have, but he just pushed it. It was the only time in twenty-two years, or whatever, that I intentionally missed class the next day because I just couldn’t face it. I took the train in, I wasn’t dressed in my coat and tie, and I was going to have lunch with somebody. I didn’t have my bag with me. Wouldn’t you know? There was a student on the train who saw me and wondered what was up that I wasn’t looking like I was going to class. I got caught. But I got over that and figured out a way to modify it, because he was harsh. There was another University of Chicago graduate who was smart and smart-alecky, and he started to argue with Ujjval. And Ujjval just bent him back. You could see the faces of the students; they were so happy because they hated this guy. To watch their teacher just put this guy in his place was just good, and Ujjval was very good at that. There were times I went to [John] Syvertsen’s office. I can’t remember the office that he was in.

IG: OWP/P Architects.

SR: Yes. We went there for something, and Ujjval was being abrasive. I just slowly moved away and stood in another part of the room, because when he went too far, it was hard. My reputation was somewhat damaged by my association with him. I learned a lot from him, but it had a mean spirit to it that, when it got out of hand, was just unsupportable. I haven’t seen Ujjval in some years. We developed this together.

IG: Can you explain what this is?

SR: The Institute for Architecture and the Humanities. The logo is Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing, which was my suggestion. His wife Gabrielle, who is a graphic designer, didn’t like that I suggested that because she realized she did not want to use it. She was a very lovely person.

IG: The Institute started in 1998, over a decade after you started at UIC.

SR: Right. It was through Ujjval’s interest in architecture and the humanities. That was the point, which was obviously compatible with the way I was thinking about things. We rented space across the highway, north of campus. We had furniture made by John Kreigshauser, who ran the shop at IIT, from our designs. It was all my money, and Ujjval was perfectly willing to let me do that. We had posters designed by his wife, we had a national competition at one point, which was a complete flop. The prize was $2,000 or something like that. We had mailed posters to all the schools. It was asking students to reflect on their own work. That doesn’t work! We had very few applicants, and they were awful because they wrote exactly the way they would stand in front of a jury. There was no self-reflection at all.

IG: Did you have to present the Institute to UIC’s administration for approval?

SR: It had nothing to do with school, nothing.

IG: Okay.

SR: It was completely independent. In fact, Katerina Ruedy [the director of the School of Architecture] didn’t like it. She thought we were trying to set up a parallel school, which was not true. But she saw it as a threat.

IG: Could anybody apply to be part of this program, even those unrelated to UIC?

SR: Yes, we send flyers to all offices. The point was that there were young people who got out of school, and, in their offices, they couldn’t talk the way they were talking about architecture in school. We would like to give you a place where you could read and talk about architecture that way. That was the point. We had some takers, but not a lot, because you are busy, and so on. We had a range of classes. There was an overlap because we ran Ujjval's and my studio’s jury at the Institute, and Garofalo wanted to come. Ujjval wouldn’t let him in the room.

IG: Why is that?

SR: Because he didn’t want him. And there was a Russian student who was all about flashy renderings. It reminds me of when I was in the Peace Corps, I went to the Architecture School at Tehran University, and it was so Beaux-Arts; you couldn’t believe it. They had these big drawings that were paintings, and they were crawling around on them in their socks. It was a housing development, and I said, “How do you get the furniture in there?” There was no answer because they had never thought of that. I was shown the door pretty quickly. Anyway, so this Russian student was saying how wonderful she thought her project was. I said, “I think it is beautiful,” and there was a gasp from the students because they knew that was the most awful thing I could say. “If Sid says that, he really hates it.” The point was that students were part of the ethos. They immediately got what we were trying to do. One of the students was in Greig Crysler’s Queer Space class. His position was untenable, it made no sense. Because our students were now critiquing him and getting him to admit that his position made no sense, they couldn’t wait to come back and tell us, “Look what we did. You taught us how to do that.”

IG: It is interesting that this was a parallel effort to UIC and that there was an emphasis on making students think.

SR: Oh, yes. Exactly.

IG: You mentioned earlier that, before Stanley Tigerman, UIC focused on professional practice. Here you were, perhaps, trying to develop a critical position.

SR: It was in response to the overreach into theory that was supposed to be the counter to the professional. We were working against the latest fad of what was popular through Stanley. And Stanley had already moved on. A woman was giving a presentation using this jargon, and Stanley was heard to say, “This is already passed.” The wind had shifted, and the weathervane was shifting the direction.

IG. You started the Institute in 1998. I am curious about the relationship with Archeworks [a school initiated by Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox in 1994] that was operating at the same time. It also provided a type of education outside the structure of a professional degree.

SR: Right.

IG: Yours had a more humanistic approach to architecture.

SR: Yes.

IG: Did you have a position about Archeworks?

SR: We saw it as completely different. The reason was ours was all text-based and language-based; there was no community outreach component, which was very important for Archeworks, which is one of the reasons I think that this didn’t have much of an appeal. This was so intellectual, frankly, which is Ujjval and Sid. We had some responses. We had a conference on music and architecture. An architect from New York, Malcolm Holzman of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, came out to join it. He saw the advertisement and he made the effort to come to Chicago. We were on the edge, but the one thing we didn’t do was online promotion. We relied on this [printed matter], and that was a mistake. In a sense, we knew it, but we couldn’t find the person to do it. It faded; they were some of the saddest moments of my life. The scheduled class was there. I sat waiting in the room in case somebody came. And finally, they didn’t come. I had to say, “I guess I’ll go home now.” That happened at the end. That was a very sad thing to do, to sit there and wait for somebody to come by your stall to buy something and nobody comes by. Then Ujjval decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He said, “I will teach an architecture and law class at the Institute.” I renewed the lease for another year of rent, and he never taught the class.

IG: It lasted seven years, closing in 2005.

SR: Yes.

IG: It is a remarkable period. We see these types of initiatives where faculty from a school decide to start their own program.

SR: Yes.

IG: Archeworks took the responsibility of generating the space for a different type of conversation and approach to architecture.

SR: An alternative.

IG: Right. It is also a way of being proactive, “This is what I believe in,” “There are other paths, and I’m going to create that space.”

SR: This competition that we organized was published in the list of Architectural Record competitions. When it was announced, there was no reference at all. I don’t know this for a fact, but I think what Record did was ask somebody in Chicago what they thought of this Institute, and who did they ask: Stanley. By that point, Stanley had left the school [UIC] and things had gotten very bad. In other words, there was no way he could be reappointed because the place was tearing itself apart. We were all interviewed, and I said, “I don’t think he should be reappointed.” The new dean, Ellen Baird, gave Stanley the percentage of support, and he figured out how I voted. After that, I was persona non grata. He wouldn’t even look at me. When Record called about this, I imagine he said “No, don’t do it.”

IG: You went through several directors at UIC before you retired.

SR: Yes.

IG: Can you talk about the arc of your teaching at UIC and how it fit with the curriculum over the years?

SR: I left in ’07, and, as I mentioned earlier, probably the first three years of the 2000s were the best because of the sequence of History / Theory / Studio. It was somewhat recognized that there was some success over there. [Michael] Gelick prepared my papers for tenure. He was happy to do that. I prepared Roberta’s papers for tenure. But in terms of faculty connection, there wasn’t really much. After Stanley was gone, [Bob] Somol started to act like he was in charge. It was amazing. They put out at the top-level graduate floor that Roberta and I were trying to take over the school. That was the misinformation. I didn’t go up to that level for at least a year, because if I walked up there, the daggers would be pointing at me. It was hilarious because that is not what I was doing at all, but that is how I was being portrayed. That is another reason why those last years at UIC were very uncomfortable for me. When I found out that Penelope Dean was going to be hired, and I realized that it would lead to Somol being director of the school, I got on the phone and called Taliesin. They said, “Of course.” I had been teaching summer history for several years. In a sense, I never had a summer vacation. I would always go up there.

IG: You were teaching at Taliesin over the summers?

SR: Yes. I did that for, I don’t know, four, five, six years, a long time. It was fun, I enjoyed it.

IG: How did that connection start?

SR: The head of the School of Architecture at Auburn University, Keith McPheeters, spent a couple of summers up at Taliesin, drawing up the building. Completely useless drawings, because he decided that there was a grid, a five-foot module. He redrew Taliesin with a five-foot module, which was totally useless. It didn’t represent anything, there was no accuracy. It was probably the spring of 1987 that he was going from Wisconsin down to Alabama and he stopped here. It came out that I had written this [Life Imitates Architecture: Taliesin and Alden Dow’s Studio], and the people at Taliesin were working with the Getty Foundation on preservation activity. All of a sudden, there was somebody who knew something about that. I was invited to come up there, sat with Tony Puttman, and did some work; I can’t remember just what it was. In the process, I became friends with the chief carpenter, I’ll call him that, of the preservation crew, Jim Erickson, who was a wonderful fellow. We got together very well, and we started thinking, in larger terms, about the significance of Taliesin. All of a sudden, it got out that the preservation guy and I were saying interesting things about Taliesin and Frank Lloyd Wright. The school heard about us and wanted us to do a walk around and point out the things that we were learning. That led to my being on the summer staff of teaching history. Erickson is still a very good friend. He was shown the door, he was kicked out, and his knowledge walked out the door. It was just stupid. He wasn’t without blame. I was so angry when I heard about it that I thought he was all right and everybody else was wrong. As time came, it was never that clear. He was the unfortunate subject of the Peter principle. He had been elevated beyond his skills. He was a carpenter, and he was put in management. It didn’t work! They thought he was a failure, but they set him up for the failure. It really hurt him because he had spent so much time at Taliesin and knew so much. They were willing to throw him on the trash heap and forget about it. It is just unfortunate.

When I saw what was happening at UIC, I called Taliesin. They said, “Yes, come up.” I signed on and I was going to teach studio, which, of course, I knew how to teach. Well, let me tell you, because that was one of the greater disappointments of my life. At a university, when you walk into your studio, you are it. At Taliesin, anybody stops by your students and makes critiques. There was no continuity at all. When the dean comes by and critiques you, what can you do? The whole thing fell apart. It was one of the more frustrating things in my life. I was hoping to take what I had learned, and I couldn’t do it. Finally, I went to Victor Sidy, who was the dean and a former student, actually. I had taught him history. I asked him the following question, “Have you read my syllabus?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Then, I can’t teach here.” If the dean can’t show me the courtesy of reading what I am trying to do, it didn’t make any difference. He was going to critique them on his point of view.

IG: He doesn’t know what the premise is, so he can’t contribute to that line of thinking.

SR: Not at all, so I stopped teaching studio. I continued teaching history because nobody cares about history, right? I developed this thing called “Taliesin as Text” for the incoming graduate students to tell them where they were and what its history was. I walked them around.

IG: Do you still do this now?

SR: No, because the school is gone. The Foundation is trying to revive some kind of school.

IG: There have been different iterations in the last few years.

SR: Yes. It is very clear to me that what I have to offer is not what they want anymore. It was hard for me to finally accept that, I’ll tell you. But it’s fine.

IG: When you were teaching at UIC, what was your relationship to the architectural community in the city?

SR: Not much, but I did have a relationship to this percussion group, Third Coast Percussion. I was on their board for fourteen years. The connection was made through Taliesin. David Skidmore, who is the lead, spent Julys in Pittsburgh for three or four years because they have something called the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; he was the percussionist. Gerry Morosco, an architect in Pittsburgh who was a Taliesin graduate, was very active in the arts, supporting the symphony and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. He met Skidmore and heard that Skidmore was part of Third Coast Percussion. Morosco called Effie Casey, the fellow at Taliesin who was the Taliesin music director. Her husband was Tom Casey, who was dean of the school in the earliest years. She was a musician, so she was in charge of scheduling the concerts at both Taliesin and Taliesin West. I am walking along the back road at Taliesin West, and I run into Effie who says, “I’m thinking of organizing a concert by Third Coast Percussion.” I said, “Would you like some support?” I don’t have a lot of money, but one of the things I have done in terms of these gifts is, if you give it early, it counts for a lot. I said, “I’ll give you $10,000.” She calls Caroline, her niece at Taliesin, who calls David here in Chicago, who is in the process of writing a grant to support their going to Taliesin and playing. Now he gets to put in the grant that they already have money. Grant people love that, right? They are not the first, somebody else has said yes, so we can say yes now, too. They ended up playing at Taliesin, and that is when I met Third Coast Percussion. I immediately identified with them. My interest in music is based on my playing the piano and violin as a youth; I played in high school and with the short-lived Ann Arbor Chamber Symphony in 1960. I knew nothing about percussion. But the thing that is so cool about them is that, when you think about their music, it doesn’t have a tradition like string quartets. It appeals to a wide range of people and ages. They are celebrating their twentieth year of success. They won a Grammy. They were in Hong Kong last month. They are the light of my life, in a sense. The joke I said is, “They are the only board that you feel better when you leave than when you came in,” which is not usually the case. I was very active in participating with them, and that was my major Chicago connection.

IG: No other connection to the architecture scene.

SR: Not really. Part of it is distance.

IG: Physical distance.

SR: Yes.

IG: You live in Aurora; you don’t live downtown Chicago.

SR: If I were living downtown, I would clearly have been more engaged in all kinds of things. But it can be a long drive.

IG: Before we move into a discussion about the Ford House, I want to discuss the last part of your teaching career. In 2015, you were a Visiting Professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Can you talk about that?

SR: Yeah. I have a colleague, Joan Nassauer, who I met in Ames, who is a world-class landscape ecologist. She gets invited to China, Portugal, Japan, and so on. We are just really very close friends. They had a death in the faculty, and they needed somebody quickly. I taught picturesque for the landscape architects, which was marginally interesting.

IG: Two years later, you went back to Carleton College. How did it feel to go back fifty years later? What were you teaching there?

SR: I had become friends with an art historian, Baird Jarman, through SAH, and he was a classmate of Guy Wilson’s daughter at Yale. He was going on leave, and he recommended me for the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor because he had brought some students to Chicago, and they had done Unity Temple. I was giving my spiel about Unity Temple. His wife afterwards said, “I could listen to you all day.” I wondered what he thought of that. He recommended me for this Visiting Professorship. It was an honor to do that. I was glad to go up there. I taught a picturesque class and an American Organic class, starting with Sullivan going through Goff, basically. It was a completely elective course. That is twenty students, and I had no idea what their backgrounds were, which was, of course, the kind of teaching I had done at Ames. You have to be able to talk free of jargon and shorthand speak. The class was ten weeks, and you can’t get to know anybody in ten weeks. I had these short papers, and the very last paper came in over the internet. There was often a paragraph saying something about the experience of the class, which was the only feedback I got as I am walking out the door. I get things like, “This was the only class I looked forward to” and “I was down on Humanities classes until I took this class.” There were several really heartwarming supports, which were nice, but I would have liked to have known them before I left. I saw I could still do it, even in a high-caliber liberal arts school. It still had that aspect to it. But I went to a Carleton alumni meeting in Chicago, which was the only one I ever went to, and there was a professor who came and talked. He talked a little bit about the history of Carleton, which was very interesting. The president of Carleton that made it Carleton, Laurence McKinley Gould, was a geologist who was with [Admiral Richard E.] Byrd in the Antarctic. He wrote a book called Cold [Cold: The Record of an Antarctic Sledge Journey], and he describes what that was like. As a scientist, he had proposed what the exposed rock on this mountain range was. He talks about trudging across the snow and saw that the rock was what he had predicted. Whenever Lawrence McKinley Gould talked, all the students went. I mean, when does that happen? He was just a cool guy. We called him Larry, and he came to Carleton from Michigan. There is a real connection between Michigan and Carleton; there is a Burton Hall at Carleton and a Burton Memorial Tower at Michigan. It is the same guy [Marion LeRoy Burton] and they have the same colors: maize and blue. The Carleton president came from Michigan, and then Sid who grew up in Ann Arbor, goes to Carleton. Anyway, so Gould realized that he wanted to make this small college a success. We are talking the late ’40s, post-war. He realized there was only one way to make that splash and that was to funnel successful undergraduates to graduate programs; that good graduate programs would recognize the students that were coming to them from Carleton. That tips things from pure liberal arts to performing for the next step, and it worked. Fifty years later, I was more aware of the cost of that. There always were some students who really were there for all the right reasons. But there were a number of them who needed an A to get into their graduate school, so they were in that class for the next step. That seemed more visible fifty years later than it was in 1961.

IG: I think this is a good time to discuss the house we are in, Bruce Goff’s Ford House.

SR: Yes.

IG: You mentioned earlier your connection with Aurora and how you bought this house. Tell us about what you found in the house, the state of the house, and what attracted you to it.

SR: Obviously, I was just terribly excited. Who wouldn’t be? I was like, “Wow, I get to live here.” Now, there were some problems. I think the summer of the first or second year was unbelievable. These fans didn’t work. There was no air conditioning. I can remember sitting on a couch with a fan and just sweating. I was also very cold in the winter. The envelope of this house is so thin. It’s all single pane and the roof is only as thick as the Quonset ribs. There is just so much R-value you can put in there. It was uncomfortable. I remember Stanley made me teach an 8 am class. What did that mean? I was up at 4:30 or 5 am, catching the train, and catching a little breakfast in the station when it was a mess. In 1986, Union Station was horrible. Then walking in the winter across the Kennedy [Expressway] to class. But I did it and he knew I would. That was the point. He needed somebody to teach that class and there was only one person who was going to do that. It was an undergraduate class with eighty or more students. I would leave in the dark and I would come home in the dark. I never got to look at the house, except on the weekends. I wasn’t a happy homeowner. There was not a lot of positive paybacks for living here. It was cold or hot, and dark, and so on. It was hard. I’ll just say it was hard. Over time, my perception of the house has changed. One of the reasons was that living in an intense piece of architecture while I was teaching architecture would begin to answer the question, “What is it worth?” Part of it was the potential dialogue of saying, “Why? What do you get out of this?” Over time, I was able to figure out the lessons that I see in the house that I could impart without saying, “You should design like this,” which of course I would never do. It was about understanding what Goff was doing and what you could learn from the house. It wasn’t Goff’s text; it was Ford House’s text. As John Waters said, I am an inveterate educator. I think like that all the time. Sometimes he laughs at me, and he says, “Sometimes they don’t want to hear it, Sid, and you keep trying. You just won’t say no.” One of the things I learned was the effect of being away from here for the 75 days I was at Carleton. I could feel myself closing down. When I returned home, I walked in the front door and said: “I’m alive!”

IG: You talk about the lessons that you wanted to share about the house. What are the lessons that you think are important?

SR: First, the word I use is a dialogue of difference. The fact that it has not just one message or one formal language; that it has at least two. The differences are as follows: there are natural materials and industrial materials; there is the discipline of the structure and the geometry, and the freedom of the materials themselves; there is the historical and contemporary. The fact that you can make something work with those kinds of relationships. I have others. It crosses these boundaries. It is like the kid who is given a hammer and the whole world turns into a nail. Everything is boundaries. I can find it here and there, and, by the way, it is over there too. This business about being accessible to all kinds of people, I think that’s an important lesson. I was talking with somebody at the Third Coast Percussion event last night who liked Sullivan. He was an artist, and he was talking about his ornament and the foliage. I said, “Yes, but it starts with a T-square and a triangle. There is an armature before he puts the leaves on it.” He didn’t want to hear that. I made the point, which is in the book, that in Sullivan’s A System of Architectural Ornament, the first plate is the Inorganic, the second plate is the Organic, which is a direct parallel of how he does his work. It puts a lie to this notion of being biophilic, which is a word I hate. I mean, this business about being obedient to nature. Frank Lloyd Wright was never obedient to nature. There is a line here that I think is just critical to understanding that. I’m sorry to do this, but it is a quotation from him from 1894. He is a young man. He is saying to shape the house to sympathize with the natural surroundings if nature is manifest there. If not, try to be as quiet, substantial, and organic as she would have been if she had the chance. Where does the quiet, substantial, and organic come if nature isn’t present? Man. When people talk about Wright and nature, I quote this. It isn’t the be-all and end-all. It is a part of a dialogue. How much nature is there to respond to on Lake Street in Oak Park? Give me a break.

The lessons for the house are these differences that come together. As I’ve said before, they are not commenting on each other, they are not critiquing each other. Part of it is that there is almost an equal balance between industrial and natural, between discipline and freedom. It is hard to say one is leading the other. They are just co-present.

IG: They are working together.

SR: They are working together. I was raised in the home of an architect who thought Frank Lloyd Wright was wonderful, although he didn’t design like that. I read his autobiography in high school, ruined my prose style forever. I looked at the Wendingen issues. In the essay for the Art Institute show on Goff in 1995 that I did on music, I made the comparison between Wright and Beethoven, and Goff and Debussy. Beethoven is very structured. Debussy is loosening the structure. Albert Schenker was a musicologist in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. He described the common practice in nineteenth-century music as being foreground, middle ground, and background. The point of that kind of composition was that all the parts were tied. Harmony, melody, and rhythm were all interrelated. The observation has been made that the first move for Debussy and subsequent modern composers was to leave out the middle ground. You had foreground and background, and there wasn’t a third term to connect them. They tended to move independently, so structure takes on a whole different form. I realized that, in a Wright house, he is moving you in the middle scale all the time. It isn’t true here. Goff does the small scale and the big scale, and the rest is up to you. I decided that was a very generous act compared to Wright.

IG: Talking about the idea of rigor and discipline, this is a rigorous and disciplined house. Before our conversation, you showed me the three design proposals that were done for this house. You can see the evolution from the first one—the one that was ultimately built—to the second proposal that was more traditional and, finally, the third proposal that parallels his consequent projects. But there is a rigor in this house that we don’t find later.

SR: Right, which means that it is, I’ll put it this way, more teachable. In other words, there is a way of approaching how this was designed. It starts with the Quonset ribs being radially disposed, and then everything follows from that. I mean, it is a perfect example of how Bruce liked to work with shapes. He starts with this element, and he figures out all the things it can do. Think about it. He has limited floor area for cost. He needs a place to paint. He has volume. We have this deck up here. Bingo. There is a late house in the ’70s in Cobden, Southern Illinois, which is a very interesting house [Duncan/Etzkorn Castle Dwelling]. It is isolated. It is probably falling apart right now. It was briefly a B&B. The guy was trying to make it work and had a folder that had the client’s notes for what she wanted. Even though the house is very strange, you can sit with this list and say, check, check. He satisfied them all, but in ways that didn’t start from satisfying them. That is what is so amazing, that you can start from the other end and actually satisfy functional requirements, which doesn’t happen very often. This house is also a perfect example.

Rick Phillips, a Chicago architect, visited this fall and emailed me an analysis of the house that is so on point, I have to share. He wrote: “Goff’s clear intention [was] that the specific demands of the [kitchen, dining, and living] spaces at all costs, never compromise the geometry of the house. Instead, Goff deftly recognizes the opportunity for the functions to benefit from that geometry.” Life functions can benefit from form! Amazing! Risky but, when successful, even a greater achievement.

IG: You mentioned earlier that the first few years where uncomfortable because the house was very hot and very cold. What changes did you make that made it the house that it is today?

SR: First of all, the radiant heat in the floor doesn’t work well in a volume. There was a period, I don’t know, probably twenty years ago, when we had three nights with 20 below temperatures. The thermostat that controls the water in the pipe is not the room temperature, but the boiler temperature. Because the pipes cannot expand because they are in concrete, you can’t stress it. That is one of the reasons they fail. If you put water that is too hot, it breaks the pipes because they are trying to expand. The guiding temperature was the boiler. It was 50 degrees in here. I spent three days in that bathroom because it was warm. I have a foam mat. It is exactly six feet from door to door. I took my phone in there, I took everything I needed, and I lived there. I was warm, and I would come out to dress up. I realized we needed to do something. The boiler was old, so we put in a new boiler, and I put in a convection furnace that blows hot air and cold air. There is a compressor on the roof. Now it is not toasty warm, but it is not freezing in here. The back bedroom gets a little chilly and I wear a red flannel nightcap to bed. And once I’m under the covers, I’m perfectly fine. I think that an indication that he or Ruth knew it was cold is that there are built-in electric heaters in both bathrooms.

IG: Oh, I see.

SR: It is very nice. You hop out of bed, you turn on the heater, close the door, get under the covers, wait for the thing to heat up, and then you go take your shower. It is perfectly lovely in there.

IG: Did you ever have to fix the skylights?

SR: I replaced all of them.

IG: What about the roof?

SR: That has been recovered probably three times now.

IG: Okay.

SR: The light Quonset hut steel is welded onto this heavier rolled section. There was significant corrosion in the light steel. I don’t remember how I found this guy, but he worked on it, and he had to finish because he was going out to San Francisco to work on the National Boiler Welder’s test. He was that kind of a welder. We cut off 18 inches of the Quonset ribs, welded an extension of the heavy rolled section, and reattached them. When you think about it, who would do such a thing? But as is so often the case with this house, if you have a craftsman, they love the challenge. He was fascinated to come and do this. He said, “I don’t do stuff like this.” He was a skilled man, and he knew what to do, so we solved that problem. When we painted them, we used automotive rust-preventive paint, and this stuff has held up. It would have been a real problem if the steel structure started to fail.

IG: That is the whole structure of the house.

SR: The structure would be at risk. I was able to intervene before that was an issue. I worked on that, the heat, and the skylights. I have put into the house three times what I paid for it. Including buying the other house on the block.

IG: The house has recently received the distinction of being included as a National Historic Landmark. Can you talk about the process? Was that something that you initiated?

SR: People thought it should be on the National Register. I was totally uninterested. I was being really snooty saying, “I do not need Washington to tell me this is an important house.” I was totally uninterested. I was talking to Landmarks Illinois, because in my will, this house will have a preservation easement that is set up for when I go; John Waters will immediately start to do that. Bonnie McDonald [President and CEO of Landmarks Illinois] said it made her job easier if it is on the National Register and it has that kind of recognition. John [Waters] prepared the nomination. We went down to Springfield, and I am suspicious of the whole thing. We are sitting there, John is sitting next to me, and he has put together a really wonderful PowerPoint. I mean, it is really good. The first example up was this incredibly stupid, falling apart old commercial building somewhere. The building was nothing. The presentation was awful. I wasn’t going to screw it up because I didn’t want to screw up his presentation, but I had to get up and leave because I knew that is what happened in this kind of a place. There was a break, and John got the deputy director, Rachel Leibowitz, who came out to calm us. She said, “We thought that was awful too. In other words, we are not in favor of that kind of thing.” We were going for national registration, not local. She said, "Why don’t you go for National Historic Landmark?" John had left VOA Associates. I paid him to do the research to do the National Historic Landmark nomination, which took several months. But there was really no question.

IG: It requires quite a lot of work.

SR: He had the advantage of being paid, and I had the advantage of somebody doing the work. That was sent in, and it took ten years. COVID was part of the problem. We had the major academic committee, and there was no question: of course it should be a National Historic Landmark. But there was another layer of meetings. All their members’ terms expired at the same time rather than being staggered. The whole committee had to stop nominations and approvals. It was just painful to watch. It stopped dead in the water. There were only minor adjustments to what John had written. There was one guy who wanted to have Goff’s sexuality as part of the nomination. John put in a sentence or two. We were not getting into that, but it was interesting that somebody thought that that was something we should do.

IG: How does the listing of the house facilitate the work when Landmarks Illinois receives the house or while you are still living in the house?

SR: People forget the National Register and that National Landmarks is simply an honorific list. It doesn’t mean anything. There is no protection. People think it is. In fact, John was telling me that there are some insurance companies who are now reluctant to insure properties with these designations thinking that they are controls, and they are not. The insurance industry is using it as an excuse not to write a policy. It is just ridiculous. It really has no impact on the application for the preservation easement. John is going to have to argue a little bit because they prefer exterior control. I want interior, exterior, and site. They are reluctant to do interior because it requires access. But if you look at this house, you can see into every room. The only rooms you can’t really see into are the bathrooms, but access is not an issue. I think the case can be made that it should be.

IG: Recently, the Clark-Netsch House in Chicago received landmark status for its interior too.

SR: Oh, it did?

IG: Yes. It was supported by the owners, who said exterior and interior needed to be landmarked. It is not just the façade, but the whole experience of the inside.

SR: I think we’ll be able to do that. With my lawyer, we have to rethink wills from time to time. He said, “You are not falling into the trap of trying to govern from the grave.” I do not want this to be a house museum. I do not want to sell it to Aurora University. It is a house that someone should live in. Aurora seems less distant from Chicago now than it did thirty-five years ago. The suggestion I’m going to make—I made a list and I can’t find it—is that all the cultural organizations in the area write to their HR and say that this house is going to come on the market. I think that audience might be the place where somebody would be interested in buying it. Price will not be the issue. I will be dead, so I won’t need the money. John’s job is to find a buyer who wants to live here.

IG: The right person.

SR: The right person, exactly.

IG: Over the years, you have had a lot of visitors, from students to architects. How much of the architecture community in Chicago has embraced or visited the house?

SR: Not much. I mean, the thing that is so amazing is they have all been to the [Edith] Farnsworth House, and some of them don’t even know that this house exists. I think that is changing with the Art Institute’s video and the WTTW public television coverage. I used to have a prairie on part of the block, which I struggled with for twenty years. It was being invaded by sumac and so on. It was just turning into a huge problem. The City of Aurora came to me and said, “We’ve had a complaint about the prairie. That is not a lawn, and lawns are what you are supposed to have.” The house is enough of a challenge to have weeds growing.

IG: They are like, “Sid, you already have a strange round house. Mow the lawn.”

SR: Exactly. I had it dug up a couple of years ago and it is so successful; there is no evidence of the prairie having been there. I started to walk in the neighborhood. Now I am known as the little old man who lives in the roundhouse. There is a sense that there is a little more support. We need to replace three of the panels up there. That skylight was replaced thirty years ago. I went to the Albert J. Wagner & Sons site, and they are still in business. They were the Cadillacs of sheet metal in Chicago. The story was they would give you a price that would knock you over, and then, when the job was over, they would give you back a few thousand, which he did for this. Anyway, they are still in business, completely different personnel. Nobody worked on it. There is no record of it. They are now in Crystal Lake. The guy came down, he had exactly the same commitment to the craft that Al Wagner had thirty years ago. We are going to do that. It cost me $27,000 to replace the twenty-seven pieces of glass thirty years ago. This year, it will cost me $20,000 for three pieces. I can manage that. I got a letter from the City of Aurora that they are opening a preservation grant program. The timing, again, is rather creepy. I called on a friend who used to be head of the Preservation Commission. She helped me put together the proposal, and I got $10,000, so it will halve the cost of the replacement. I think there probably wasn’t much discussion in the city, because this is the most important house in Aurora.

IG: Regarding the people who have visited the house, I know there are prominent architects who have visited it and perhaps might have changed their opinions in multiple visits.

SR: It is so exciting because there are people from all over the world who have come here. If you turn around, there is a Mayor’s award from the City of Aurora. It is from when I got the Stewardship recognition from Landmarks Illinois. The city came forward and did that. I wrote a note to the mayor, thanking him, and saying that when people from around the world come to Aurora to see my house, I always tell them what a wonderful place it is. I was patting him on the head. He has never been here, but the house is known worldwide. Where is the house? It is in Aurora, Illinois. It has about as much support as it could. The local historical society has had a couple of events here, and it is fun. The last group that was here were ladies in their 70s. “I’ve driven by here my whole life, and I’ve never seen the inside. I’m so excited.” It is just sweet. The house is known driving by, but given the chance to come inside, they feel like it is such an honor. When students come, and architects, I give them the spiel about the dialogue of differences and all that stuff.

IG: And then Philip Johnson came here.

SR: Yes. Philip Johnson wrote a letter to Mies van der Rohe just after the [Edith] Farnsworth House was finished. He wrote to Mies and, of course, said how wonderful it was. Johnson said to Mies, “I stopped in Aurora and saw the Goff house, which is beneath contempt.” Little did he know that Mies had been here, and said to Mrs. Ford, “Goff was a very good architect, but nobody should try to copy him.” Mies was broader than that. Mies’s students at IIT had the same attitude that Philip Johnson had; they think this is the worst thing in the world. There is another story that Mies came out with an architect, I think it could have been [Paul] Schweikher, and they didn’t come in. Mrs. Ford was a difficult woman. She was an only child. Her daughter was Sam and Ruth’s only child. She had three daughters who came to visit. They were visiting grandma’s house, and they were remembering it. It was interesting. They were in their 40s and they kept referring to her as “Sugar.” It came out, “Sugar” was what Ruth asked her granddaughters to call her, not grandma. It did not escape the granddaughters that it was a strange word as the last thing they would use to describe their grandmother is sweet. There have been people here who worked on the house, like Tosi. Don Tosi came, we sat there, and listened to him talk.

IG: He was the contractor.

SR: The contractor. His stories are very important. I recorded them and had them transcribed. He then annotated the transcriptions. In houses like this, you often get the story from the architect and the client, and rarely you get the point of view of the contractor. Having the contractor’s story about this house is gold. I learned things about the way it is built that you would never know if he didn’t share them.

IG: Because he made changes from what Bruce wanted.

SR: What Bruce wanted, yes.

IG: Can you talk about a few of these changes?

SR: Yes. The coal wall is one. It is interesting to say what the brief for this house was. What did the clients want? First, she wanted a place to hang her paintings. This 70-foot arc of coal is the gallery. At the top of the wall, there is a hole drilled every two inches in the wood cap to drop cords to hang pictures. How else are you going to hang a picture on that wall? That was all worked out. A place to paint, which was this [pointing at the mezzanine], the closets up here. You can see there is a track, like a drapery track on the edge. At some point there were various kinds of hangings. She liked to entertain, and she didn’t like to be separated in the kitchen from her guests, so the dining room table used to be right next to the kitchen. That is why that relationship is so open. Her mother lived with them for a year, so we have these two remote bedrooms with their own bathrooms. That is what they wanted. Goff, starting with Quonset hut ribs and circles, meets all those requirements. The wall is coal because Goff, who never had any money, in his apartments he always liked to put colorful paintings on a black wall, more than a white one, so he convinced Ruth she needed a black wall. The next question is, what do you make a black wall out of? The answer is coal, of course. Goff designed it as chunks of coal as it would come out of the mine. Tosi, in conjunction with the masons, who apparently didn’t want to lay up a wall like that because it didn’t show their skill, were willing to take irregular chunks of coal and shape them into rectangles. It is a laborious task that is hard to imagine people actually doing. Goff hated this wall because it is not as he designed it. This is Don Tosi in Goff’s house. For the ceiling, Goff wanted a spiral of the wood. Tosi tried to make it work, and it wasn’t physically possible. He came up with this chevron pattern. To show you how slow things were in 1949, he does a test section of this angled thing in that bedroom. He takes a picture, has it developed, puts it in an envelope, and mails it to Oklahoma. It takes what, a week? Now, something would take a second. Goff approved the ceiling. It wasn’t his design, but he approved it.

IG: He approved the ceiling; he did not approve the wall.

SR: He did not approve the wall. The two major surfaces in the house are not the way Goff designed them. As he talked about his work in the past, he didn’t particularly feature the Ford House. I think the reason is that it was a collaborative effort and its geometric, structural discipline. He was willing to let Tosi do it, and he thanked him. But it was a problem, I think.

IG: A strange relationship perhaps.

SR: Yes.

IG: Do you know where the coal was sourced from?

SR: I think it came from Kentucky. It is not Illinois coal, because Illinois coal was brown and soft. The thing that is wonderful about the source of the coal is that the Aurora firm that supplied the building materials was transitioning in the late 40s from being a coal dealer to being in construction. They knew that, when Goff said coal, he was dealing with a contractor who knew what to do. He knew where to get the coal. It is called cannel coal. I thought it was anthracite, but I learned later that it is cannel coal. It is a seam above or below bituminous, and is very hard with almost no methane content, so it is never used as a fuel. It is not useful in the coal industry. I don’t know how they found it. Regarding the glass, Goff worked for Libbey-Owens-Ford glass in Toledo, Ohio, for part of a year. This is window glass that hardened as they were pouring it out of a ladle. It would harden at the bottom, and they would chop it out and throw it away. Goff being Goff said, “What can I do with that?” As a result, they had to find a glass factory that didn’t throw the glass on concrete, which shattered it, but threw it on the ground. They found a place outside St. Louis, I think. It was free. It was garbage from their perspective. They loaded up the truck, came back here, and started to lay it up on the wall.

IG: Have you ever had to replace any of them?

SR: No.

IG: Did they keep spare ones?

SR: Not that I am aware of. When they were reworking the wall, I have some buckets of coal. Small pieces, it isn’t particularly useful.

IG: There was a 1995 exhibition about Goff, The Architecture of Bruce Goff, 1904–1982: Design for the Continuous Present, that took place at The Art Institute of Chicago that you co-curated. Can you talk about the exhibition, the ambitions, and the response to the work?

SR: I am trying to think. They wanted to get in touch with me because I lived here. Mary Woolever [then architectural archivist for the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries] and Pauline Saliga [then associate curator of architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago]. How the Goff archives came to the Art Institute is a story. Joe Price had this collection of Japanese screens that he was peddling to various institutions around the country. In the process, he suggests, “I have this other archive.” The Art Institute bites and says they will take the archive, and then they didn’t get the screens. As a result, John Zukowsky hated this archive and Goff, which is the reason Pauline Saliga became the curator of the exhibition. Zukowsky didn’t want anything to do with it. Pauline did a wonderful job; she was a wonderful person. The longest lead time on an exhibit is the authors in the catalog, identifying them, and giving them time to write. That has to happen early. She was describing that, and as I am wont to do, I said, “Would $10,000 help?” She said, “Oh, Sid, I wasn’t asking you for that.” But what that meant was she could now contact authors, because the museum would not let her contact writers unless she had the money in hand to pay them. All of a sudden, that dam burst, and she was able to contact writers. I said I would write on the music. Jack Brown [Director of Libraries], Mary, and I went down to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. In the playroom of Joe Price’s parents’ house, which was designed by a California architect, was this pile, probably 20 feet by 20 feet by 5 feet of all kinds of stuff. The Art Institute was doing a last pass of what this stuff was. They found shirts and stuff. A lot of the stuff that will be included in the exhibit next year was found on that visit. I went down for one reason only, and that was the player piano rolls. No one else was particularly interested in those. I was, so I went down. That was all I looked at. There were boxes of player pianos, and I could just open and tell whether they were Goff's or commercial because of the holes. Commercial holes are round, and Goff's holes are square, because he took a knife and made every note: 1, 2, 3, 4 cuts.

IG: All by hand?

SR: All by hand. When you think about it, it is perfect for an architect. Keeping the registration for the player so it is read perfectly, was something that an architect had no problem doing on the drafting board. We got those rolls, and they are now part of the collection because Sid found them. I was unhappy with the way the Art Institute displayed the paintings. They only showed 30 of the 400 paintings, and they were in the basement next to the photography gallery where the bathrooms are. The main exhibit was up in the horseshoe gallery. The new exhibition is going to be in a big gallery, apparently.

IG: Yes, in the Modern Wing.

SR: Who knew that those paintings were down there? We had headphones so that people could listen to the music. I was so unhappy because they put the notification of the paintings on this wall, not that one, in the stair to go up from the horseshoe to the main level. Who was going to see it over here? They wouldn’t move it. I don’t know how many people saw the paintings. We had to find somebody who had a player piano, and we recorded it. It wasn’t all that successful. I think they are doing a much better job this time. Then Third Coast Percussion, of course, transcribed three or four of them for their ensemble and played them here.

IG: That was the event with them and Luftwerk that took place in 2014.

SR: Yes, exactly. I think Alison Fisher [Harold and Margot Schiff Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago] didn’t know that Third Coast Percussion had done that. I said, “I think there should be a concert of Goff music with your Goff exhibit. I’m willing to underwrite it.” I offered to pay for the artist fee for Third Coast, but they declined because of an experience with a couple of opera singers that were part of a concert for another exhibit, and the bill came in and it was too high. The connection between the music and the exhibit was a little remote. At that point, I said, “You are not paying for the concert. How close can you get that you have an exhibit, and you are playing his music? That is impossible to get any closer.” I am not paying for the artist fee, but I am paying for Third Coast’s time to transcribe, which will be several thousand dollars.

IG: That will be a great contribution.

SR: Yes.

IG: You recently published a book called Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led to Architecture. The word boundary has come up a few times during this oral history. Can you talk about the main aspects of your latest book?

SR: Yes. I don’t know if we have talked about the precursor for the book. When I was at Columbia, we had to write a paper after the summer 1966 trip, and I wrote a paper on boundaries. I referenced Wright in that paper. I produced a manuscript (perfectly awful, I admit). I peddled it, and nobody wanted to publish it. University of Chicago Press rejected it. Princeton Architectural Press rejected the revised version, as did the University of Minnesota Press. It is really a long essay. It is not history, and so it doesn’t fit market categories. The Picturesque book was really history, it could be recognized, because I quote all these eighteenth-century authors and all that kind of stuff. This Wright book is not like that. It is full of quotations from Wright, and it is a very tight argument. It is based on the fact that I talk about Wright’s boundaries from room to room and from inside to outside. Rather than being a single plane, it is an overlap. He didn’t like cantilevers just because he liked cantilevers. The cantilever is the perfect structural overlap from inside to outside. You can’t get better than that. When you are under a cantilever, are you in the building or are you outside? I talk about that. We know that Wright is blowing smoke a good bit of the time, particularly when he is old. When he finally gets to write about Sullivan in 1949 in the book called Genius and the Mobocracy, two-thirds of the way he actually says something that you can believe. He says that he learned from Sullivan’s ornament, not his architecture. Isn’t that interesting? An architect would look at another architect’s ornament and interpret the principles of the ornament to the scale of a building, something that Sullivan never did. The two words that he used to make the transition from ornament to architecture were two that Sullivan used, and Wright quoted through his whole career to describe this transition: plasticity and continuity. What he did was to take those principles that he saw in Sullivan’s ornament and use them to design a building. If you think about the parallel with sculpture, plasticity is projection and recess, as opposed to planar. Continuity means that the parts are all related to each other. He took that and then made architecture. That was the starting point of the book. There is an analysis of Sullivan’s ornament, how he starts with inorganic and goes to organic, and how Wright follows that. There is a whole chapter on Wright’s writings, because Wright’s writings can be very difficult to read. Almost as difficult as my book, which I describe as freeze-dried. You have to add liquids, preferably alcohol, and then it goes down a lot easier. I took a number of words like “machine,” “conventionalization,” “democracy,” “organic,” “nature,” and quoted how, even in one sentence, he will be an advocate and then an adversary. It sounds like he is contradicting himself, but he is not. He is simply saying, “Look at it from this direction, and then look at it from this direction.” He got fifty pages in Architectural Record in 1908. He is 40 years old, and he gets this kind of coverage, which is unheard of. He has an essay before the photographs. You know he spent time on that essay, because he was now introducing himself and his architecture to the world. The first sentence is the key. The first sentence is, “Radical though it be, the work here illustrated is dedicated to a cause conservative in the best sense of the word.” In one sentence, he goes from radical to conservative. And that is the key. That sentence tells you how to read Wright. It is crossing boundaries. You look at it from the inside out, and then you look at it from the outside in. That is true of every room, every envelope of interior or exterior. It is exactly paralleled in his prose. He talks about democracy as being a wonderful thing and then a terrible thing. He talked aristocracy. Machine is a wonderful thing, then it is a terrible thing.

IG: He is able to create argument for and against every aspect.

SR: Yes. As I say, he is both an advocate and an adversary, which is merely saying: you can’t get stuck thinking one way. As a result, you have to critique any position you take. You have to see how it works from the other side. It is very subtle, and it is really quite wonderful when you line up the quotations and then look at the buildings. It is hard, but I say it is a very tight argument. Wright used the diagram on the cover of my book for the cover of one of the versions of his autobiography. There is a story behind this. In his autobiography, he has this graphic as the opening page, and it is a story. He is a child, nine years old. He is walking up a snow-covered hill with Uncle John, and Uncle John is walking up the hill, Frank is running back and forth collecting weeds that are sticking out of the snow. They get to the top of the hill and Uncle John turns around and looks back as this Welsh Unitarian, this is the way to go. Wright is holding weeds, and he says, “Uncle John was missing something.” This is a story of crossing boundaries, and the point is that you have to have both: the boundary and the crossings. You can’t take out one and have the other. The other parallel, which I made, is that Wright was paying attention to Corbu. He didn’t ever tell you he was reading all that stuff, but he did. He wrote a review of Corbu’s Towards a New Architecture, when it came out in English. He wrote a review in World Unity Magazine in 1928, just as he is writing his autobiography. In his book The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, Corbu starts off with a little parable about the donkey and the man going up the hill. The donkey goes up the hill in a zig-zag and the man goes up the hill in a straight line. Wright started his autobiography with his story for a very purposeful reason: I’m showing that Corbu was wrong. The zigzag is the point. The chronology is perfect. No one has ever noticed that. You put those two little parables next to each other and it’s like, “Well, of course!”

IG: What is next for you?

SR: Since you are doing this, I don’t have to do it, and I’m very happy. The question is, how does Sid write about the Ford House? I’m reluctant to say this, but I am always amazed that architecture is never discussed the same way one talks about a poem or a piece of music. Hegel put architecture at the very bottom of the list of aesthetic activity, because it was heavy and part of the earth, and poetry was the highest and all that stuff. I would like to think that I could talk about this house in a way parallel to talking about a poem and a piece of music. I am working on that. I have chosen the poem— a Wallace Stevens poem—and I have chosen the piece of music—a Ravel piano quartet. I don’t want to talk about how both have rhythm. That is really stupid. What is your response to the poem and what is your response to the music? Can you have a comparable response to a piece of architecture? I don’t think all architecture can be compared to a poem or a piece of music. However, of all the ones I know, this one can because it has so many dimensions and ways of reading meaning. This may turn out to not be anything, but I am going to try.

IG: I can’t wait to read it.

SR: Thank you. This is a real pleasure, and I appreciate your taking the time and the interest.

IG: It is my pleasure. I thank you for your generosity over the years and for your stewardship of this house. We continue to learn about it every time we visit it.

SR: Thank you. Thank you.

PROFESSIONAL RESUME OF SIDNEY K. ROBINSON, AIA, ARCH.D

Education

1974
Doctorate of Architecture, University of Michigan

1967
Bachelor of Architecture, Columbia University

1961–1962
Carleton College

Professional Experience

2017
Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor, Art History, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

2014
Visiting Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment, Landscape Architecture Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

2009–2015
Preservation Program Coordinator, Taliesin Preservation, Inc.
Professor of Architecture Emeritus, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture

1998–2005
Director/Founder, Institute for Architecture and the Humanities, Chicago, Illinois

1985–2007
Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago

1973–1985
Assistant, Associate, Professor, College of Design, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa

1970–1971
Junior Designer, Alden B. Dow Associates, Midland, Michigan

1967–1969
Peace Corps Architect, Iran

Memberships

Present
Member, Society of Architectural Historians

2005
Emeritus, American Institute of Architects

1974–2005
Member, American Institute of Architects

1973–2005
Registered Architect

Selected publications

Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led to Architecture (Arizona: OA+D Archives, 2023).

“Living in Joyful Order,” in Bruce Goff’s Ford House: Friends of Kebyar Journal (2016)

“Bruce Goff: Architect/Artist,” catalog essay, Leo Saul Berk: Structure and Ornament, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, 2015.

“Taliesin 1911-1914; Refuge and Outpost,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Preservation, Design, and Adding to Iconic Buildings, ed. Richard Longstreth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

“Wright, Goff, and After,” Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind, catalog essay, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma, 2014.

“What Frank Lloyd Wright Learned in Fiesole,” in Frank Lloyd Wright a Fiesole (Firenze, Italia: Giunti, 2010), 28–31.

“Forward,” in The Noble Room, David Sokol (Chicago: Top Five Books, 2008), xi–xl.

“Bruce Goff’s Ford House,” ed: Yukio Futagawa, GA 65 (2005) English and Japanese.

“Ruth Ford House,” Bauwelt 37 (2004) trans German.

“Frank Lloyd Wright and Victor Hugo,” in Modern Architecture in America, co-edited by Richard Guy Wilson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000).

“Bruce Goff and Music,” in Architecture of Bruce Goff, catalog essay, Art Institute of Chicago (1995), Co-curator.

“Building As If In Eden,” Architectural Design, Organic Architecture (1993).

Inquiry into the Picturesque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Continuous Present of Organic Architecture, catalog essay, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center (1991), Co-curator.

“The Romantic Classicism of the Prairie School,” Inland Architect (May/June, 1991).

“Picturesque Anticipations of the Avant-Garde and the Landscape,” Landscape Journal vol.10, no. 1 (Spring 1991).

“The Picturesque in an Ancient Japanese Novel,” Landscape Journal vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1990).

Life Imitates Architecture: Taliesin and Alden Dow’s Studio (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Architectural Research Laboratory, 1980).

Architecture of Alden Dow (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).

“Architects as Tourists,” Journal of Architectural Education (Spring 1980).

Richard Guy Wilson and Sidney K. Robinson, The Prairie School in Iowa (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975).

Selected presentations

June 2008
“Goff Day,” The Tate Modern, London

1995
Society of Architectural Historians, Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, American Institute of Architects, Landscape Ecology Symposium 1995, Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Sidney Robinson for providing personal photographs and drawings to illustrate this oral history. Thanks to John Waters for providing images of Sidney Robinson while teaching at Taliesin West. Thanks to Molly Hanse for the help copyediting the interview.