My goal was to have the best architecture school in the country. If that was a possibility. In other words, how do you get there? And the other was, can you program it in a way that is better than the conventional way?
Welcome to ArchiNect sessions one to one. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hoffberg and this week we have a very special interview with architect Ray Cappy, founder of SIRC and Southern California Modern Master. At 88 years old and with over 60 years of practice, Cappy is still working. He began his career building post-in-beams during California's post-war building boom and in 1968 founded Cal Poly Pomona's architecture department.
Shortly after he left to establish SIRC, known then as the new school. Cappy invited us to do the interview in his home in Pacific Palisades, which he designed and built in the 1960s and has since become one of his best known works. With such an extensive career to cover, our interview takes a wide angle on Cappy's approach to architectural education and his thoughts on how architects relate to historical eras of art and science. So Ray Cappy, thank you so much for coming and talking, or rather I should say, thank you so much for inviting us into your home, in Rusty Canyon, to do this interview.
Well, you're very welcome. So this is a real limitation of the podcast medium is that no one gets to really feel the interview as we are feeling it, getting to be in the space, but I wanted to kind of start the conversation around this house. Formally again in 1965 and finished in 1967. Correct.
And at that time, what was the neighborhood of this Rusty Canyon in Pacific Palisades like? Well, this was a very, to me, a very special neighborhood in the city, having gone to Berkeley in Northern California. It also reminded me a little more of that because of the narrow streets and the way you kind of come up into it. And there at that time was one in which there were a lot of, there were many smaller houses through the canyon.
Land at that time was probably selling for $3,000 or $3,000 or a site. And I did a house in 1957 or eight, I think here. That was the first time I was in the canyon that way, you know. I was aware of the canyon, just because I went to university high school, so there was some affair sometimes at this, at a park community building.
So anyway, after doing that house, and I, we were living in San Fernando Valley. And so I liked the area a lot. And so therefore I started to look to see when lots would become available. Part of the problem of this lot of course was that it has springs, a lot of water.
I was aware of that. And you couldn't at that time, there weren't sewers in the area. So it was subject tanks and cesspools and stuff. And this lot was not one that was very conducive to even that kind of a use because of the amount of water that would flow.
And you either had to have a big tank out in front or nothing. But at the time I bought it, in 1962 or 1963, they already said that there would be sewers. So I knew, you know, if I waited a little bit, I could probably just about time the house to finish when the sewers were going in and everything would work out fine. So that's the way it was.
And as I said, most of the houses were smaller in a way. I overbuilt the area at that time, but we were coming out of a house of around 2,000 square feet. And I felt I could, we wanted certain spaces. I went to my studio here or a place where the kids to do their artwork.
And so I built a little larger at that time than most of the houses around. And also I was on a kind of an odd site which ended up being very good in the sense. And it came from a high, the highest part of the site where most people were building up on the upper portion to a lower portion. So I was sort of a transitional left between those two.
Anyway, that's answering beyond that, probably what you want. But I just, it was a great area. The banks didn't think so. But I certainly thought so.
They said you're trying to build a house on groundwater that's flowing out. And they weren't ready to invest in the thing. They don't even like the area, which was even more crazy, you know. But because it became a very primary area later on.
Which was good for me because at that time we could build for a lot less cost than you do to take by far. Absolutely. And so the value increases are maybe 50 times what they were when I was there. And you mentioned before wanting to build the house to accommodate not only just the living situation, but your own children's creative efforts and your own studio.
Did that change your approach in from the beginning to designing the house knowing that you wanted to be able to work there? And maybe how did that change the design? Well, that didn't change the design too much. It changed the, what I was thinking about in the future more than anything.
So the children's rooms were designed in a way that when they were, when they moved out and if I wanted to move my office here totally, I could use that whole area plus the downstairs studio plus this. So it was sort of like taking this section that's kind of hard to, but the other at least section that children's extension and making that for primarily office all the way. And then the rest of the house, we should just be, you know, our bedroom, living room and kitchen would be a good size for us. Initially, of course, I only used the studio for a few months, probably about six months because I was forming a partnership at that time.
And we were waiting for our. A bird in the window, you think? Or? We would just came in the house.
Oh, wow. I want to listen to the interview. Yeah, well, that kind of takes you back to the very, when I was building here, we used to have a lot of blue jays. And when the house was almost finished, two blue jays walked into the house kind of walked around exploring it.
And whenever through they flew out, very smart birds, both birds come in and they keep wanting to crash into the windows. They were taking a tour. They were invested. They were really, yeah, they were taking a tour until the crows kind of screwed, moved them out of the neighborhood.
But I like the blue jays. They were pretty bright. But anyway, where were we? So anyway, that was, you know, the goal was to someday have my office in here at a later date.
And for a while, I did have that. I had four or five people working here. And I never really decided, I didn't really want to have a real big office at that time. And so I just decided I wouldn't do that anymore.
And I just left everything as it was. And our grandkids grew up here. And we used it for guests and everything else. And the space, part of the space changed to a little office during the time that I was having a little space.
And I was having more people here. So to move back a little bit in time, you mentioned Berkeley, attending school at UC Berkeley. And I'm wondering specifically about a, not just your experience of architecture at that time in the 1950s, but specifically there's a statistic that I believe is quoted on Kathy Architects website that says you built 50 post-and-beam houses in the first 10 years of practice. And that's pretty, like by today's standards, you imagine the architect fresh out of school never even coming close to touching that menu.
No, that was because it was post-world work too. Exactly. So I'm wondering in your education, what did you perceive as the core objectives to the architecture education at that time? And allowing you to get to that point of practice.
Well, Berkeley at that time is, you know, after World War II, it had been changing from a Bose-Arts school that was prior to World War II, a more modern school. And at the beginning, when I was there and started in 1947, they didn't have too many of the sort of pre-mole architects that existed in the Bay Area. There were some very good ones in San Francisco. But most of them did not teach at Berkeley at that time.
And I was probably two years into the program for maybe three, I think two, when Worcester came from the East Coast. And he had been, of course, he was an important San Francisco architect. And he became the dean. And then gradually they began to bring other architects in.
So the beginning of the education was, you know, it was just kind of normal stuff. And it was okay. It was sort of more graphic at the beginning. A lot of things I didn't really love, but I did okay with.
And then gradually we had a lot of projects. We would do projects every five weeks. So compared to today, where you're normally at least 10 to 15 weeks, depending upon the studio. And so there was a different pace to the whole thing.
I mean, you designed a lot of work just kind of off the top. Maybe we were using some magazine influences like we still do. And other influences that were around, I was certainly aware of Neutre around here and she learned in Harwell Harris too. And some of the other people working out of Southern California, as well as the Northern California architects.
So the learning was almost a self-learning process. We did not have to go to classes in the studio if we didn't want to. If you wanted crits, you could go. If you didn't want crits, you just couldn't have to go.
So as I've explained to other people before, my fourth year, well, I had been in the Army and I'd also gone to UCLA this semester. So I had quite a few units going in. And my last semester, my last year, I only had design left to take. And I've talked many times that I worked 40 hours a week and just do my projects when they were due.
And I'd usually go for one crit and that would be about it. So was there much of a student community around architecture? There was. I was not as much a participant as many others were.
I'm more of a loner, I guess, when I worked. I like to work alone. I like a lot of people talking to me. I'm not a synergistic architect.
Some people are. And they work very well with talk first. You know, a lot of discussion back and forth and all that. I don't really ever, I've never worked that way.
I don't enjoy working that way. I think it's a very viable way of working, but it just doesn't happen to be me. So I wasn't really around the community of my own class that much. I was to a degree, but not like some of the summer students always work together.
And of course, the ones that work together, their projects were more similar. Therefore, they would fall into one category in the jury system. And those of us who worked really more alone, you'd either be high or low compared to that group, but usually high. I don't know if you know the name of one of my classmates was Jerry McEw who later became Dean at Harvard.
And he also was one person who worked a lot in the field, but at the same time, usually worked alone. He wasn't part of the group either. We were that kind of people, I guess, I don't know. So that was all I can really tell you about it.
And I like the education when retrospect particularly because I felt it can give you a chance to realize who you were and what you can do and what you can't do. And when you stuck up for your own projects and thought they were okay, and you came out okay, it's sort of a reaffirmation of how you think about yourself. And so I was kind of, I was that way. And then I was always a person, a little bit of a hurry, because I knew after World War II that there was going to be, there was a lot of fair amount of work.
And I felt that sooner I got moving and it was better off. It would be when you talk about the number of projects. It was time when half a dozen projects a year was not unusual. And I not only designed but I also built in those days, I was more of a design builder.
And so I had clients just coming in, you didn't have to market, you didn't have to do anything. It sounds like a very far less political and kind of public image interested approach to architecture school, where so much of the importance is of attending those grids to talk to the visiting professors and present to yourself in a certain way. Yes, well people had more, today there's much more, or for many years, it's been a lot more talking along the way. And a lot of professors really want to see questions to their students and really want to, I guess, give them what they do and what they're about.
I didn't teach that way either, but I was more interested in the student evolving. But today they go for the credits because there isn't a jury like we had at Berkeley where there were four people, your instructor was only one. And so therefore you weren't worried whether they're going to give you a bad grade because you weren't a nice student coming in all the time listening to them and doing what they want you to do. So that was an advantage.
I probably did better that way, although I probably, if I was forced to be there, I would have been there. But as I said before, it really, I think, was a good system. And then we also did sketch problems at Berkeley. They would give a project every Friday night, you had to turn it in Saturday.
So you learned to work more quickly, and with less rhetoric and less thinking about it and going through it. I always felt we had a draw and have a full presentation. But I never thought it was, I always felt it could be thought about even further and could be more complete if you had a longer period of time. And when I became involved in education, I was very comfortable with the fact that we would have 10 and 15 week projects instead.
But there was also, I may go on with that a little bit, was what disappointed me was when you did do that, the students instead of evolving better would quite often, if you, you know, they'd keep going backwards with their project instead of sort of linear fashion moving forward. So when you ask them to do certain things on the project, they would usually drop the projects, do something else. So by the time you were through with 15 weeks, they might just have been three weeks because they have the time to change the projects right down to the end. Because of their lack of confidence in what they were doing, which I always, I tried as an instructor.
I mean, I said it to them, if you can design the project, you know, what I give you, and you can do it in two weeks. And you're satisfied with what you have. You can go to the beach as far as I'm concerned, because the rest of the semester, until you turn it in. Nobody ever took me up on that in all the time.
I was teaching in 27 years. Well, so when you went to Cal Poly Pomona then and started the Architecture Department there, how did those ideas come into the program? Did they? Yes, well, they didn't know what happened by that time.
No, it was many, you know, I didn't get it. I didn't start in education until I was 15 years in practice really. So I thought of myself more as a practitioner, not necessarily an academic or a great educator. But I was interested in education.
And I, when I finished this house, that was, you know, 15 years into my practice practically. So I felt I had something finally to say in my mind. I felt that I had put together a good combination of a rational process, along with an intuitive process. That seemed to be a good balance.
And when I was teaching, substitute teaching at USC a couple of times, they were going through that transition to, prior to that time, SC was taught primarily by practitioners in the city. And they were really doing that just because they loved to teach. They weren't getting paid very much. But when Galyon set up his program, that's sort of the way it was.
And those students were taught in a way that they were pretty much doing about the same thing we were doing in practice. So when they came out of SC during those early years, from let's say, probably 1945 to probably 1962, 63, they would come out really well prepared and with the same kind of almost aesthetic and attitude towards lifestyle and living and interaction between the inside and the outside. I mean, it was all very similar to the practice. So they would come out and you knew what they knew and where they would go.
When SC was started and Sam Hurst came from, these coasts, he came at that time, it was much more of a discussion of rational thinking and decision making that would have less of the intuitive probably and much more of the other. And that was interesting to me because even though I had always worked with construction systems and cared about those things, the idea of that was appealing to me. And that you could now think in a way that might be a little more lineal in a way that could progress in a better way in the architecture. So that was really, so when I went to Cal Poly, my program was sort of a combination.
First, we tried very hard to see how far I could go with the rational process. Christopher Alexander, who was up at Berkeley at that time, was into this idea that his computers were now available. That you could put down enough of the programmatic issues and use the computer to sort those out in a way that would give you an answer. And so I tried that with my students.
A couple students could almost do it that way, not through the computer, but through their own ability to think because the computer was not, it was very slow in most place. It was punch cards and you could take forever if you're going to do anything with it. But they could think that way. And so I was encouraging that.
But majority of students probably couldn't to integrate degree. So we tried that for a while and tried to see how that would be. I did a lot more experimentation because I was interested in what Archigram was doing internationally. And they were here and I hired some of the guys from there.
We did inflatables and we did other projects and took a decade and all kinds of stuff that was going on. I was trying in the first couple of years. But along with that I also had some other thoughts because I was also always interested in urban issues. Since it was planting and landscaping there as well, I was hoping that the next generation of architects would be much more involved than they had been.
Because we were one of the few firms, smaller firms at least, that were doing this kind of work in the city of LA. And a few of the big firms were too. So we were rather unique and I thought why aren't more students caring about those issues as well. And particularly in a environmental design program.
So I was trying to, so there was an offering in both architecture and urban design. There was an offering in management. There was an offering in construction management as well. There was another course that they could take that would be involved with.
What was the other, well even marketing. Because I was using the rest of the university that way for them. And if they're designed, if they were not as strong in design, they could kind of push their major more to those areas. Because when you go out into the field later, few people are on design staffs.
And the majority of the people are doing these other tasks. So I always felt that why shouldn't it start in the university as well. So there were these combinations of things that I was testing at Cal Poly. And the program was going very well.
I was just there three and a half years, but we had grown in a lot too much really. But at the same time I felt that the program was successful. The professional thought it was successful. And so when we later split it was over silly things.
But anyway, they didn't buy wishes. I've explained to many times that the other two programs couldn't grow much more than 200 students. And I thought architecture also had also capped out at 200. And so there was a school of 600 students, which is plenty for normal college.
But the administration liked the idea that there were so many architectural students who wanted to come into the program. So as a result, that would be an economic thing. So therefore, sorry. We can get into the sorry, but I want to ask you first.
I didn't mean to say sorry. Sorry, I was going to say. After the tuition and it pointed out. Well, too much tuition, too much worrying about that part.
And of course we would get our funds later and you've changed the power of the whole thing. And then you don't have that equality of the three disciplines at all. So there were a lot of things that didn't work in that system, but generally our program was okay. It was growing well.
And the rationalism that you mentioned before that process, that method, do you feel that's a scientific process necessarily, or a specific to a design process? It's really specific to that in a sense, except that the idea, my idea about science was a little bit more that science usually does not circle back on itself so much. It tends to grow in a, what I would say, in any way. Standing on the shoulders of giant sort of thing.
Yeah, you keep on moving. Architecture was not doing that. And my feeling was that it should be thinking more of the way science thinks in which you evolve to a point where you feel positive about it. And then you're moving on to another exploration and another exploration.
And you're moving it in a way that's what I would call more rational, maybe more scientific in its thinking. And if you want to use present day technology, obviously that's an advancement. That's where we should be moving. And at that time it wasn't doing that much.
Today it does a lot more. I think the computer does that. The ability of the industries to really do what architects are doing and promote it into the point where a lot of things that used to be so personal and so special become a matter of fact. So that is occurring in the sense today.
And when you started SIRC, at least one of the origin stories that has floated around is that science architecture was one of the initial origin names for SIRC. It could also be something called for an institute. Of course it's a convenient overlap. But would you say then that one of the initial founding ideas behind SIRC was to make architecture more scientific in the way you described?
Yes, I mean that's the way I was thinking about it. That would be my vision of what the school should be. And it should be people who are not necessarily of the same thinking but people who have diverse thoughts but talented people who could be more than they would be. And so I think that's the way that people who could move the school, create dialogue and see where it would go and how it would evolve.
I mean I had my ideas, other people had their ideas. But being the one who gets to put the program together and essentially and the staff, you have an advantage of trying to forget the people who you think fit into your vision. And that's the way I manage the school. And at that initial point of beginning SIRC, of course there are many other fields that we're going through incredible advancements and exploration just in general in science and technology.
And obviously a huge shift in the culture because of that. Did you feel that architecture was a part of that necessarily? Well, architecture was a part of it in a kind of a different way. I mean, you know, if you look at what became the isms as far as the art and literature, architecture was always served in that mentality.
If we were talking about postmodernism, postmodernism was in the other fields before architecture decided they should have postmodernism. Which was kind of nuts because in my opinion, you don't have post and beginning and out. I mean, for those of us who are modern architects, we just think of it as architecture period. That's the way you design, you design to the programs.
That's the rational point. What you're going to do and you answer those questions and you move on. If you are based, if you're thinking is based more on some of the other ideas, that's okay too. If art is important to you as a direction or a conceptual manifestation, okay fine.
If it's exploring materials, that's important to you. Well, that's another way to go. So, you know, when, again, when postmodernism started, then I wanted to do a futures institute. So that's a school because I wasn't interested in that and most of our faculty weren't either.
Some weren't interested in postmodernism. So that whole thing kind of messed everything up as far as I was concerned for quite a few years. Almost 15 years of sort of setting things backwards because it didn't really accomplish what it changed. I mean, there was nothing wrong with the idea that modern architecture had not created the best cities in the world, mainly because they had to grow too fast.
I mean, it was sort of obvious that most cities and great cities took centuries to build. You know, we had to do it. You know, in our case it was like five, ten years, well, it didn't work too bad. It was like New Townes in England.
You know, it didn't work. Throw that one out. Let's do another one. You don't even give it a chance.
It doesn't have evolution over time. So, of course, modern architecture couldn't solve all those problems. And, you know, some of the ideas were great. The concepts might be great.
But when you have a lot of practitioners, they're not all great. So you're going to have a mixture of stuff that isn't going to be what you might think it should be. So all I'm saying is that, you know, it needs time and needs all this. And architecture, I think, because I'm not sure today, I think it probably evolves in maybe a better way.
I mean, the communication is something so much more than it ever was in early or early days, just in a time. Between client and... No, no, no, just in general. So much material.
When I started Cal Poly, our library was probably not as big as I even have in terms of architectural publications. I mean, there were the old books, but I'm talking in terms of modern architecture. It was not a very large amount of written material. Today the written material doesn't stop, you know.
And there are zillions of books coming out all the time. And so, and that's one part of it. And then the other part is, there's much more in the paper about architecture now than there used to be in the general section. We used to have a home section, which was a good communicator at that time for locals.
And we were all local workers anyway. So that worked okay. But the bigger global communication and everything that's out there and what people can pick up from the computer and you're like that, you know, and you can Google anything. It makes a big difference in how a field can evolve and how any profession can evolve.
So there's a lot of that. There's connectivity at the same time as there's just a whole different growth process. And the computer has changed the whole method of working anyway. And it's completely a different world of architecture than I started in for sure.
And that's not that many years, but it's still in the 60s, 60 years now, something like that. I mean, it's that kind of thing, you know, that I think takes place. But I wouldn't say architecture ever really led. I would think a little more of a following follower because your clients lead in a sense, right?
I mean, you have your developers who lead, you have your cities who have people who are telling you what you can do and you can't do. You have all of this going on and you have to work with all that. So you're usually working, if you're in the real world, not just the sort of academic world. You're really working with constraints, many, many constraints.
And you have to be able to sort those out in order to be at all successful. And if you can't satisfy your client, you don't have a project. And so that to me, that's the program is important. People are important.
They're very important. And my goal is to make them happy. I like to be happy that the project turned out well, but I'm not going to live there. Well, it's certainly a long game.
And it strikes me as something that at SIRC, the kind of initial rebellious attitude that kind of gets attached to the school, I think, right? At the beginning, might have been in some parts protesting against that lack of architecture to lead in that regard. And the research that SIRC wanted to do at the beginning or the kind of questions that they wanted to be engaged in were part of trying to push architecture into a more meeting in the ideas, zeitgeist or so. But I would agree with that.
My goal was to have the best architecture school in the country. Simple. Simple. That was a possibility.
In other words, how do you get there? And the other was, is there a can you program it in a way that is more, is better than the conventional way? Well, the advantage that SIRC always had is we can move fast. You didn't have to go through the university process.
I mean, you go through that and you can go nuts. You know, it takes several years to get anything even going and to get a decision from somebody without a whole thing. I mean, all they had in my case, somebody had to come and could I try this? Yeah, go ahead.
My attitude was, you know, running up the flagpole with flies. Great. It doesn't. So what?
Try something else. So my answer at that time was very much, yes. Go ahead. Yes.
I didn't stop anybody from trying things. That's the only way you can advance. But we could do it. We were just quicker on our feet.
That's all because we could, you know, make your decision and go. And that's still the case. I mean, that's what makes it vital and it can change and it's open and the students feel good about what they're doing. They feel energized all the time.
It changed a lot in education, I think, because everybody was looking at SIRC. Here we were, at school, we started with zero dollars and we were able to do stuff that other schools weren't even doing. Just from working off from tuition. And in the context of architecture education today, we have dealt with not only that frustration from students and faculty and really everyone with an university system that has to go through these, you know, present in the kind of levels of your own search, but also that there are new schools that are trying to, not in the same way that SIRC did, but try a new alternative to that kind of education where they're working more with practices and directly putting students in more of an apprenticeship role to learn.
Well, some schools did that early on too. There were schools in the country, I think, you know, where, well, of course Boston architectural center was started that kind of the school back east. And I was trying to think who was the Midwest. They would always, students would take, I think, even a year off of financing and so forth.
And they were really, very much into that. The hard part about that always was, you know, when you're in that much of a real world. And it's good if you take off like that, because you can't, when you do professional practice in school and you try to teach what you do in the profession, you know, construction documents and things like that. You can't get enough hours.
It's hard to get the hours. I mean, in one month out of school, you know, you got 160 hours and to get 160 hours in a school program is really tough. Unless the students are working only, I mean, that's all they were doing is pro practice during the year. They wouldn't have enough time.
So most schools and almost majority of thinking, and there's been this disarguments gone on forever. And it keeps being repeated. But my feeling is that the profession has to take, you know, that that as a goal of their own education system to bring it to the end of the world. And so I took one month, that's all working in the outside world to really understand that whole thing.
And so I didn't see, you know, and yet it was nice, as I said before, when I see how students ready to go practically. That made a lot easier. The system was fairly prescribed in a sense. Everybody was doing post-beam houses, everything.
You know, it was the case study years. The arts and architecture, there was a lot of influence of that type. It was rather straightforward and rather simple in a way. And so that was much easier.
Today it's very complex. And people, you know, the CCs are always very esoteric and all over the place. And you can do it from sewing to the gondos. So it's a whole different world.
And the products are more, are almost artful in a sense. The degree that you have to invent materials to make them work with the knowledge that the student has. Not that they can't be structured properly and built properly, but they don't think like that because they start with form. And then, you know, and that is no way architects like myself work.
I start the opposite way. So it's a, you know, the structure is important to me. The environmental control systems are important to me. The programmatic issues, of course, are the progression of space is important.
The whole ball of waxes, which you're trying to get together in one time. Well, the student today doesn't want to think that far into the process. But yet, there are things that are happening that are quite wonderful. In terms of how it advances, it can advance the profession when you have people who already have experience in it.
And then you have young people coming in who can push the edge of it in the office. And I think in the bigger offices, that is very, very important. And the work has gotten much better. Public work today is, I think, quite good.
It used to be horrible. You know, those weren't, those weren't pre-mode jobs together. Most of it was almost difficult to do. But today, I find very good buildings.
I was on the design review board at UC San Diego. And the work got better and better. And the products that were produced were better and better. They weren't about in guard.
They weren't way out. But they were very excellent in terms of professional, in my opinion. Other people wouldn't agree, but they were very professionally well done. So, I don't know.
That's different. So, as a, I think we can all agree on that. It is different, absolutely. But I wanted to ask you as a final question.
The atmosphere that you saw, SIRC operating in when it first started and the kind of scientific zeitgeist that it might have been contributing to. And a part of how would you describe the zeitgeist that it's contributing to today? Well, it's known for two aspects of architecture. It's known as a strong design school.
In the United States, we're known in the world. And we're known as a strong computer driven school. It's not very high on the practical and the scale. But on those two elements, SIRC is still out there pretty strong.
I mean, who are we second to in this country? We're Harvard and MIT. Well, you know, they have a pretty big advantage. And yet we're right there with them.
And some people would put us ahead of them. But it's hard to put anybody ahead of a couple of schools like that in the East Coast schools, because they have a long time reputation. They can choose any student in the country they want. So, you know, they give them full scholarships and anything like that.
So they start with probably some of the brightest students in the first place. So if we're right there with them, and we don't, at least when I started, I took in everybody. Look them, flunk if they want to. I didn't flunk them.
They drop out. You know, if they didn't like, if the work is too hard, it's not an easy program to go to school. Because you're working, working, working, particularly in these days. So I always felt that they couldn't hack it and they didn't feel comfortable with it.
They should at least have a chance to try. Today, we're more, they've been more leaders since after I stepped down. Everybody else. They got a fort too.
They got a fort too, but also there was an attitude of some of the instructors. You know, I was probably too open, but not in my opinion, but in other people's opinion. And they didn't want to teach students that weren't the best students. Some people only want to teach the best students.
Well, that's the easy way of teaching. The hard part is to teach the students who aren't the best students. The best students will take care of themselves, pretty much. You know, it was a little encouragement.
But the other students need a lot more support. But if you're going to have only good students in your class, you're going to do better. It'll look better, at least, but it's not necessarily, you're not necessarily teaching or having people learn better. It's just a way of observing it as looking better.
And then, that was another real strong point that Sargre early on, was some of the models that were made were really beautiful. And they were, I give a lot of credit to both Eric Moss and Tom Ain for that kind of product that they were getting out of students. And when we first started, everybody was sort of in a cooperative mood. And nobody would touch anybody's model.
You could leave them out. You know, in most schools, they could smash stuff right away or stolen, or God knows what. So we could have them out and people would visit us or come through, and they'd be really impressed with what was there. And that was nice.
And of course, in Sargre today, I think, I like the lineal school that we have, because I think that's a very good way of moving directly out of the studio, into the quit session, onto the wall, walk away, you have an exhibit of what's going on through the school. And when you take a walk down, you see everything that's happening. And that's very good. And I think that's the way schools to be open like that.
And one in which you see what's happening. I remember, and I'm sorry to go regress a little bit, but just one more minute. I remember when we started Cal Poly, I would visit some other schools around the country. And some of them were a disaster.
I mean, you can find anything in the school. I mean, as far as work. And you look on the walls, and they teach you in this place. You know, it's really unbelievable.
And even at the millennium, when I was giving a talk in Cyprus, and they later showed us to work. And there was nothing there. I finally see some good work on the wall, and I said, well, what classes is this? Oh, that was when the AA came through.
That's their work. So in a very presumptuous way, I wrote the dean afterwards, and I said, you know, if you'd like, I could help you get some people teaching at your school, it might be better. Because all they want to do are PhDs. Well, PhDs are not good design instructors.
Usually it's in history, or they care only about that, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But you don't have a, you can't expect a school to be a good design school. With people who aren't designers, you can talk, you can write, you can do everything, but you can't design.
And a lot of times the best ones who talk the best and write the best are not good designers. And vice versa. So it's, you know, there's lots to conclude. You know, architecture requires so many different abilities, really, to be successful.
And it's hard from, you know, you have to be anywhere from, like, you do it in a lot of things. From today, you have to be able to sell. You have to be able to communicate. You have to be able to, you know, do the product.
You have to understand all the stuff that goes into a building. Any building is very complicated, no it takes. You know, it's very, very complicated. So it's really a cool, it's a collaboration.
It has to be a collaboration of many, many talents and disciplines besides architecture itself. You need good engineers and you need good, you know, mechanical, electrical people. And you need all this stuff. And now they even, you know, now you have people who are specialized in curtain walls.
They specialize in all kinds of different things. And architects are really conceptual designers, beginning design, schematic design, preliminary design design in general. But they have to be able to bring all these people together and be able to understand what they're talking about and be able to put it in. And be ready to defend yourself if you get sued later on.
Because that's another part of it. And even the way contracting is done today, it's so much different than when I started out in the end of the 80s. And it's just a different world. And it's a complicated world.
But you've managed to retain a very clear eyesight throughout all of it and to get to reflect on over 60 years of a very drastically changing practice. So thank you so much for telling us a little bit about that and joining us on the podcast. You're welcome. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to our Connects Questions 1-1 with Ray Cappy. Daniel LoWainov edits the podcast and Matt Skilling's composed our music. Myself and Paul Petunia are the producers of 1-1. New episodes come out every Monday.
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