Receiving the Topaz Award is an honor I did not dare dream about. I am extremely honored and especially grateful to Bruce Abbey and appreciative of the kind words of the many friends that supported my candidacy. It is a special honor to be the third member of a small group of young faculty at the University of Texas in the mid fifties known for some time as the Texas Rangers, after Cohn Rowe and John Hejduk, to receive this award.

Finding anything to say on this occasion has been made very difficult after the exceptional presentation last year by Don lyn Lyn don. I am beset with doubt about the appropriateness of what I have to say. Writing is not my forte, however I hope that the content will be a stimulation for thought and make up for a lack of rhetoric.

It is, I believe, natural on an occasion such as this to look back on one's life as an architect and as an educator. I began my education in the US at Cornell in 1950. I remember it as having been a very exciting moment. Philip Johnson had been a visiting critic after he had completed his famous glass house in New Canaan. His book on Mies van der Rohe published on the occasion of the exhibit at MOMA, became a sort of textbook for the students who went to great lengths interpreting the few aphorisms by Mies found on a few back pages of the book, like words from on high. The Farnsworth house and 860 Lakeshore Drive were being completed. In New York the first modern high-rise buildings, the UN building and the Lever House were under construction and caused exciting debates about which of the two was better. On the students' desks one would find Kidder-Smith's Brazil Builds and the 1948 and 1951 issues of Architectural Record on Frank Lloyd Wright. The more engaged students of the third year became passionate Mies followers, while some of my classmates and I believed that the future of architecture belonged to Frank Lloyd Wright. As I look back, it was, in the absence of any rigorous instruction, a very beneficial learning situation, since it forced us to carefully, and penetratingly, involve ourselves with their work.

It was also the time of John Entenza's Art and Architecture Magazine and the Case Study Houses, though of even greater interest for us was the magazine Spazio edited by Luigi Moretti, and especially the famous article on architectural space. It also introduced the work in Italy of Paolo Soleri. Anyway this was the beginning of a very interesting and constantly stimulating 50 years in architectural education. Modern architecture had won the day followed by a continuous series of architectural events, each announced as marking a significant change - expansion of the tenets and the formal possibilities of modern architecture. I will take a moment to cite a few of them.

Ca. 1950 Buckminster Fuller became an interesting force in architectural education, beginning with his teaching at NC State University School of Architecture under Henry Kamphofner, one of the most significant schools in America at the time. Bucky Fuller was also teaching as visiting critic at schools in the East, involving a series of fascinating projects such as the autonomous dwelling unit, the dymaxion information center and the design of a cotton gin etc. I was in one of his studios in the Spring of 1953. At the end of the semester I was ready to devote my life to the betterment of mankind through technology. Although my passion for form and space finally won out, the experience provided a rigor of thinking that has stayed with me ever since.

There followed brief facets at center stage of the architectural scene, with houses by Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra, and a great interest in Japanese architecture and gardens. Typically, MOMA followed by erecting in succession a house by Breuer, a Japanese House and Bucky Fuller Structures in the museum garden.

The late 50's and early 60's heralded a major new phase, which coincided with a publication of a book by Siegfried Gideon titled Architecture, You and Me in which he proclaimed the problem of vaulting to be the next important issue for architecture and essential if Modern Architecture was to produce buildings of monumentality. This led to a rash of buildings with warped surfaces, hyperboloids, conoids, only to mention a few after Ronchamp, Nowicky's livestock pavilion in Raleigh NC, Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium, the Yale hockey ring, the TWA terminal and the work of Eduardo Catalano and Horatio Caminos.

The interest in monumentality produced also another phase in modern architecture with the design of buildings and complexes with completely symmetrical plans,and temple-like structures with large overhanging roofs on slender columns, enclosed with perforated sunscreens (a version of LC's brise soleil) such as the Embassy in New Delhi by Edward D. Stone or the Embassy in Athens by Gropius, and the work by Yamasaki, who proclaimed that he was putting the beauty back into architecture that Corbu took out. Interestingly this delicate effete architecture was followed almost immediately by another movement, The New Brutalism, with buildings by the Smithsons, like Robinhood Lane, Corbu's Maison Jaoul, Ham Commons by Stirling and Gowan, and perhaps one should include Paul Rudolph's Arts and Architecture building, and Marcel Breuer's St. John's Monastery.

The social interest of the early 1 960s was to have a major effect on a number of architecture schools. Schools hired faculty who were social or behavioral scientists with a degree or merely an interest in architecture. In many schools design began to become irrelevant or even disappear. It took many schools a long time to rediscover architecture.

Interestingly, there appeared almost simultaneously in the early sixties the work of Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Venturi published his important book Comolexitv and Contradictions) and the group of architects identified as the Whites and the NY 5 - the one considered to be pluralistic, inclusive - the other elitist and exclusive. Even though the distinctions bordered on the silly, they nevertheless impacted heavily on teaching and influenced the discourse of architecture.

Simultaneously there appeared in Europe, in England, a movement called Archigram, with the main players Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, and Michael Webb. In Japan a group called The Metabolists and in Italy another - the Neo-Rationalists around Aldo Rossi. Aldo Rossi taught in a number of schools in the United States and exerted a major influence on the work in many schools or architecture. It was nastily referred to as "Architecture made easy".

And it was only a short step from Rossi to Post Modernism. To this must be added an important change in Michael Graves' work, the Portland City Hall and Court House, and in particular the design for the museum in Fargo, North Dakota, with its quotation from Ledoux. Ada Louise Hustable called it the greatest design of the century. Post Modernism is unfortunately still with us. It was an easy selling product. Major firms, not to be named, which had a reputation for good modern glass sky scrapers not only recruited young graduates as designers but engaged architecture faculty to teach them how to do POMO.

An important moment occurred with the competition for the Wexner Center. The only modern project was Peter Eisen man's. It was the moment that "Decon," Deconstruction gained entry into the design studios. It would be wrong to leave out the influence of Frank Gehry, beginning with the publication of the redesign of his own house. Both Frank Gehry and Peter Eisen man taught at Harvard. The rest is recent history.

In 1993 I invited Peter Eisenman to give a lecture at the ETH in Zurich. He began his lecture proclaiming that Decon is dead. Yet in 1998, like Pomo it continues to hang around while already a new movement is being born, on one hand The New Simplicitv and simultaneously Minimalist Architecture.

If we search through archives of architecture schools we see all these trends reflected in the work of the students. Every phase was taken seriously to the point of becoming an issue of belief, and some faculty taught with the missionary zeal of bringing the message from on high to the heathens.

I am certain that I have left out many other influential events and design directions. Fascinating to me remains the rapidity with which design movements or attitudes replace each other. They can also be seen as being all part of a larger architecture epoch called Modern Architecture.

When Modern Architecture was born during a few years in the early 1920's it was from the start not at all a single homogeneous body of thoughts, ideas and attitudes. Already, even then, it consisted of very diverse, even divergent directions, if one looks critically at the work around Gropius, Constructivism, Neoplastic architecture, Neue Sachlichkeit, Expressionism, to name some of the major ones. Each phase involved talented, creative architects, each making significant contributions to an enrichment of Modern Architecture.

Through all of these influences the basic curricula of schools of architecture remain essentially the same. One only has to refer to the 1928 Report on Schools of Architecture. A curriculum appears to be a very resilient structure, it adapts, it sheds, and accepts trends as they appear, without altering the basic model. One may conclude that it is not the curriculum that will determine the quality of an architectural institution - that the curriculum is only as good as its teaching. I would argue that we teach too much, provide too much information, but do not teach thoroughly enough.

I have no doubt that students' feelings of being engaged with the latest artistic and avant garde state of design yield enthusiasm and greater volition. A talented student would want to feel part of the forefront of architecture. But, to what extent should it be the content of design teaching? and when? Is being au courant an essential ingredient of a good design program? I have serious doubts.

I have always found it interesting that students who were studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg were only allowed to compose in the diatonic system. There is also the joke about a mother bringing her seven year old son to Picasso to show him the modern paintings done by her son and Picasso commenting: isn't it amazing what your son can do? When I was his age I only wanted to draw as well as Velasquez.

I might also insert here a brief quotation:

From Germany came young people "liberated by the Bauhaus, the school founded by Walter Gropius and closed by Hitler; they were inclined to be aesthetes; they quickly considered themselves artists and they lacked the serious foundation of the English, the Swiss, the Czechs and the Poles.

The virtue of the plan, the elegance of the solution, eminently French values, are unknown everywhere else. Such lack of spirituality saddens me. The Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris would have emerged victorious if its aims were other than constantly striking effects by graphical methods." Le Corbusier in "When the Cathedrals were White".

It must have been circa 1970 and I believe it was at Harvard, that the idea of a core program in architecture curriculum was initiated (not basic design). This assumed that there was a body of architectural knowledge and experiences to be imparted before a student would enter advanced studios.

Core teaching must assume that a teacher leaves as much as possible, his personal, intellectual and architectural interest and predispositions at home, while by contrast students in the advanced level should be exposed to a variety of different approaches by individual architects. The visiting critic system is an ideal model. At the core level, I understand teaching to be distinctly different from "critting". It implies a sequential process of learning, a collective effort of a like-minded faculty with a shared, agreed upon structure of subjects, issues and objecUves. It also requires an established common, not private language, so that the students' confidence with the content matter is reinforced through constant reiteration and so that discourse can become possible. At the basis of the teaching lies the assumption that architecture is a formal construct and that it operates through its own particular logic. It is this architectural logic which would constitute the intellectual framework for the core, which means that the success of the core model depends on a parallel teaching of history and theory. By theory, however, I mean perhaps something else than is commonly understood - a theoretical discourse appropriate to the students stage in design, such as the properties of architectural space, of parti, the formal logic and the appropriate arrangement of a plan, etc. - not exactly hot, current topics. And what of history? I would like to end with a quotation:

"Back again walking hand in hand miles through the hot sun and deep dust of the ancient winding road: an old Italian road, along the stream. How old! How thoroughly a Roman road! Together again tired out, sitting on benches in the galleries of Europe, saturated with plastic beauty, beauty in buildings, beauty in sculpture, beauty in paintings, until no Chiesa however rare and no further beckoning work of human hands could waylay us any more."