"Let me begin by recalling that Chimacoff-Schumacher song of 1962, from whence derived the myth of the Texas Rangers:

Oh the Rangers come from Texas
There's Werner, John and Lee
And Colin's come from Cambridge
No Texas Ranger he!

This is a specimen of what I still think of as New York Jewish wit and, if it intimated a pedagogical program which, so far as I was concerned, did not exist, it rapidly acquired a legendary dimension. And, of course, it referred to the last days of that academical Pompeii, the architecture school at the University of Texas, circa 1954 to 1958 or '59.

Now, if it is possible to speak of the young Turks of Texas, I was certainly one of them, fired by the senior faculty along with Robert Slutzky, John Hejduk and Lee Hirsche after the resignation of Harwell Hamilton Harris. And it was this same senior faculty who, hoping to restore what they conceived to be normality, then appointed in our places Werner Seligmann, John Shaw, and Lee Hodgden. But all of this has been described by Alex Caragonne (not to mention myself) and those acquainted with these long ago politics are well aware that the faculty old guard did NOT secure their objective of a quiet well-regulated school, a school without animation and only refrigerated by the kiss of death.

Rather, what they imagined to be fever and sedition just didn't go away and their new faculty came rapidly to operate as an active coalition gathering around the infectious teachings of Bernhard Hoesli.

This is something of a precis of the "old, unhappy, far off things, and battles long ago" which Wordsworth presumed to be the possible "plaintive" song of his "solitary Highland lass" (who no doubt herself was an impersonation of liberty): but, further to this, it is a necessary preface to my first encounter with Werner, which took place in Ithaca in the late summer of 1958 when I was visited by the original trio of Chimacoff and Schumacher's Texas Rangers. And, by that time, Texas was again disturbed. Being recognized as a carrier of insidious germs, Hoesli had already been dismissed in 1957 and had returned to Switzerland, ultimately to take up an appointment at the E.TH.; and, as for me, after spending the academic year '57 to '58 at Cornell, I had received an invitation (which seemed to be full of hope ) to go to teach at the University of Cambridge, where I remained for four years of increasing disappointment.

And so, in August '58, just what were Werner, John, and Lee doing up in Ithaca? By their own admission yet another massacre of junior faculty was impending at Texas: and. by my own interpretation they were prospecting for an escape route, with Werner as leader and guide. But what I do vividly remember of the occasion was a question of Werner's; and he asked it in a manner which was somewhat aggressive, partly accusative: from student drawings he could see no trace of my influence. And was it not my duty to indoctrinate? And, for heaven's sake, after a presence of two semesters, just why was I leaving without having produced any visible impact?

This was my first meeting with Werner and I remember the place. I had been living in eddy Street, in that house built by Henry Miller in the 1880's which had been bequeathed to Cornell the year before, and we were sitting in a swing seat in that green-painted side porch. And, on a very hot day, I tried to explain my failure; but I don't think that I had too much success. I told him what Henry-Russell Hitchcock had told me at Yale: that Cornell was the most relentlessly retarded of pseudo-Beaux Arts institutions and that (though this might have been New Haven - as usual - badmouthing Ithaca) there was still a degree of truth in what Hitchcock had said Possibly Cornell was not impenetrable but its points of view would only fall as the result of a protracted siege. But, characteristically, Werner was scarcely able to accept such an excuse. Though a graduate of Cornell himself, in Texas he had been subject to a glaring illumination as to the virtues of hard line drawings.

In terms of the discriminations provided by Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay The Hedgehog and The Fox- "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing" - Werner was a hedgehog, the immortal type of Mies Van der Rohe and Palladio; and, hence, the curiosity of his enthusiasm for Le Corbusier, the most prominent super-fox known to modern architecture. But Werner was consumed by a messianic passion, and, to me, this was one of his more engaging ambiguities. With an almost adolescent enthusiasm, he really did believe - I think - that modern architecture was going to redeem the world, this long after the available evidence to suggest otherwise; and it must have been this rather boyish impetuousness which, when he was absent, often led me to underestimate his physical size. When he was absent I recollected him as a small boy, pocket edition; and then, when he was present, he was apt to become something of a miniature Farnese Hercules. He was easily shocked and he could be stubborn. When I once told him - this was rather a long time ago - that the latest slogan at the A.A. in London was "Long Life Loose Fit Low Energy" he was typically pained: this seemed to him to be a betrayal of all that he had ever believed. But, little or big, he himself was certainly a ball of incorrigible, hyperthyroid energy; and he conveyed this energy to almost everybody. As they say of practitioners of the high jump, he "raised the level" - he was always raising it - and, in doing so, he elevated the student's self esteem, and his or her ambition. In an entirely compassionate way he was impatient: or, if you like, "His patience rooted in impatience stood"; and with Werner's death a small but steady light has been removed from the world.

I remember him over a period of forty years and I see him in the sharpest focus always in a Italian setting - most clearly during two consecutive days in March 1981. I had come up from Rome, where I was teaching at Notre Dame, to be on a jury in Florence - and this was when the Syracuse outfit was in that rather shabby and exiguous apartment over on the other side of the river, with a rather nice antique shop almost next door and a rather painful little restaurant across the way.

What we judged I don't recollect; but I do remember two very outstanding drives. On the one occasion we went to Cerreto Guidi and also took a look at Vinci (I think it was Vinci) to see a little museum with models of Leonardo's machines. And, on the other, we drove to Montepulciano, a difficult town where, in spite of splendid palaces, the streets never seem to arrive at what ought to be their pre-ordained destinations; and it was here that I became infinitely amused by the predicament in which Werner soon became involved. His car was large (a Mercedes Benz or a big BMW?) and, trying to get down the hill from the piazza, he decided to take what he supposed to be a shortcut. He quickly found himself in an almost inextricable labyrinth of acutely angled intersections, clumsy little corners, and narrow little alleys, some of which turned out to be dead ends. This is the sort of crazy urban texture that Matt Bell calls "cracked mud"; and needless to say his vehicle could scarcely negotiate it. So, reversing and twisting, but just not scraping, we finally got out of it; but I can't believe that he was at all pleased by what he must have known was the slightly malicious, I told you so look on my face, and I am sure that he was only too happy to put me off at Chianciano to take the train back to Rome.

Coming here, with Matt and Cheryl, from Washington, D.C. yesterday, we stopped in Binghamton to take a look at Werner's synagogue, which is no longer too Wrightian for my taste; and I regret that we have not been able to refresh our eyes with the building for the mental institution at Willard - a very respectable mini-version of Corbu at Brazilia (even though said by its architect to derive from a local barn); and then, of course, there is Center Ithaca, which I have always admired and which has still not yet been sufficiently praised - as one of the very few modern buildings which are fully engaged with an urban context.

So there is Werner; and I say IS because I can only think of him as STILL alive, an indefatigable and quite excessive, bouncing ball, forever on the road between Cortland and Ithaca and then between Cortland and Syracuse.. .When he left Cornell it was the end of an epoch and I would have dearly liked to have left with him. Because, when Werner left, a languor descended, the noise level became less, wisdom became diminished to a remnant, and conversation became fatigued. But I believe that you have to take the rough with the smooth and I, for one, must be one among the many who can only feel profoundly privileged to have known Werner Seligmann.

He was self-conscious; he enjoyed his work; he was not a technocrat. It was a good life and it is a consolation to have witnessed it."

Colin Rowe
Syracuse