ORAL HISTORY OF AMBROSE M. RICHARDSON

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1990 Revised Edition Copyright © 2005 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Preface to Revised Edition v

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 230

Curriculum Vitae 231

Index of Names and Buildings 233

iii PREFACE

On February 1, 2, and 3, 1990, I met with Ambrose Richardson in South Bend, Indiana, where we recorded ten hours of his memoirs. Ambrose has pursued a dual career: as a practicing architect and as a professor of architectural education. He was a member of the first senior class to study with Mies van der Rohe at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago, and began his career as designer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill during the early years when his contribution, no doubt, helped shape the firm's reputation. The architectural community recognized Ambrose's clean, clear design, despite SOM's insistence on anonymity. In 1951, he left SOM to teach architectural education at the University of Illinois in Champaign, where, in 1956, he organized Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Associates, a firm that soon specialized in educational work. In 1972, Ambrose was appointed chairman of the department of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, where he is now professor emeritus and serves as consultant for architecture, design, and planning projects. Ambrose speaks not only as an architect, but also as an educator, which gives his recollections and judgments special authority. Our recording sessions were taped on seven ninety-minute cassettes, which have been transcribed and reviewed for clarity and accuracy by both Ambrose and me. This transcript has been edited minimally in order to maintain the flow, spirit, and tone of the original narrative. Ambrose took care to recount his experiences thoughtfully and to share his impressions with candor and attention to detail, for which I thank him. His personal view and eyewitness account of the recent past will provide a more complete understanding of the events and personalities of the past fifty years, for which future historians will thank him. This document is one of a series of oral histories by Chicago architects available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. Ambrose Richardson's oral history is sponsored by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The Graham Foundation is outstanding in its ongoing support and encouragement of our oral history program, which seeks to document the recent architectural past through the words of architects who created it. For their care and good judgment in shaping the final form of this document, thanks go to Joan Cameron, our transcriber, and to Meg Moss, our editor.

Betty J. Blum July 1990

iv PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since 1990, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library's commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor.

Betty J. Blum February 2005

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Life 1 Century of Progress Remembered 11 Education at the University of Chicago 20 Studying Architecture at Armour Institute, Chicago 22 Memories of Chicago 51 The Early Days at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 59 Ryerson Competition 84 Military Service 88 Return to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 95 Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois 105 A Whirlwind European Trip 112 Greyhound Terminal, Chicago. Illinois 124 Oak Ridge, Tennessee 128 Executive Training 144 Academic Career at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana 150 A Sidebar: Competitions 155 "Chicago's Tomorrow," An Exhibition 161 Campus Commissions at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana 166 Moonlighting with Naess and Murphy 172 A.M. Richardson and Associates (Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Associates) 176 Niles High Schools, Niles, Illinois 178 Bible Belt Colleges 182 Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana 184 National Institute of Baking Building, Chicago, Illinois 191 Working in Washington, D.C. 195 Work for the National Architectural Accreditation Board 197 More Academia at the University of Notre-Dame, South Bend, Indiana 203 Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre-Dame, South Bend, Indiana 211 Reflections 212 Inventions and Patents 216

vi Ambrose Madison Richardson

Blum: Today is February 1, 1990, and I'm with Ambrose Richardson in his home in South Bend, Indiana. Ambrose was born in 1917 in Helena, Arkansas. He was a member of the first senior class to study with Mies van der Rohe at IIT [Illinois Institute of Technology] and graduated in 1939. Ambrose, your career has had a two-fold thrust. One, as a practicing architect, first with SOM [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill] and then with your own firm called Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Associates. And the other thrust of your career has been as a professor of architectural education at the University of Illinois and at Notre Dame. Today you are professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. If it is all right with you, I'd like you to go back as far as you can recall and share with us how it all began, how it took shape, and how it developed. What was your father's work?

Richardson: I think of myself as a Chicagoan, Betty, but I actually grew up in the South. I was born in Arkansas, as you mentioned, just south of Memphis on the Mississippi River. I have very strong memories of my very early childhood in the Deep South, as it was and still is to some extent, and growing up along the river. There were still riverboats at that time. I remember when the calliope on the famous Kate Adams would blow and we would run down. Of course, there was a big levee there, and we'd watch the boats come in, and we would watch the activities along the river. The actual town itself was below the river level. There was this high levee there. And so I grew up in this tradition of almost a post-Civil War era. I think the ratio of blacks to whites was something like five to one. It was the blackest part of the country, as they said, at that time. My father had his own lumber business and hired a good many black people. Of course, I grew up in our own house. We had our own wonderful nanny and our cook and so forth. So, I grew up in this traditional southern background. Then when I was about six years old, my father was offered a very fine opportunity to go in the lumber business with a wealthy

1 young man over in Laurel, Mississippi. So we moved over to Laurel, and I spent the rest of my early youth in Laurel. But that was also a very interesting and unique southern background, because it was not a river town at all. It was primarily a pine center. It's where Masonite was started, by the way. It was a very interesting place to live because a good many of the people who had established the town, lumbermen, had come down from the North—from Wisconsin and Iowa and so on—and established a very interesting sort of a Yankee culture down there. They had a wonderful library with a collection of paintings. And my start—you asked me how I really was influenced by all this—really started at home, like so many things do. I had shown from an early time an interest in drawing and so on, and my mother, who had been fortunate enough to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and had this wonderful background of studying both in Florence and Paris, encouraged me, of course, right away to develop my art instincts. I was encouraged very much by that. When I was a young boy—I can't remember now, maybe sixth or seventh grade—I met a teacher who taught us art. We had very exceptional schools there, at least for the white kids, and she encouraged us to go to the art museum, which was a part of the library there. We had these wealthy lumber people who had given these things. We had some [Frederic] Remingtons and we had a [George] Inness or two, and she encouraged us, of course, to go. So my interest in painting and in art was from the early times. We had copies in our house. We had an Inness—I'll never forget it—not an original but a copy, and we had copies of some of the great Raphaels and so on. So I really grew up in the tradition of loving art and being interested in it. My grandparents were also encouraging. We spent every summer up in St. Joseph, Missouri. My grandfather, who was an industrialist, actually, an overall manufacturer, was, I think, kind of a frustrated architect. He encouraged me from early days, and I had shown this skill in drawing. So, I was encouraged from the very earliest time.

Blum: What was your grandfather's work?

Richardson: He was an industrialist. Actually, he was a great inventor. He inherited—really he or his family did—an old manufacturing concern in St.

2 Joseph, Missouri, called the R. L. McDonald Manufacturing Company. They manufactured overalls. Overalls, at that time, were as common as blue jeans. Of course, these were the bib-type overalls. They're not that common now. But anyway, he was a fascinating man—a book in himself—and he encouraged me, as I say, from very early days to get interested. My father, on the contrary, wasn't encouraging at all. He was a businessman, and he encouraged both my brother and myself to go into business, and that was his whole interest. He didn't have the artistic interest at all.

Blum: Were you encouraged to become an artist or an architect?

Richardson: I think I was first encouraged to be an artist because I had the skill and I had met this teacher, whom I referred to down in Laurel, who gave me certain assignments to do on my own. I even have some now in my collection. I was drawing very credibly, I think, at eight or ten years old. Then finally I got into some contests and won several of them. By the time I was twelve or thirteen years old, I had won several prizes—not in any formal exhibitions or anything—but I was a good drawer.

Blum: What kind of contests were they?

Richardson: Well, actually it was a very interesting thing, and I wish they'd do more of it now. The local newspaper in St. Joe each week had a child's page, and they would give the subject matter to either write a little essay on or to draw a picture on. And so we would submit these essays or pictures, and then the following week, or whatever their deadline was, they would publish it. That was great fun because you could get to see your picture published and your name underneath it and a prize. I think the prize was something like an automatic pencil. They weren't big prizes, but, you know, it was the thrill of seeing your name in print and so forth. So it was a very stimulating thing. Of course, a lot of kids entered these things. The few that did win, well, you know, they got to be known. So I got stimulated that way. That was not really professional drawing. Then my father went broke in the depression of 1929. I think I was twelve then. We had to make a transition to move back to

3 Chicago where he had originally started his business. We spent a year going to school in St. Joe in the meantime, while we're making this move, because we were absolutely broke. My grandfather, as I said, was a very remarkable person—among other things he was a great craftsman—and he built a tilting drawing board for me and also for my brother. That got me kind of encouraged. He gave me a T-square and triangle, and that encouraged me to learn how to draw with a T-square and triangle. Then that spring he bought me a crow quill pen and gave me a book written by a man named Joseph Pennell—I don't know whether you've heard about him. He was one of the great architectural draftsmen. I have his book now about cathedrals in France with these lovely pen-and-ink drawings. It was a big house and I had plenty of room to work alone, and I would sit down at this drafting table and I'd copy these pen-and-ink drawings of Joe Pennell, and I still have some. They were done when I was thirteen, and they're really credible. So I got very much intrigued drawing with pen and ink and particularly architectural subjects. As a matter of fact, later on when we moved to Chicago, I would actually do pictures of the buildings at the University of Chicago, and I sold them when I was sixteen for ten dollars which was a lot money at that time.

Blum: Did you save any drawings?

Richardson: I have one or two. As a matter of fact, I had one hanging in my office over at the university for a while to cover a crack. But, anyhow, I stepped up my interest in the drawing, and the drawing naturally took me into other fields. The way that started was interesting. Although my mother encouraged my brother and my sister—I don't mean that she was playing favorites in any way—since I did seem to show this interest and talent, she made every effort to see that I would get the opportunities. When we moved up to Chicago I was then, I think, a sophomore in high school. She arranged somehow—I don't know how we did it because we certainly didn't have any money and everybody was broke at that time—to have me go to some classes at the Art Institute. So I went down there on Saturdays and went through the high school with Dudley Crafts Watson and George Buehr, whom I met at the Graham Foundation [for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts], was his young

4 assistant at that time. Well, anyway, Dudley Crafts Watson was the Midwest authority, you know. He was the Burton Holmes. He was the person who took the great tours. He would stand up in Fullerton Hall. My mother somehow got to be a member of the Art Institute, and I'd go down and hear these lectures of his, primarily for older women. He was superb! He had his pince-nez with the long ribbon, and he wore a cutaway. He was a really dapper guy, a marvelous speaker! I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about the paintings and the history and so forth. He was looking back at it. Of course, he was corny, and I don't think he was ever committal, but he was a wonderful speaker who inspired me. He and Buehr developed a high school group that met on Saturdays. I don't remember what you had to do to qualify. You had to submit some drawing or something like that. If you qualified, you could come to this group, and they came from all the suburbs and all over Chicago. I don't know whether we met every Saturday or not, but, in any case, it was marvelous. We were all young people. I remember one time a wonderful, young sculptress did a bust right in front of us in clay. We had demonstrations and these wonderful lectures. So that was inspiring, too. Then finally I reached a point when I thought maybe I didn't really want to go into the art field. When I was fourteen, about 1932, I decided (or my mother decided for me, I guess) to take a summer course at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Now, that's located on South Michigan, in one of those wonderful [Louis] Sullivan buildings. I went there, and I was going to study, I think, interiors. Well, anyway, that was my introduction to watercolor, my introduction to mixing color, my introduction to brushes, and so forth. I remember we did some Adam period interiors and whatnot. But among other teachers that I had there, and there were some very good ones, indeed. I guess I was probably one of the younger students at that time. Bruce Goff, whom I had never heard of and no one else had really, at that time. But he took one of my classes and he was very interesting. I remember he had a canary yellow shirt, and he had a purple tie that he pulled through. He never tied a knot, he would always just pull it though. He was a very young man and a very shy sort of guy, kind of pigeon-toed and whatever. But anyway, he took quite a shine to me and said, "I think you really should be interested in getting into architecture." He told me about his story, how he had started

5 out as a young boy in Tulsa [Oklahoma] and he had shown an interest and he designed this church by the time he was fourteen or fifteen years old. And it's still there. In the meantime, he told me about Frank Lloyd Wright. Well, of course, I was familiar with Wright, living on the street of the Robie house. I lived on Woodlawn Avenue just three or four blocks north of Robie house. So walking to Hyde Park High, which I did every day, I'd walk right by the Robie house and I got, of course, very much acquainted with it. Now mind you, really at that time—this was 1932—Wright had not been published, had not been rediscovered really except possibly in Europe. He was very controversial, indeed. I remember my family talking about all the horrible experiences that they had heard about when Wright was in Oak Park and burning up his wife or whatever all these horrible things were. So, his name was really not surrounded by the best of circumstances as far as I was concerned. My grandfather was equally influential although I only saw him summers and whatnot. But his background had been Yale, class of 1878, classmate and good friend of William Howard Taft and he'd shared the mathematical prize with him and all that. He was a classicist. I mean, as far as he was concerned, architecture reached its absolute zenith with the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and he ingrained that in me. So at this time, when I met Bruce Goff, my idea of architecture was the orders. I didn't know what they were, but Corinthian architecture or Corinthian columns to me were the ultimate. When I met this person who was talking about doing houses with copper and these other things—my first design with him was a house on the dunes made out of copper. We designed these windows and everything. I guess I did some renderings on them. Well, anyway, he was very pleased. The fact is, he took me on as sort of a protégé, I think.

Blum: He was teaching a class, took a shine to you, and you wound up working for him?

Richardson: No, not working. He kind of took over my class work. I mean, I gave up on the interiors and everything else. I don't know how it happened, but somehow he was my main teacher.

6 Blum: Were you his apprentice?

Richardson: He's the only one I really remember. I remember the others were okay, but it was to the point where he was teaching me other things. For example, he asked me to come out to visit him in his studio in Park Ridge [Illinois]. At that time, Park Ridge was a long way out. You had to take the train out, of course. I managed to do it somehow. His studio—mind you, this is the height of depression—had taken over a little store, and he lived there. It had a toilet facility in the back. I suppose there was a shower. He just slept there on the floor. He had a pallet. For his drawing board, he had a four-by-eight sheet of plywood on four orange boxes, and he did these perfectly magnificent watercolors. The only other equipment he had there—I think maybe there were a couple of camp stools or something—was a record player, and he had this record collection. And he introduced me to [Sergei] Prokofiev, and he introduced me to [Claude] Debussy and so forth. Mind you, with my background I was lucky enough to be familiar with the classics. Both my grandfather and my mother and so on had acquainted me with Beethoven and Bach, all the classical things. But Debussy and Prokofiev and [Dmitri] Shostakovich were new to me. It was just like the new architecture. My eyes suddenly opened up, and here I am this fourteen-year-old, wide-eyed guy. I went out there one or two times. I can't remember how many. He showed me his paintings, and we'd sit on the floor and listen to Debussy, and he would tell me about the relationship of Debussy to contemporary architecture and meaningful things and so on. Of course, at that age I was extremely impressionable. It was a very important eye-opener to me. I remember he'd sit and close his eyes and fold his hands and rock back and forth as we listened to this music. That was a little strange, but, anyway, I thought, it was okay. He was doing some freelance artwork. He was doing some perfectly beautiful colored pencil drawings. He introduced me to that, too. I think they were Prismacolor pencils. They were for Libbey-Owens-Ford for advertisements. They were gorgeous drawings, and they were published in architectural magazines in the early 1930s. He had been commissioned to do a poster for the YMCA—the Chicago YMCA, I guess—and he asked me if I would be his model and pose for him. I told this story before at the Graham

7 Foundation. I told my father about it, and, of course, my father was just horrified.

Blum: What was he worried about?

Richardson: He was worried about this guy being a pervert. Well, I didn't know what a pervert was. It never occurred to me that there was any danger in my being exposed to this guy. My father was such a strong, southern person. I mean, he was very firm in his ways—very wonderful in his ways—but very firm. That was just about the end of my art career.

Blum: With Bruce Goff?

Richardson: It was certainly the end of my relationship with Bruce Goff until many years later when I saw him and he remembered me. The fact is, later on when I was at the University of Illinois, he tried to hire me when he was down in Oklahoma. He wanted me to come down there. So he didn't forget me and I didn't forget him.

Blum: Did you withdraw from the Chicago Academy?

Richardson: I didn't quit, but I think it was just about that time I certainly didn't ever go to his studio again. I mean, my father prohibited that completely. In other words, I finished that project, but that was the end of my personal relationship with Goff for a long time.

Blum: What do you think you had learned?

Richardson: I learned that there was something else besides the classics, for one thing, in architecture. Bruce was a very imaginative person, a very enjoyable person. He certainly opened my eyes to the fact there was other classical or other serious music beside Beethoven and Bach. It was just part of an education, just was part of growing up. I really thought that there probably would be another approach to architecture, although the classical was pretty ingrained

8 in me. I mean, there's no doubt about that because of my background. But, anyway, he gave me an opportunity to see something else.

Blum: You spoke about your mother studying at the Sorbonne and in Florence.

Richardson: She had a very interesting career, as many people did at the time. This was the turn of the century when she was just twenty-ish. But she had the opportunity, thanks to her parents, who at that time were well-to-do, to travel and take the European tours. She studied, as I said, both in Florence and Paris. She became quite fluent in French and Italian. She never graduated from college, but she took these courses. Of course, young women who were privileged at that time didn't necessarily finish college, but they got this wonderful education in other ways. It really stuck with her. She drew very well. She played the piano beautifully, and, as I say, she was fluent.

Blum: Did she favor any of the arts particularly or just generally?

Richardson: Generally. She drew. She never did any serious drawing or painting, but, of course, she encouraged me a great deal. She had these—as my grandmother did, too, in her house—big photographs of Ponte Vecchio and all of these kind of things. But we grew up with that kind of stuff around us. It didn't come as any great surprise for anybody to say, "Well, Ambrose is going to go into the architectural world." As I said, at that time, I was still mixed up about whether I wanted just to draw or to be a commercial artist. In high school, I was the art editor of the yearbook, and I drew pictures of Hyde Park High in pen and ink.

Blum: Did they offer mechanical drawing or shop or any of these classes?

Richardson: They did.

Blum: Did you take them?

9 Richardson: They did, and I'm glad that you mentioned that, because that was another strong influence on me. When I came to Chicago and Hyde Park High, I was a sophomore at that time. I started high school early. I was only twelve when I went as a freshman. One of the options there was mechanical drawing. Through my grandfather, as I said, I had gotten a T-square and triangle, so I decided the thing to do was to develop my mechanical drawing skills, which I dearly loved. We had a wonderful teacher there who also taught Walter Netsch and my partner John Severns. At least I'm sure she taught Walt. He was two or three years after me in Hyde Park. Matter of fact, he was in my wife's homeroom there. We didn't know him at that time, of course, at all. She knew him only as another student. But, anyway, this woman's name was Bertha Spink. I'll never forget her. Maybe you've heard of her somewhere along the line. Goodness knows how many future architects she trained. But she had the mechanical drawing class. She was strict but good, and she taught us how to use the tools and all this. After the first year, I kept advancing and I kept on with it. I took everything she had to offer there, as much as I could possibly do. In the meantime, my grandfather had known indirectly or perhaps directly, Lorado Taft, the great sculptor. Although my grandfather didn't introduce me, I was very familiar with his work, living out near the Midway and knowing the old, disintegrating piece of sculpture out there, and, of course, knowing the Art Institute.

Blum: The Fountain of Time.

Richardson: Yes.

Blum: This is the concrete sculpture?

Richardson: Yes, at the west end of the Midway. He had a studio down in Ingleside, just south of the Midway. So one day I went over—I was about a junior in high school—and I just went over to visit him.

Blum: What was that experience like?

10 Richardson: I just went in and it was marvelous! He was just wonderful. I said, "Hello, Mr. Taft." I mentioned my grandfather. He had visited my grandfather's place, I think, in St. Joe when he gave a lecture. He was very kind about it, and I told him that I was an artist, too.

Blum: A budding artist.

Richardson: A little presumption. I didn't say "budding artist." I said I was an artist, too. His students were all there, and they were making these marvelous little displays—the small figures of the great sculptures and whatnot. Anyway, he was just a delight and just as kind and generous as he could be. That's the only time I ever saw him personally. He must have given me an hour or something. We sat down and he talked to me about drawing and art.

Blum: And this was while you were still in high school?

Richardson: Oh, yes. I think maybe I was just a sophomore or junior, thirteen or fourteen years old. I was genuinely interested, and, of course, it was very fascinating to me. But I kept on drawing just for the fun of it. So, finally the 1933-34 Century of Progress International Exposition was coming along. This was just after I'd met Bruce Goff. Well, of course, those buildings were such a shock to everybody at that time who was used to the example of the Columbian Exposition. To see all these new buildings was really shocking. Of course, jobs were hard to come by. We saw in the newspaper that they were going to have roller chair guides. They mentioned a man named Daggett who had gotten this concession, and he was going to have college boys push these chairs.

Blum: What is a roller chair?

Richardson: Roller chair. You push it while people are sitting in it.

Blum: Like a wheelchair?

11 Richardson: Wheelchair, yes. They called them roller chairs. My brother and I looked him up and he lived up on the North Side. We got an interview with him and I guess we were the first ones interviewed. He thought that was pretty impressive. This was back in January and, of course, the fair wasn't going to start until May or something. But he said I was too young, that they were only going to hire college people. My brother was going to be eligible for college the next year—he was older—but they said I was too young. I said, well, I was going to be a senior in high school. I wasn't really, I guess. Come to think of it, I was only a junior, but I was going to be a senior the next year. He was very nice about it, an older man, and he said he'd make an exception and let me be a chair guide if I thought I could hold up in terms of health and whatnot. So, I had this job as a chair guide and was paid on a commission basis only. You had to buy your own uniform, which wasn't easy. The chair cost a dollar an hour for people to ride in it and the guide got thirty-five cents. But you didn't get any money at all if you didn't have a customer. It was strictly a commission deal. Of course, he provided the chair, and then he got the sixty-five cents out of a dollar. I decided in order to do this—my brother was right with me on all of these things—we had to do a little research or certainly find out more about what was going on if we were going to be intelligent guides. At that time, you'd try to make a buck any way you could during the depression and a dollar was a lot. He and I had started a little sitting service for Saturday. There were a bunch of local people down in Hyde Park who had young children. My brother and I would collect these kids, probably a half a dozen or eight at a time, and take them on the bus down to the Field Museum every Saturday. And we became guides for the Field Museum so we knew everything there. We took the kids to the movies at the Field Museum and the cafeteria there and all of that stuff. And, of course, it was a wonderful deal for the kids because we were high school age, and they could relate to us. All these kids must have been about eight or ten, I suppose. It was a neat deal for the parents because they got rid of the kids all day long, and they knew they were in pretty responsible hands and so on. My brother and I loved this, and we loved the idea of teaching and we loved the idea of learning and seeing things and so on, so we became sort of natural guides. Well, the north end of the fair was the Shedd Aquarium and the

12 south end of the fair was 39th Street. So, in order to work out for this thing, we would walk from Hyde Park downtown. It was about seven miles, but we figured this would break us in. We'd walk the seven miles. In the meantime, though, we got special permission to see all the buildings and all the exhibits while they were under construction. You didn't have to have hard hats or anything at that time. I suppose there were others that did the same thing, although I don't know. We were about as familiar with that fair as anybody could possibly be. I mean, every single exhibit in it. Not only just the buildings, but I knew what the exhibits were, so it was really a fascinating thing. In the meantime, though, I got adjusted to the architecture. Although it was weird; you know, when you think of the architecture and the moving roof on the Travel and Transport building and all these crazy things. On the other hand, all the color and all that was very fascinating to us, and it began to be a real thing. The upshot of it was, when the fair opened, I was a chair guide, as we called them. I worked seven days a week and ten hours a day, and I think I averaged about ten dollars a week.

Blum: That sounds like pretty good money.

Richardson: We walked about thirty-five miles a day. We did get some tips, not very many, but if I totaled my tips, I maybe averaged $12.50 a week. At the same time, in those days, you'd get a sandwich for a dime. For people to pay a dollar to go in a wheelchair, why, that was an awful lot of money. So most of the people that we would push were either well-to-do or celebrities. I pushed a lot of celebrities.

Blum: Or incapacitated.

Richardson: Or they were drunks or cripples. It was a wonderful experience, and, of course, I got to meet an awful lot of people.

Blum: You also became very well informed about the fair, the architecture, and all the new things that were happening.

13 Richardson: All the new things that were going on, plus the fact that we got exposed to drinking—not ourselves because we were much too young—but what happened with people that were looking for rumble seats on your roller chair. I took on the late shift. I found out you could get a lot better tips when people were drunk. So I worked from about eight o'clock at night to two in the morning or later than that, or I'd go from six o'clock to two in the morning.

Blum: Didn't the fair close?

Richardson: It didn't close until about two in the morning, around then. Well, maybe you began kicking them out about one. I wheeled out mostly drunks at that time, then I'd have to park my roller chair at Soldier Field. Then I had to go over to the Twelfth Street IC [Illinois Central Railroad] station and go back down to Fifty-third and then walk a mile from Fifty-third home. So, I usually didn't get home until about three or four in the morning. My mother was up and always gave us a good meal when we got in. Amazing.

Blum: Did you meet any of the people who had designed the fair in the process of doing what you did?

Richardson: Not at that time. That came later. They were only names to me. I'd heard that the architects were involved in the Belgian Village, like Andy Rebori, but at that time they were only names. Remember, I was still just in high school. I was just in the end of my junior year. I'd only met—I'm trying to remember the name. I was very impressed with one of the towers right next to the Hilton Chapel, on the campus of the University of Chicago there, and I found out who had designed it. It turned out to be a man who lived on Woodlawn Avenue, and I'm ashamed to say I've forgotten his name because I only met him the one time.

Blum: A Chicago architect?

14 Richardson: A Chicago architect. I went over and I talked to him, and he was nice enough to invite me in. I was still in high school. At that time, I hadn't decided I was going into architecture. I hadn't even after the world's fair. I was still interested in art. I was not really that sure. I was almost sure, but not quite.

Blum: You had an opportunity with the Century of Progress experience to observe buildings being built.

Richardson: Yes, I did.

Blum: How did that strike you?

Richardson: I was excited about it. Here again, I give credit to my grandfather. He had shown us construction sites, and, among other things, he was very active on the park board in St. Joe, Missouri. They developed this marvelous parkway system that's still famous all over the world today, which he was largely responsible for. He didn't design it. It was designed by a well-known Paris landscape architect and planner named [Jacques] Greber, but he was largely responsible for seeing it done. He would take my brother and myself out to construction sites when we were pretty young, but I was not familiar with all the nuances of construction, but it wasn't a new thing to me. At that time, it wasn't a very mysterious thing to me. I just didn't get totally thrilled or anything. I was not sure I was going to be an architect at all. I still loved drawing and so on, but I hadn't made up my mind, in spite of Goff or in spite of anybody else. When I graduated from high school, the year after I studied with Goff, I got a job as an office boy at Curtis Lighting, which was a big lighting concern. It was way out on West Jackson some place. That job was sort of indirectly related to architecture. I got it just because I was looking for a job and got it through a friend of the family or at least heard about it through a friend of the family. It was strictly an office boy, errand-running job. That's all there was to it. They paid me ten dollars a week, and I had to carry the mail on my back all the way from the old post office downtown out to West Jackson. They wouldn't give me carfare. I carried all the mail back at night to mail it and so forth. They ran me ragged the whole day long. Then it

15 was interesting. They had an art department where there were drawings of these light fixtures for their clients or their customers, and I got very intrigued with how the professional artists drew them, and I began copying some of them. Finally I felt that I was equivalent to anybody they had. I might add, in getting the ten dollars a week, I replaced an office boy who was elevated to clerk of some sort and made $12.50 a week and on the strength of that, he got married. So, the ten dollars, although it doesn't sound like much, at that time was not too bad. I didn't mind the running around. They'd chase me all over town, but that was part of the thing. It was a great experience. I had to fill the water bottles for the executives among other things every morning. One day I went to take a water bottle in and the guy, one of the vice presidents, who was an old-timer, too, had his secretary sitting on his lap. Unfortunately, I hadn't knocked or anything, and I was kind of persona non grata from then on. They treated me without much respect. But, anyway, it was a good experience. This is an aside but it was really kind of funny. It was a big national company. It still exists today as far as I know. It was a well- known company in those days, and the Curtises were big socialites in town. Larry Perkins knew them, by the way. They were older than he. It's a famous family. At the end of the summer, they had this sort of gathering of their salesmen. It was kind of a convention for all of them. They had a big golf day. They hired one of the golf courses out on the West Side somewhere, and they let me play. They were very nice about anything like that, but I qualified to play. These drunken salesmen were just great because they had all these prizes for the longest drive, the least number of putts, the closest to the hole, and all these types of things. Well, these guys were so drunk that they couldn't hit it off the tee, much less putt or anything else. That night when they had their banquet, I walked off with about three or four of the prizes because I think I was the only sober person there. I'll never forget that. It had nothing to do with my architectural experience. But the fact that I had that office boy experience stood me in good stead later when I went to SOM.

Blum: Did you ever graduate to the art department?

16 Richardson: No, they turned me down. I had tried, but I must have been—looking back on myself—obnoxious. I was always the ambitious guy wanting to get into something else. I figured maybe I could get $12.50 instead of ten bucks. I thought they were pretty good drawings myself. They said they didn't need anybody. They were nice about it.

Blum: Could we go back to the fair, please? You did allude to your surprise and how impressed you were with the new style of the buildings after having been so well-schooled in the classical.

Richardson: If you could imagine the fantastic change of those buildings as compared to what they had been doing. I mean, even the big buildings in Chicago built in the 1920s still had a sort of classicism about them, a decorative thing about them, even the Art Deco. I think they're great. And then you suddenly throw the Travel and Transport building at them. That was the one that had the "breathing" roof. You suddenly see all these garish colors, these weird forms. I don't think anybody took it seriously, in other words. The architectural world didn't take it seriously at all, I don't believe. I mean it was a stage-set, like the Belgian building or the French buildings.

Blum: Was that your feeling?

Richardson: I think so. I think at that time I thought they were interesting, but I didn't take them seriously as architecture. Architecture was out there in Jackson Park or out in the Museum of Science and Industry.

Blum: Was the fair theater?

Richardson: Yes, this was theater. I think so. Interesting theater.

Blum: Some people have said that they thought it was just a political farce, because it was planned so far in advance and so many important people were involved and it was subscribed.

17 Richardson: I don't think there's any question that it was a pump-priming thing, an economic thing. I don't know about political, but it certainly was meant to get something moving. Roosevelt was in. It was like the New Deal, almost just to get things moving, and it was a whale of a success. It was a tremendous success that way—I mean, financially. It was great. Marvelous for the city of Chicago. And look what happened out of it. We got Meigs Field—not Meigs Field, but the island. We got a whole rejuvenation of the Shedd Aquarium and the [Adler] Planetarium, all of that wonderful group of public buildings that are so important to the culture. Finally, we got the Museum of Science and Industry. The original exhibits all came from the 1933 fair. It had been the Palace of Fine Arts during the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Al Shaw updated it and brought it back to life. It was all just falling apart when I was a young boy. He was the one that was hired to do it—he and [Louis] Skidmore. Skidmore had a lot to do with fixing up the museum.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: Was the Century of Progress influential?

Richardson: No, I don't think it was. I don't think of anything in our, architectural history was really influenced by that fair as it was, or so importantly. The Columbian fair—right or wrong—was very influential over architecture in this country for a long time. But I don't think that was true of the 1933 fair. There was a solar house, you know, which was a very interesting revolving house. I think Fred Keck was involved in that. Then there were two or three houses that were very avant-garde and were very interesting. But as far as the buildings themselves were concerned, I can't think of anything that they really influenced. It certainly didn't set a trend. It certainly didn't influence the great architects of Europe, and it didn't influence Wright, of course.

Blum: Do you think it reflected any of the influence of the International School?

Richardson: No, I don't think it did at all. It's very curious, isn't it, really? I never thought to ask Skidmore about this or [Nathaniel] Owings, who, of course, started

18 there. No, I think they just said, "We need a building. Let's do something that's interesting. Let's do something that's startling, if it works, of course." They had to work. It was just a big show.

Blum: Fred Keck did have two houses. One was the House of Tomorrow and the other was the Crystal House. He designed the furniture. I mean, everything was very consistent in those presentations.

Richardson: Except those things, I don't think the fair had much influence at all.

Blum: What about Buckminster Fuller and his Dymaxion Car, which he parked in the driveway of one of the Keck houses? Do you remember that? It had three wheels and was sort of long like a bus.

Richardson: There was a car there. I don't remember seeing the car. At that time, I didn't know who Fuller was. I probably was interested, but only mildly. It wasn't until much later that I got to know Bucky, but I know of the car. I actually had forgotten that it was there, but it was there. There again, it didn't influence cars or anything. They had these marvelous production lines. They built a whole car in front of you at the General Motors and Ford pavilions. You saw it going in at the beginning and coming out and driving away. It was fantastic. And the same thing at the Firestone Tires exhibit. But again, it wasn't a research thing at all. I mean, they didn't establish any new systems, to my knowledge. Now, they probably developed display methods and a lot of ways to educate people with hands-on exhibits. I think all of this stuff in the Museum of Science and Industry came out of what they learned at the 1933 fair. But that's something else again. It was more of an educational thing. It was a fascinating thing, but it's even hard now, as you know, to find pictures of it. There are plenty of publications, but it certainly wasn't taught in the schools or anything like that.

Blum: No. It was too contemporary, I suppose, too current.

Richardson: And wild!

19 Blum: The Century of Progress stayed for two years. The first year, I understand, everything was different colors, as you describe it. But the second year, wasn't Joseph Urban hired to coordinate the fair and everything was sort of white?

Richardson: That could have been. I wasn't involved at all in the second year, so I really don't know. I worked in a summer resort that summer, and I wasn't even in Chicago. I went there a couple of times, but I didn't pay attention. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall that.

Blum: It was unified with color. Even though you had shown an interest in art, not necessarily in architecture but you had your T-square and you worked at the fair, in 1934 you went to the University of Chicago. Why the University of Chicago?

Richardson: Well, at that time, as I say, I hadn't made up my mind about architecture and the university was close. I'd originally thought maybe I'd try to go away to school, but with the depression, it was just out of the question financially.

Blum: Wasn't the U of C a school where you paid tuition?

Richardson: I paid tuition but didn't have the transportation. I could live at home, which made a big difference. My brother was also in college and so we just couldn't afford anything else. So, I went there. It was after [President Robert] Hutchins had started his new plan, as they called it at that time, where you'd pass two years of general studies, and then you'd have to select a division, as they called it at that time. I don't know what they call it now. So, I went there for a year and enjoyed it very much. I was very active in various things. My brother, of course, was very active, and he was a fraternity man. As I said, we didn't live there, we lived at home. They didn't offer any architecture. By that time I had kind of decided on architecture. My father was still against it, but I was pretty keen about it. Illinois I couldn't afford. I knew Illinois had a school, and Armour Tech [Armour Institute] had a school. Well, Armour

20 Tech, to me, at that time, was a "dis and dat" school. I mean, the only guys that went to Armour Tech were bohunks, as far as I was concerned.

Blum: What is a "bohunk"?

Richardson: Oh, Hungarians, hunkies, or back-of-the-yards types, Polacks.

Blum: What was it they learned there? What was your perception of what they taught?

Richardson: It was strictly an engineering school. There was no cultural interest whatsoever on the part of any of these people. It was strictly a technical school. It was like going to a technical high school, in my mind. No one ever heard of music, no one ever heard of art.

Blum: What had you been studying at the U of C?

Richardson: At U of C we had this broad, wonderful study. We had biological sciences, physical sciences, humanities, and social sciences, these four basic things, and the most marvelous lectures in the world by world authorities. Two or three that we would listen to all the time were Nobel Prize winners. My father-in- law, my later father-in-law, was one of the best of the bunch over there.

Blum: Was he a professor?

Richardson: Prudence's father [Merle C. Coulter] was a professor, and her grandfather [John Coulter] was one of the original professors at the University of Chicago where [William] Rainey Harper had hired his staff. Her grandfather had been president of Lake Forest College, and U of C hired him to the original faculty. He was very eminent—probably the most eminent botanist at the turn of the century. But in any case, I didn't know Prue. I had met her in high school and it was a long courtship. I got a lot out of the University of Chicago, but I had to make up my mind about what division I was going into. They had business and they had arts and letters or whatever, but no architecture.

21 Although I had only been there one year and you had to make up your mind after two, I took some optional courses. At that time, and I think probably still, they had comprehensive exams. You'd take this six- or eight-hour exam at the end of the year or end of the quarter, and that was your grade for the full semester. They didn't care whether you came to class or not. So, I passed two courses without going to class.

Blum: Because you passed the exam?

Richardson: Yes. So I qualified in mathematics and something else without going to class at all. As a consequence, I had gone beyond my one year. I had a year and a half, in effect, and I had to make up my mind. That's when I made the big jump, and I think it was probably the only argument I ever had with my father, but I decided I would try for Armour Tech. Well, it had already started. I think that school had been going on for about a month by the time I decided. The first man I talked to was Henry Heald, who at that time was dean of men, and he was very impressed with my background in terms of the University of Chicago and the fact that I'd had some arts and letters and so forth. He said, "You're the type of young man we want to get over here and want to encourage to start." Well, I started, and thanks to the arts and letters credits that I had from the University of Chicago, I could qualify for certain subjects that were a little too advanced for the other freshmen. In other words, I was sort of an advanced freshman.

Blum: Freshman? But it was actually your third year of college.

Richardson: It was my second year in college because the first year I took more than I needed to because of these exams, so I got credit for more than a year. I wasn't really that precocious. It sounds like I was.

Blum: Well, you were very much younger than usual.

Richardson: I was much younger than everybody else. I ended up about the same age as everyone when I graduated finally, because after the University of Chicago I

22 ended up having five years of college when the other guys had four. I started in there, and it took a little bit of an adjustment for me to catch up. Their engineering courses were down at Armour and the art courses were at the Art Institute. At that time, we were up in the front of the Art Institute underneath the skylights. Above Ryerson Library there's a kind of well and then this area is way up above there. Once in a while we'd drop a book or something out, and it would go through the skylight. That was it. We had to climb up these stairs, all the way up there. It was a great spot. At that time, it was really not organized well at all. They'd had a lot of different problems with administration. When I went there, Earl Reed was the head—I don't know what he was called—he had a chair, but I think they were called the "head" then. He was a wonderful old man. You've probably met him, I'm sure, somewhere along the line. He was a historian primarily, but he was also a practitioner, and he was a wonderful old, distinguished man. Although the engineering curriculum was very structured, and we were taught by the engineering professors down at Armour, the architectural courses and art courses were sort of ad hoc. All the architectural design courses were taught by local practitioners. In other words, they weren't full-time teachers at all. I don't think even Earl Reed was full time-even though he was head. Harry Bieg was there teaching for a while. I never had him. He was teaching older people. Charlie Dornbusch taught there. Al Mell taught there. He was a young man that later went with Fox and Fox, and he was there when Mies came, too. He stayed on with Mies and so did Charlie Dornbusch. I can't think of all the names. But all these wonderful crits [critics] were practitioners, and they would come in and we'd have plenty of charrettes at night. Some of these guys were rather flamboyant. Dave Chapman taught us. He was the famous industrial designer later, very successful. He taught us sculpture or modeling. Art was taught by a man by the name of Albert Krehbiel, who also taught in the Art Institute. He was wonderful. He taught us drawing, and he taught us watercolor later on. Most of the teaching was done, very frankly, by the upperclassmen.

Blum: You mean other students?

23 Richardson: Yes, students. We had what we then called and can no longer call, the "nigger system." The architectural schools at that time were all under the so-called Beaux Arts system, which I think you are probably familiar with. Actually the Beaux Arts system was based on the French Beaux Arts projets, and those were written by a Beaux Art group in New York, mostly practitioners, a good many of them from New York City itself. These printed problems would be sent out to all the member schools. I don't know how many schools there were in architecture at that time, not nearly so many as there are now. Most all of them, including the big name schools like Yale and Princeton, were members of this Beaux Arts system. As a consequence, everybody across the country was working on the same projects at basically the same time. It was like a competition. The dates were set pretty much by the Beaux Arts system. All of our design projects were based on that. They were interesting projects, but, going back to my young experience of being published, the interesting thing about this was if you were premiated by a New York jury, you got into their publication, the old Beaux Arts Bulletin, and that was distributed to every school. And, boy, that was something! Those pictures were marvelous.

Blum: Let me ask about the extent of the system. You competed within your own school and then your school winners competed with other school winners?

Richardson: Yes.

Blum: Did the American school winners then compete with European school winners?

Richardson: No, this was strictly an American thing. But you hit it just right. Incidentally, this wasn't a part of the freshman year. We only started it as sophomores. They had sophomore, junior, and senior years. But the system was that you were screened—you did the project, and then you were evaluated by your own faculty. The system of grading—this is a detail but it was kind of interesting—was based on mention, mention being roughly a B, I suppose. It's called mention. This is based on the Beaux Arts system, too. Half-mention was C, C-minus maybe. H.C. was hors de combat. I mean, you had violated the

24 rules, and if you got an H.C., your six weeks or eight weeks work was thrown out. That was all there was to it. I mean, you got zero. Above mention, you could get a first mention, and above first mention you could get first mention place. Well, that meant about an A-plus. First mention was A. There was class B, and that was for sophomores and juniors, class A for seniors. Now [Eero] Saarinen, [Hugh] Stubbins, all of these people, [Gordon] Bunshaft, all of them went through this system. I was one of the last because Mies threw it out completely. It had a lot of weaknesses to it, and that's why the schools threw it out. It also had a lot of advantages. The first advantage, it seemed to me, was that you were given a tremendous incentive to compete, not only with your own peers here at your own school, but with that guy at Yale or Princeton or Illinois or wherever he happened to be. Plus, if you got a first mention place, say, or a first medal from New York, it was an automatic A. There's no doubt about it. Plus the fact that every architectural office was aware of this, and if you had a record of getting medals in New York—you know, that's like winning the Paris Prize.

Blum: You were automatically hired?

Richardson: You were fixed for life, just about. Incidentally, one of my students just won the Paris Prize the other day. I was so proud of her. First woman, I think, that's won to my knowledge. One of my former students. But it was a great system in that respect. I know Larry Smith, an old friend of mine in Wilmette, was down at Illinois while I was at Armour. I think the whole thing failed when the Bauhaus group came over, and then plus the fact that the drawing got to be pretty much the whole thing. And Illinois was so skillful at the drawing that they walked away with almost everything. And the old schools like Yale and Harvard and Princeton didn't go for that at all. Bunch of guys out here in the Midwest.

Blum: Why do you think that happened?

Richardson: Because of the crits primarily, and there came to be tricks as to how to win the competitions. So, I think that a lot of the schools and a lot of the educators

25 felt it wasn't really architecture. It was more a rendering process than it was a learning architecture process. I don't know whether they're right or not. Some of the best architects in the country grew up on the Beaux Arts system, and I think they did awfully well at it.

Blum: What was the attitude within your peer group about competing with each other?

Richardson: They loved it. That's part of it. The first thing you learn in architectural school is that you hate the other guy's work, never give anybody a compliment, knock it. That's what they do. I don't know why architects work so hard to get the peer recognition, which they do. They want peer recognition above all. They don't care about a client or anything else. It's peer recognition, and the peers think they're nuts anyway. You're never going to find Walter Netsch saying anything good about [Stanley] Tigerman or Tigerman saying anything good about Walter Netsch. That's just the nature of architecture. Never compliment your competition!

Blum: Do you think that is, perhaps, the nature of the orientation that one received under the Beaux Arts system?

Richardson: I think it's in architectural schools now. I don't think it changes a bit. The whole jury system in architectural schools is critical, critical, critical, critical. I told my students, "You'll never have a client who's going to be as tough as your crits." Don't give compliments. Occasionally I'd say, "That's a nice drawing." I always gave compliments and someone would say, "What's wrong with you anyway?" I'd tell the kids they were doing nice drawings.

Blum: What does that do to a student who is trying to learn a profession and make friends in the profession? What kind of an attitude of cooperation or competition does it set up?

Richardson: You're still friends. You just don't like his architecture. There's that famous story I think I can tell about Shaw and Owings. This is a much later story. I

26 don't know if this is absolutely literally true, but I've told the story so many times, I can tell it again. The New York Life people were looking for an architect for Lake Meadows, and, of course, every Chicago architect was after that job. Al Shaw and Nat Owings were great friends but great competitors in every sense of the word, although Al was older than Nat. Jack Gurney was the New York Life architect and General Otto Nelson was their vice- president in charge of development. After Owings had already gotten the job he called up Shaw and said, "Al, I was talking to Jack Gurney and General Nelson. They're pretty hot on you. I think you should come out. I think if you got on a plane or a train and got out here, you'd have a pretty good shot at it." So old Shaw gets on a plane and goes out there. Of course, they told them that Nat had already gotten the job, but he blew a whole afternoon in New York. But they were still friends.

Blum: Sounds like a practical joke.

Richardson: Yes. They had said to Owings, "You know, we've been talking to Al Shaw." Owings had it by this time, or I guess he didn't have it but they were still competing for it. They said, "We've been talking to Al Shaw. What do you think of him?" "Oh," Nat said, "he's great! He's a wonderful guy! We have lunch here a couple of times a week over at the Tavern Club. I see him and we're great cronies. I've known him for years. He's a terrific fellow." And they said, "Well, we meant as an architect." And Nat said—pause—"As an architect?" But this is just part of the game. It's upmanship.

Blum: Were you comfortable in that kind of an atmosphere?

Richardson: What do you mean? The competitive atmosphere?

Blum: Yes.

Richardson: Oh, sure. Because they were always competing with me. I remember when I was a freshman, we had two or three really talented guys. I said, "You know, one thing about this school is it's tough competition." Everybody looked at

27 me. We were having coffee across Michigan Avenue, and they said, "What are you talking about? You're the competition!" Of course, I had this drawing skill, you see. Drawing-wise, I wasn't way ahead of them, but I would say it was very easy for me, whereas some of these fellows had never drawn at all. And, of course, my background at the University of Chicago, I had a historical background, but these poor fellows—I say, poor fellows, they were great fellows—from Lane Technical High School and Tilden Technical High School. See, they'd had the technical background. That's what I mean. I don't mean it to be a bigoted, derogatory "bohunk" type of thing. I mean, they were technically oriented people. They were not culturally oriented people.

Blum: Well, it sounds like you not only had the skill, the talent, but you also applied it with great intelligence.

Richardson: Well, I don't know whether it was great intelligence. I did pretty well. I mean, I was a pretty straight A student, as a matter of fact, all the way through until I put too much time in over at SOM, and then I couldn't study as much as I probably should have.

Blum: Armour was part of the Beaux Arts system.

Richardson: All accredited architectural schools were.

Blum: This was 1936, 1937.

Richardson: 1935, 1936, 1937. Yes. I started there in the fall of 1935, I guess.

Blum: There were things that were happening in a contemporary way in Europe—the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Mies himself. Did any of that information filter back?

Richardson: Oh, yes. When I said the Beaux Arts system, I didn't mean to imply that these were all based on the orders and Greek and classic thing. I mean, just the system was called Beaux Arts based on the French Beaux Arts, just because

28 they picked that name. Oh, no, at that time, even as freshmen we were exposed to particularly the younger crits, as we called them. I guess you're familiar with all these architectural words. Somebody asked me the other day, "What's a crit?" I said, "A critique." Particularly some of the younger ones were exposing us to what was going on. I didn't hear about Mies, very honestly, until I was about a sophomore. But we knew about [Walter] Gropius and we knew about the International Style. I think one of my heroes very early on was Alvar Aalto. I think I discovered him. When I say I "discovered" him, other students did, too. We lived down in your library there—Burnham, as it was then called, though Ryerson was there. Burnham Library was the south wing, you know. We used that constantly. We'd see a lot of things coming out in the Beaux Arts Bulletin that the other students had done. We weren't at all hidden away from what was going on. By this time, even Wright was becoming known.

Blum: Do you remember particularly any professors or upperclassmen who promoted contemporary work?

Richardson: Sure. This fellow Al Mell, whom I had as a sophomore, was very strong on Mies. Well, he didn't talk about Mies, but he talked about him later. He stayed on and worked with Mies in the first faculties. He was one of the younger ones. We didn't have that many different professors. You see, I wasn't exposed to the teachers that taught the seniors and juniors at all. Well, the juniors a little bit, but not the seniors. I'm going back to the system we had. You learn more from this "nigger system"—I don't like to use the word, but, anyway, that's what it was called. The whole idea was that we were scouted as freshmen, kind of like a fraternity. They would look us over after the first project or two and say, "Look, I want you on my team." Each senior had a junior, a sophomore, and a freshman working for him. We always worked as a team. I got a very good senior. Of course, he thought I was pretty good.

Blum: Who was your team?

29 Richardson: I can't remember that. I think the senior's name was Morris Beckman. He practiced later in Chicago. We weren't that close. In any case, when a senior let you draw on his sheet, that was pretty exciting stuff. I mean, you know, ink in a poché or a plan or something and, of course, he would show you how to do the washes. When I was working on my stuff, my senior would come around, and at that time, it was a fellow by the name of L.J. Lammers, I remember. I don't know what ever happened to him. These people just go on. He would come around, and he'd help me run the washes or do the drawing or give me a crit. As I say, the upperclassmen gave you more crits than the crits did. They also were tougher than the crits sometimes. My senior would come around. I remember one time I was working on my very first analytique. They were great Chinese ink wash drawings. I wasn't using the brush right, and he was infuriated because each team was kind of competing with the other team. In other words, he felt just as strongly about my freshman drawing as I was suppose to feel about his senior drawing. So, if his boy didn't win, he was infuriated. So he took a sponge and he sponged out the whole thing. He said, "Oy!" He gave me a real reaming out, a real cussing, and said, "Jeez, you handle a brush like you're doing it with a cotton swab. It's awful!" So, I shaped up. I was more scared of him than I was of my crits. But they also were very helpful in that sense. He'd say, "Look up something. What you need to do is look up Aalto's sanitarium, " or whatever. So they referred us to these great people that the crits often didn't refer to at all. But also, as a freshman, your prime job was to run errands. You'd go across the street and get some coffee. We didn't have beer at that time—we had beer but I don't think anybody would allow it inside. Certainly you'd have to smuggle it into the Art Institute if you had it. So things were pretty straight. We didn't do anything very bad. I think the main thing we did was just ink in stuff occasionally or draw some of the basic drawings occasionally. Sometimes you'd do a tracing. Just menial tasks, really. But it was awfully good training because you were working right with the "master." It was an apprentice kind of thing.

Blum: The senior master.

30 Richardson: A senior master, yes. Nobody was distinguished but at least you were learning hands-on.

Blum: Were you aware of Corbusier's book that had been translated into English, Towards A New Architecture?

Richardson: Not really at that time. I was really introduced to Corbusier somewhat later and, of course, was very much involved in those books and everything that he had done working later with Gordon Bunshaft at Skidmore. That's really where I had my main introduction. Of course, I knew about him through Mies, but I didn't know about him because I've got to tell you this wonderful anecdote, which I've told many times. When I was a freshman, I was still very much involved with the classics. That was pretty well ingrained in me, no matter what I had seen at the world's fair. That was a joke, and Frank Lloyd Wright still was, ah, you know. Architecture to me was still what my grandfather told me it was and so on. I remember they had an AIA [American Institute of Architects] meeting, I believe it was, in the Art Institute lower level, and they invited us students to see it. I remember John Holabird, Sr. and maybe Jerry Loebl were there. They had a great interest in school, and they were talking about contemporary architecture. I remember I was very shocked. I had the temerity to get in an argument with Holabird about contemporary architecture versus the classics, and I said that the Columbian Exposition was the greatest thing that ever happened and the 1933 fair was a joke and so on. Here I was, a freshman in college arguing with one of the most eminent guys in the world at that time. Anyway, the story I wanted to tell you is similar, it shows you my naiveté. They had Corbusier over for a visit in November 1935. I was a freshman at that time. They had a lecture scheduled for him at the Cliff Dwellers Club, and they invited us as students to come over. We had a man who taught us history briefly. His name was Hoffmeister. He was very much up on contemporary things. He was one of the few that briefed us. I think he was the one who brought this to our attention, and we were told to go over and hear Corbusier's lecture. Well, they needed somebody to help arrange seats, and I remember I got involved somehow behind the scenes setting up chairs or something. Corbusier gave

31 this wonderful talk; of course, I was very impressed. I'd heard about him, and my mother told me about him, and so did my grandfather. He was one of the avant-garde French architects, and I thought he was very impressive with those dark rimmed glasses. I couldn't understand a word he said, but he was drawing these great drawings of cities and whatnot with his charcoal. He was very skillful.

Blum: Did he have an interpreter?

Richardson: Oh, I'm sure. Gilmer Black was probably his interpreter. He was a great friend of Gil Black, whom I knew later at Skidmore. I didn't know him at that time. But in any case, Corbusier made this talk and, of course, for a young student it was impressive, but it was beyond me. When he finished, guess what my job was? To take down all of his sketches and throw them in the wastebasket—which I did.

Blum: You did?

Richardson: I did. I thought you had to know that story. Gil Black had been a friend of Corbusier in France, I guess. After the trip finished in Chicago, he said, "Now, what is the most significant thing you saw in Chicago?" thinking he would say Wright or whatever. He said, "The timing of the lights on Michigan Avenue."

Blum: When he arrived in the States in New York, he made a comment that was published in the Herald Tribune. He said, "The skyscrapers in New York are too small and"—I'm paraphrasing—"there's too many of them." Of course, he was proposing another concept...

Richardson: His stuff has big green areas in between.

Blum: …and larger buildings.

32 Richardson: Which we thought we were going to do with the public housing in Chicago and look at the disastrous results.

Blum: That's fascinating that you were there. You not only heard him, but you threw away his drawings.

Richardson: I threw away this stuff that was invaluable. And nobody else asked for them either. That was the interesting thing. They told me to throw them away or clean up. There wasn't a single critic or architect. It was an AIA meeting, I think, for the Chicago chapter. There weren't that many people there. There weren't that many practicing architects at that time. There was nothing to do.

Blum: When Corbusier was in Chicago in that November of 1935, he spoke at the Arts Club, at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and for the AIA. It's interesting to know that the AIA held their meeting at the Cliff Dwellers. How did his talk strike you?

Richardson: I was tremendously impressed with it. It was way over my head, of course, because for a freshman, young architect, I had never thought of urban planning in that sense or certainly hadn't thought of high-rise buildings in that sense. So, it was really beyond me. But I do remember it very well. I don't know whether it had any lasting effect, but I suppose it did. Certainly when I got his books later and got more familiar with what he was doing, it was very impressive—the fact that I had actually seen him and had been as close to him.

Blum: And had thrown his drawings away.

Richardson: And thrown his drawings away. But I learned a lot. That was my freshman year. I remember I learned a great deal. It was a whole new eye-opener. There were, as I said, a few students and a few critics that were beginning to open their eyes to different things. We had two or three very talented young men in my class, and I learned a great deal from them, as a matter of fact.

33 Blum: Do you recall who they were?

Richardson: Yes, one fellow I remember very well. I don't know what's happened to him. His name was Larry Cuneo, and he was exceedingly gifted. He came from an artistic family. I don't think he could draw as well as I could, but he was way ahead of me in terms of design concepts and so on and had a great deal of background experience. He lived out in Park Ridge, too. He didn't know Goff. He was a relative of the Cuneo Press people. He was extremely talented. The school was just too much for him. I think he was the best student we had in the freshman year, but he went on to Wright's school at Taliesin. He was just so far ahead of us that he went on to Wright. He flunked out of Taliesin, but he was a talented guy. I think he ended up in Hollywood. I've long since lost track of him. But I'll never forget that he was very—I shouldn't say inspiring—but he gave me a lot of ideas and a lot to think about. He was very outspoken and a very good critic, too. I learned a lot from the other students, as I say, as well as the critics. But mostly from the upperclassmen.

Blum: So, you were at Armour for three years before Mies arrived?

Richardson: Yes, I was there for my freshman, sophomore, junior year, you see. I was a senior when Mies came.

Blum: How did you first hear that he might come to direct the School of Architecture at Armour?

Richardson: Well, I'll have to go back a little bit on that because, as I said, the school had been in a state of flux. They didn't have any permanent staff; as I say, I don't think Earl Reed was even full-time. He was a local, loyal architect who was giving his time, as a matter of fact. Jerrold Loebl, the same way. I didn't know Jerry until I was a sophomore, or maybe even a junior. He was a loyal alum until his death; he was a very great person in that regard. Of course, I've heard this story from him rather than from my own direct knowledge. When they were looking around for a head or a chairman, they decided to pick

34 Louis Skidmore or at least they asked him to come. I may have been a freshman or a sophomore. His assignment at the world's fair had ended after 1934, and he had started his own little business. Owings was his partner, I guess. It was 1935 or 1936. The school had it pretty well thought out that he was going to be the head, and he could obviously have done that. The office of Skidmore was right across the street, as it turns out. You know, right in 104 South Michigan, right across and down the street from the Art Institute, so he could run back and forth very easily. So, I think it probably would have been a very ideal arrangement. I remember all of us peeking out around the doors like little kids at Christmas when they brought Skidmore around to look over the school. We saw this dapper little guy with a waxed mustache wandering around. We said, "That's Skidmore, that's Skidmore." And everybody's saying, "Who's Skidmore, who's Skidmore?" We said, "Well, he won the Rotch Travelling Fellowship." Everybody knew what the big prizes were and so forth. And we said, "He was the chief of design at the world's fair." Everybody said, "Oh, boy." It was pretty exciting and heavy stuff. We were going to finally have an honest-to-goodness name as the head of our school. So the students were very excited, indeed. Well, just at that time, as you probably know, which is another story, Skidmore had this opportunity to go to New York and start a New York office. Well, that, of course, threw the plan of being head of the school all in an uproar. Charlie Dornbusch had been working as a designer for Skid out at the world's fair and was then working with Nat on what I would assume was full-time basis. I think he had two or three houses to do or something. Maybe Charles was doing his own house. You know, he did the one for Lynn Fontanne up in Wisconsin. He was a friend of the [Alfred] Lunts. In any case, they sent him over to replace Skidmore, as acting head of Armour, presumably on a temporary basis. So Dornbusch in effect was the...

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Richardson: I'm really not sure of his administrative duties. I had, obviously, very little to do with the little office there, being a student. It was right up there underneath the skylight on the top floor in the Art Institute, as I said, but I

35 never had much experience with him. I had had some experience with Earl Reed, and I'll have to tell you this story because it was a very interesting one that I told my students. Going back to the freshman year for a minute, one of the projects we had to do was a little church. I drew skillfully, as I say, by that time with pen and ink, and I decided to do my final rendering in pen and ink. In the meantime, I had gotten an idea for a church from a bulletin from the architecture school at Princeton. When I had been dreaming about going to school, I had gotten bulletins from various schools—Yale, Princeton, and many others—hoping that somehow or another I might get a scholarship or something. I don't know what. I was dreaming. But in any case, I kept these bulletins, and sure enough there was a little church in one of these that one of the Princeton students had rendered. So I stole the idea. I liked the front of it so much, I stole it. I made this pen and ink drawing. We didn't have open juries at that time. We had kind of a jury room, which was in one of the levels. We had two levels of studios and this was on the lower level, I remember, and they would hang up our stuff, and then all these faculty would go in and lock us out. They would deliberate and we would sit there and sweat, of course, for however long it took—maybe an hour or an hour and a half or whatever. I went in there and, by golly, I had a first mention place plus. I was floored. Mr. Reed said, "I want you all to know in all of our years of teaching here at Armour, this is the finest piece of freshman work I've ever seen." Well, of course, I was just thrilled but mortified. I had stolen this idea. I felt really guilty. I worried about it. I thought, gee, that's terrible. And, of course, the guys knew I had stolen it, too. I hadn't made a big issue of it, but I implied that I had.

Blum: Was the award given for the conception as well as the execution?

Richardson: I think it was design and execution.

Blum: I see. So you were only half guilty.

Richardson: It wasn't all execution, but it was a nice drawing. So I felt so guilty, the next day I asked Reed if I could have an appointment. I said, "Mr. Reed, I've got to

36 be honest with you. I'm very flattered, but that wasn't an original idea." He said, "Where did you get it?" I told him. He said, "Come with me." I walked down those stairs, and I thought he was just going to exit there. He put on two more pluses. He said, "I'm giving you that for having such good taste. There's nothing original in architecture. We copy from everybody, and you've shown great taste."

Blum: You also showed great integrity to go and own up to what you were worried about.

Richardson: I guess. There wasn't any secret about that. The thing that reminded me of it is the office. I had very little contact with the office until I got to be an upperclassman. Then I had a lot of contacts with Mies and Jack Rodgers and others. Anyway, going back to the Skidmore thing. In any case, we were all terribly disappointed, not with Charles Dornbusch but because we felt badly treated. I think, frankly, Jerry Loebl and John Holabird, who were on the committee at that time, felt kind of bad, about it, too. Jerry has told me this story, but I don't remember all the details, of course. But that's when he and Holabird and a volunteer committee offered the job to Mies.

Blum: Alfred S. Alschuler was on the committee, wasn't he?

Richardson: Alschuler was on it, but I can't remember who else. That's when they began looking seriously at Mies and probably others, too. Jerry and Holabird were instrumental in getting Mies to come. He worked originally, as I understand it, primarily on the Resor house it in Wyoming. Isn't that the story?

Blum: Yes, the Resor house.

Richardson: That's what I remember. I read that in Franz Schulze’s book, too, although I knew a lot of it because Bill Priestley, even later, became a very good friend of mine. You know Priestley and Jack Rodgers worked on that house with Mies when he came over. That's when he stopped off to look things over in Chicago and then went on back to Germany.

37 Blum: But he was interviewed at that time?

Richardson: He was interviewed at that time. This is detailed in the Schulze book, I'm pretty sure. Then he decided to come here, but that was later.

Blum: What did you expect when Mies van der Rohe came? What were your expectations as a student in that school?

Richardson: I had really very mixed thoughts on it because, you see, I had been in this Beaux Arts system and it was very appealing to me because if I could do well on one project. I probably could do that with my drawing skills, then the chances are I could float the rest of the semester in design, and that was the thing that took all the time. Well, mind you, by this time, I was working at Skidmore, so school had not the same kind of impact on me as the office did. When Mies was coming, Al Mell talked about him a lot, and we looked up all the things we could in the library.

Blum: What was the advanced publicity like? What did it lead you to expect?

Richardson: He was not that well known. If you remember, he hadn't built very much. He was well known for the Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat house and that was it. So, we didn't know a heck of a lot about him. We looked at everything we could, but he wasn't nearly as well known, for example, as Gropius or Aalto or Breuer, even to us. I mean, Corbusier, certainly not. I think we had mixed emotions about it. We all kind of liked the Beaux Arts system, I think—most of us did and got along with it, and I particularly did. It was extremely difficult for me to get adjusted to Mies’s architecture and his method of teaching. I found it very difficult, indeed.

Blum: When he arrived, what was your first acquaintance with Mies?

38 Richardson: Our first reaction, of course, was seeing him—this great bear of a man with his rugged face. He spoke no English whatsoever, so it was really kind of difficult at first to get acquainted even with what he was trying to get across.

Blum: How did he communicate?

Richardson: Jack Rodgers came with him. Jack later became a partner in the West Coast office of Skidmore. Jack was his right hand, and he had studied with Mies not only in Bauhaus in Germany but also had worked with him on the Resor house, and so he was just the straight man all the way. Every time Mies said anything, Jack would interpret. All of our crits were in German. The only thing I got out of it was "Nicht gut," and I figured that was "no good." The other one was arbeit, work. Those were the only two German words I ever knew until the war, and then I learned achtung and verboten. But in any case, my first reaction was, of course, trying to understand him and what he was doing. We just jumped right into a project to do a house. What he wanted us to do was study the spatial relationships of one of his wonderful flowing houses like the Tugendhat house. We were supposed to build these models, and all we were supposed to do was study the models and move the walls around and so on. He said, "Build a model of house." I built a model of a house and I was putting in all the roof structure and everything else, you know. I put in a heck of a lot of time and effort on this darn thing, and he came around and practically jumped on me. "Nicht gut," and out it went.

Blum: Did he give you a reason?

Richardson: No. That's all right.

Blum: What did you understand by what he did?

Richardson: I didn't know. I couldn't understand at all. Well, finally I got the idea because Rodgers tried to be helpful and he said, "You're not studying the spaces." Jack wasn't very good either explaining any of it. He's a wonderful man. I'm not knocking him. But to me, he was no great teacher at all. Well, we had Jim

39 Speyer, who was a graduate student, in our class, and he caught onto this stuff right away. I don't know whether he studied a lot of Mies—he may have. He was a very sophisticated man. Once he began playing with these planes and so on, why, the rest of us said, "Oh, we get it at last." We had to cut a cork base that you could put pins in and move all these planes around. We'd look at them and pretend we knew what was going on and lower the ceiling.

Blum: Pretend?

Richardson: Yes. We didn't really know what was going on.

Blum: Had you worked with models before?

Richardson: Not very much. No, we didn't work with them. You see, the whole Beaux Arts thing was a mail-in business, so we never used them. They occasionally would mention a model, and you could take a photograph of it. It's kind of like a competition. We hadn't had much experience using models at all. This was all a brand new thing for us. Some of us got onto it. Finally, I was very pleased, because at the end of the semester I got an A. And I asked him, "Why did I get an A?" I asked him through Jack. All my conversations with Mies were through interpreters until later. He said, "Because you were so bad to begin with and you learned so much and you came so far." I did catch on, but, as I said a few minutes ago, it was very difficult for me to jump from this purely visual or two-dimensional rendering to suddenly this whole different concept—at least different for me. You couldn't read this in the books. Even though you saw pictures of models in books, there was no way you could tell what Mies was driving at, at all. So, when I first met him and for that whole first semester, I didn't think he was a good teacher at all. I thought he was an impressive man. I obviously followed along with what everybody else said. I said, "Well, if he's that good, he's that good."

40 Blum: But you were so talented, or you had developed so highly the skills you needed to succeed in the Beaux Arts system, to change and be sort of bewildered...

Richardson: I won the national junior prize in that. I was very comfortable with that competition with Illinois and Princeton and whoever was in by that time. It didn't bother me.

Blum: And Mies sort of pulled the pegs out from under you?

Richardson: He pulled them out completely. That was thrown out completely. He threw out any competition completely. I took the Paris Prize qualifications, the semifinal thing, but I did it out at a Park Ridge office. I had a quick call from William McCaughey. I may have mentioned him earlier. I don't know whether you've heard of him. He was one of our flamboyant crits—a Beaux Arts man from way back. Great watercolors. I have one of them here somewhere that I won as a prize. He let me take one of these Paris Prize things in his office and he sponsored me. Mies didn't know I did it at all. I did it on a weekend. I didn't tell them at school. I didn't win. I qualified for the finals, but I didn't win. He was very much against any competition at all.

Blum: Mies was?

Richardson: Yes. It was a complete reversal from what we had had, so it was kind of a shock.

Blum: At the end of the semester, after you had some time to understand Mies’s process and perhaps, be less resistant to it...

Richardson: I wasn't fighting it. I just didn't understand it.

Blum: Did you feel there was a benefit to going through this?

41 Richardson: Oh, yes. By the time I did my space studies or my space houses—I did one or two, I don't remember how many exercises we had now—I felt completely at home doing it. Later on he told Priestley—this was three or four years later—that I was the best student he ever had up to that point. There was no question about our friendship or our getting along or anything. At first, it was just a very difficult adjustment for me.

Blum: So did you think it was all worth it?

Richardson: Oh, yes, I think so. No doubt about it. But don't forget, at the same time I was having this opposite education across the street at Skidmore and Owings. I was there from April of my sophomore year, which would be 1936. The office then was only four or five people. I was spending every afternoon from the time school quit at five o'clock until almost midnight in that office. It was a very dreary existence because I was all alone up in this garret. It was not scary, but it was lonely.

Blum: This was at Skidmore's office?

Richardson: Yes.

Blum: Before we get into the office—I know that's another important story—could we go back to IIT and Mies's arrival for just a minute? Mies brought [Ludwig] Hilberseimer and he brought [Walter] Peterhans. Did you take classes with them?

Richardson: I took classes with Hilberseimer because the seniors had to take Hilberseimer's city planning course or urban planning. I think we only had him one semester, as I remember. We got to know him pretty well. He was with Mies. He had lunch with Mies, they came together to school, and they left together. They were just like two people working together all the time.

Blum: They were colleagues in Europe.

42 Richardson: Oh, yes. They had been, and that's why Hilberseimer came over. I remember Mies saying, "The thing about Hilbs, he thinks all the time." And he did. He always gave you the impression that he was thinking all the time.

Blum: Did Hilbs speak English?

Richardson: No. Neither one of them did.

Blum: Oh, so they both spoke through interpreters.

Richardson: Through Jack Rodgers or interpreters. Al Mell, whom I've referred to several times, was really a very interesting younger teacher. He fortunately spoke German or at least enough to interpret, too, and so did Charlie Dornbusch. So, those two stayed on as well as Jack. Jack Rodgers, I don't believe, had any classes of his own. I never had Peterhans. He taught the lower levels. So, I really don't know. I can't tell you too much about it. Maybe he spoke English. I don't remember. I knew him, but I didn't ever speak with him.

Blum: Did you ever have the feeling that Mies would say something, and Jack Rodgers would interpret and it wasn't quite what Mies said?

Richardson: I didn't ever get that impression.

Blum: Some people have said that.

Richardson: Have they really? Of course, I didn't know enough German. I couldn't tell.

Blum: They could have fooled you.

Richardson: Yes.

Blum: What was the city planning course that Hilbs taught like? Was that a whole new idea for architects to consider?

43 Richardson: Not in some schools. It was in ours. It was at Armour. I don't think we had much city planning experience. I can't vouch for that, but certainly I hadn't had any, nor during the time that I had been an underclassman, had I seen any evidence of it. It wasn't ignored. It's just that it was thought of as a specialty, and we didn't have that kind of specialty. They did down at Illinois, I think. Most of these city planning schools were just offshoots of the landscape architecture schools. That's how city planning developed. They weren't getting enough people in the landscape schools, so they just got the architects globbing onto city planning. The landscape architects picked it up. It was as simple as that.

Blum: Did that change your concept of what architecture was all about?

Richardson: What? City planning or Hilbs?

Blum: Both.

Richardson: I didn't get enough out of Hilbs. Hilbs, to tell you the truth, you could put in a thimble. I like him. Personally he was fine. He'd drink straight gin everyday. He didn't take a martini. He took straight gin. While Mies was having his two or three or four martinis, why, Hilbs was having his gin. I liked him fine. There was nothing wrong with his personality. He wasn't even dull. I thought he was fine. His teaching was dull. All we did was a house and we had to go through the process of finding, I think, fifty-three different plans. Each one of them had a fault in it. Then you finally ended up with number fifty-three, which was his plan—which was right. I did it the first afternoon, and he wouldn't let me do it. I had to go through the process of fifty-three plans. Then you put these plans into a neighborhood. It was his neighborhood. You did it right from the book exactly like he did it, blah, blah, blah. You went through this whole process for a semester. It was the dullest damned thing I ever saw in my life! I never understood what was so great about his teaching or about his work. I saw pictures of his work, and I thought it looked like the back end of a six-flat in Chicago, as far as I was

44 concerned. I didn't see any talent there at all. I didn't have anything against him personally. I just didn't buy it.

Blum: That was your feeling at the time. You were bored.

Richardson: Sure. That's still my feeling. I don't know him that well. I don't know his work that well. He wrote and he talked and he thought, but to me it was always massaging the obvious. It was terribly dull. Awful dull.

Blum: Well, that's a pity. He taught such an important subject. Too bad he turned you off so early on.

Richardson: He didn't turn me off on urban planning particularly. I didn't think he was an urban planner. He did it one way and that was the way to do it. It's the old German way and period, that's it! There aren't any alternatives. It's like that house. You couldn't do any other house. That was it.

Blum: Was Mies the same way?

Richardson: Pretty much. He did things his way, sure. But he was a lot more interesting. He did different things, and each one of our houses was different. But not Hilberseimer. His had nothing to do with space or anything else. It was just a routine, ordinary worker's house. It had to be cut in this mold and that was it. That's the way people should have lived. Everybody had the same size lot, everybody had the same house—talk about your dictators. That's the only way I could look at it. I got a good grade, I think. That was not enough.

Blum: Because you couldn’t go from sketch number one to fifty-five.

Richardson: Yes, you had to go through the process.

Blum: Did the faculty change when Mies came?

45 Richardson: Well, McCaughey was gone. Those people were gone. There wasn't that big a staff. Dornbusch stayed on. I said there was a man from Holabird and Root, Harry Bieg. I never knew him because he taught the seniors. He, of course, wasn't there anymore. Al Mell stayed on. So there really wasn't that big a turnover. There was an increased number of people rather than a complete turnover. McCaughey was the only significant one. Our freshman crit was a fine man, too, but he was no longer there. I don't know who taught the freshmen under Mies. I think Peterhans may have. I'm not sure.

Blum: Did Mies attract new students? Did the student body change? Increase, decrease, or change in character?

Richardson: It did. Not while I was there because I was only there one year. It changed significantly by the time people knew he was there. Jim Hammond and John Weese were attracted to come to study with Mies, although they had studied at other places. There's no question that he attracted people from all over the world. Almost immediately, as I gather, he had a graduate program as well. Certainly Jim Speyer was getting graduate work, and I think then Danforth stayed on later. He took graduate work with Mies. [Myron] Goldsmith took graduate work. I chose not to because I was tired of school. I wanted to work. I don't think he tried to persuade anybody to stay. As I said, by the end of the year, I think he was quite fond of me, and I certainly was of him. Of course, I felt that I'd gotten a great deal from him. My work even at Skidmore was beginning to show the influence already, as young as I was.

Blum: Did you know that he was also commissioned to do a plan for IIT and to build the buildings when he came?

Richardson: Yes. I wasn't sure that I knew it when he came, but he was starting on it the first year.

Blum: Right from the beginning, it seems to me, he was gathering people around him who were going to work in his office like Jim Speyer and George Danforth and other people.

46 Richardson: Well, that might be, but I think that's a natural thing. I did that when I was teaching at Illinois. The first two fellows that I had working for me were students who had gotten their degrees, and I just carried them on. Same thing with Jim Scheeler and John Severns. They were students of mine and I said, "After you fellows have gone out and had a little more experience in the big world, why I'd like to have you come back." And they came back as my partners. So, I think that's very natural. Like Joe Fujikawa or Bruno Conterato. Then, of course, it has been true of Wright's people. I think Gropius is one. The Architects' Collaborative was all his students or most of them at the beginning. So, I don't think it's a deliberate plot or plan. It's very natural.

Blum: I just wondered if you felt that perhaps you had attracted his attention?

Richardson: I'm sure that if I had worked with him, he probably would have been very interested under the circumstances, because I could draw well and so forth. But I was never that indoctrinated. Don't misunderstand. By that time, I was building things. This was no toy to me. Not big things, not fancy things, but I was pretty heavy with what I was doing.

Blum: You were already into the practical application.

Richardson: Skidmore was beginning to grow, and Gordon was there by that time. This was serious stuff for me.

Blum: Before we leave IIT, among the material that you were nice enough to share with me from your scrapbook, there was this drawing, and your note was, "IIT housing designed by Bill Priestley and drawn by" you. And this is about the earliest piece of your design work that I have seen.

Richardson: That's the stuff I've lost.

Blum: On both sides. How did that come about? What was that for?

47 Richardson: Well, this housing is still down there at IIT. The only reason I didn't claim credit for it, it's so dull. It was Bill Priestley.

Blum: Was that done while you were there in 1939?

Richardson: Oh, no. This was done when I was at Skidmore. You can't read it very well, but Skidmore, Owings and Merrill is written on there. I have the date. And then I've got Richardson down there and the date.

Blum: Oh, well. I thought that was something, perhaps, that came out of your school years.

Richardson: I tossed it in there because I found it amongst these things. I don't know whether it was a newspaper or what. But there's a funny story on this. I was doing it one weekend, and I also did an aerial picture of Mies's campus plan, for the public relations department of IIT. I was moonlighting. That's why I was surprised about the Skidmore, because they told me to put that on there. I was moonlighting on these drawings for IIT. I was drawing them in with pencil and blocking in these windows, and IIT was paying me very well at that time for these drawings. I was blocking them in and Prue was there at home. I was working in my living room—we had an old house out in South Hyde Park—and she said, "Doesn't that bore you?" And I said, "Not at a nickel a window it doesn't." That was about what I was getting.

Blum: So you were working for Skidmore at the time but doing this for IIT directly.

Richardson: I moonlighted it, yes.

Blum: Who at IIT had asked you to this?

Richardson: Public relations department, I guess.

Blum: So this was after you had graduated?

48 Richardson: Yes. I can't read it at all. It's 1946, actually, so it's quite a bit later.

Blum: Oh, well that's considerably later. Here I thought I discovered an early drawing.

Richardson: Unfortunately, it's terrible, but they kept all of the drawings that I did with Mies at school. George Danforth called me when they were having the big thing for Mies two years ago. They wanted some drawings and stuff. I said, "Heck, they got them all at school. I guess they threw them away a hundred years ago." My Beaux Arts drawings have long since gone. I don't know what happens to all these old things.

Blum: They look so good again.

Richardson: After a while. But I don't have much of the old stuff left.

Blum: In 1937, you won a Tau Beta Pi award. What was that?

Richardson: Tau Beta Pi really wasn't an award. It was an award for me, and Tau Beta Pi is the engineering honorary. It's the equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa.

Blum: For engineers?

Richardson: Yes, for engineers—the Tau Beta Pi. I was the only architect in school, at that time, who had won it.

Blum: Oh, this was a society that was broader that just the campus? It was a national society?

Richardson: It was a national society, maybe international.

Blum: Did you, while you were getting a design approach, the Beaux Arts and then with Mies, also have a lot of engineering?

49 Richardson: Oh, yes. All architectural schools offer a lot of engineering.

Blum: Some more than others.

Richardson: Some more than others. Since Armour was an engineering college and still is—I guess it's a university now, isn't it? That's its orientation. Many architectural schools like the one at Notre Dame are still in the college of engineering. I think they're still in the College of Engineering at IIT. They may have broken off by now after George Danforth. I don't know. But while George was head of the architecture department, he was still under the College of Engineering, just as I was here. So, it's natural that we would have had a lot of engineering. But, of course, we had to have a pretty good background in structural engineering because in order to get your qualifications, the state board, you had to pass the engineering subjects. We took a course, at that time it was a very meager one, in mechanical systems of buildings. Of course, it's much more sophisticated now. Students today get a lot more of that than we did. First of all, you'd have math in the first year and physics and then you'd get into wood design and wood structures, and then you'd get into steel, and then you'd get into concrete and foundations. Oh, sure, you have a lot of engineering. That's part of it.

Blum: The same year, 1937, you won the Spiering Prize. What was that for?

Richardson: That was the one that I referred to a little bit ago. That's the national Beaux Arts junior sketch prize. Along with these other Beaux Arts projects that I've talked about, which usually would last anywhere from a month to six weeks, we had a Saturday sketch about once a month. You had eight hours. The idea of that was to acquaint you with an office where people come in and they need a quick sketch in a hurry, an idea, and so on. It had some basis of training. If you got it sent to New York and you got a mention, they'd give you a full mention. That's the equivalent of six weeks work. It counted just the same. Well, of course, for me that was great. I just loved these sketch problems because I could pick up a whole semester grade practically in one

50 day. So, it was just one of those things. I wasn't the only one. I was probably the most skillful one in the school, at that time, for that purpose. But this happened to be a national one, and I won the prize. It was a big thing.

Blum: The prize was just to get a mention?

Richardson: And fifty bucks.

Blum: Okay, that's what I wanted to know.

Richardson: In those days, fifty bucks was like two or three hundred today or more than that. I don't know. But anyway, it was the prestige of the thing because the school and my critics were very excited about it.

Blum: It was an achievement for them as well as for you.

Richardson: And then Mies, in my senior year, picked me to try for the Ryerson Prize. Two seniors each from ten Midwestern schools were selected to do this. Mies selected me along with one of my classmates to represent the school in that competition. I think he did it based on the fact that I had this experience of winning this other prizes. I've always been quite proud of it. Then I was competing with Princeton and Yale and everybody else. It wasn't a very big deal, but it was big at the time.

Blum: It was a feather in your cap to have been chosen as one of two from the school.

Richardson: Well, that was, too, yes.

Blum: We went very quickly early on. What are your recollections of Chicago when you arrived? What did it look like? What was Chicago like during those years? What was your impression of the city?

51 Richardson: In the first place, I'd been to Chicago just as a youngster a couple of times. My grandparents had brought me over earlier, and I'd seen Marshall Field and Company and I'd seen downtown. I'd seen the Art Institute and taken bus rides on the upper deck buses and so on, so I was a little familiar with Chicago. The town I lived in in Mississippi, which I was used to, was a town of, I suppose, ten thousand people. It was the Deep South and of ten thousand people, I suppose, at that time, there were maybe four thousand whites. I can't remember. I summered in St. Joseph [Missouri] which was much larger, at that time, it must have had about sixty thousand. So I was jumping between those environments. We lived in a large place with plenty of space out in the country and out on the edge of town and so forth. Plus, we were socially oriented. I mean, my family had been modestly successful—I mean, they weren't well-to-do, but certainly early on they were more than well-to-do. We were members of the country club, and we were socially acceptable people, certainly in the South. Both my mother's and father's families were old families from Missouri and St. Joe, so we were established socially, if you see what I mean. Then we were suddenly plunged into this four-thousand-student high school.

Blum: Hyde Park High School?

Richardson: Hyde Park, which was a marvelous school at that time. No question about it. There were marvelous teachers. But it was very frightening for young kids, the three of us. My sister was too young to go to Hyde Park, but my brother and I, didn't know a soul, and being a high school kid with no social life whatsoever was really grim. As far as the city was concerned, as I say, we began fitting into it pretty well. We were right near the university there. We lived in a nice area on Woodlawn Avenue. At that time, of course, it was not nearly so dangerous. It took us a while to get adjusted. We began making friends at Hyde Park and found our own niche and, as I say, we were always culturally encouraged. I told you I went to the Art Institute a lot. We went to the Field Museum a lot. I'd take bus rides out to Garfield Park to see the conservatory. My first year at Hyde Park, I was a sophomore. We came in late and so we didn't have much choice of electives, but we had to take a

52 science. One of the only things left open was botany. As a sophomore, I didn't have much interest in botany at all. It turned out that we had a very, very fine teacher, and I got really very excited about it. It was the first science I really had ever experienced. It involved a lot of drawing, by the way. You know, drawing pictures of the flowers and all. So, I really got very excited about it. I don't mean as a field, but it really turned me on. I went out to the Lincoln Park Conservatory frequently. Of course, we hadn't had those kind of advantages. We had that small library and museum in Laurel, Mississippi, but we really hadn't had the kind of things that the city could offer. We just, frankly, took advantage of it, being such lonely kids anyway. Of course, my brother and I were close in years and close together, and so we shared a lot of things.

Blum: Did your appreciation of the city include the architecture?

Richardson: Oh, I think so. I'm sure it did because my grandfather had me pretty interested by that time. I wasn't really that sophisticated about Louis Sullivan, for example, until later. By the time I got to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, I was only fourteen, but I knew that it was a Sullivan building. I knew some of those things. I think, by that time, I certainly knew the Robie house, as I said, and I certainly think I was aware of the Auditorium building. My grandfather had pointed that out to me. Another thing we did, even as high school kids, was to take in a good many plays. Prices were so low, they encouraged people to do that. Later on, I was an usher in many of the theaters. They'd let us in and pay us a dollar a night, and I ushered for almost every theater in town. That was much later, when I was in college.

Blum: Did you usher for movies?

Richardson: No.

Blum: Oh, for theater.

53 Richardson: Sure. You couldn't sit down, of course, until all your people had been seated. But once the first act had started and there was an empty seat, even if it was right in the middle, you could take it. Maybe there was a time limit, because if somebody came in late, they could get their seat. That was marvelous. I saw all kinds of things. I saw Tyrone Power, Sr., and Fritz Leiber in Julius Caesar. I saw The Green Pastures and I saw Maude Adams in The Merchant of Venice. Otis Skinner was Shylock. All these old classics, you know. They were practically Victorian. It was really marvelous. Oh, I saw Walter Hampden in Cyrano every year. That was my favorite, so I saw that as many times as he played. Harry Lauder. Just amazing how many things there were.

Blum: Chicago must have been a very exciting theater town.

Richardson: It was a terribly exciting city!

Blum: What about jazz?

Richardson: Even though I grew up with jazz music, I never was a musician to that extent. Later on I was quite a dancer. I was very much sought after as a partner for dancing. I always liked it, but as a youngster I could take it or leave it.

Blum: Did you ever attend any of the jam sessions, I suppose you might call them, at Bill Priestley's house?

Richardson: No, the only time I ever had any experience with Bill was one night when we went up to have dinner with him and his wife, and he sat in the corner and played us some individual stuff, which was terrific. It was marvelous stuff.

Blum: Well, I understand he was a fine musician.

Richardson: He was in Fred Waring's band.

Blum: I thought it was Paul Whiteman's. Or was it Freddie Wacker's?

54 Richardson: I'm almost positive on this, but he could have been in both for all I know because he was terrific. He also came from Mississippi.

Blum: Because he was such a fine musician and did play professionally, when professional musicians would come through town, they went to his house and got together, and many of his architectural colleagues attended those jam sessions and were fascinated by the art form.

Richardson: I don't know whether he invited me or not. See, I didn't know Bill until after the war. We both came back from the war about the same time, within a week or two of each other.

Blum: Well, was Bill at Armour when Mies first came?

Richardson: No. I knew he was Jack's [Rodgers] partner, but this came later on. I never saw Bill until after the war was over. The fact is, I don't think I had even heard of Bill, except maybe indirectly.

Blum: How did Moholy-Nagy's arrival fit into all this? How did you learn about it, respond, think about it?

Richardson: Well, I was really quite excited about it. By that time, I think I'd started working at Skidmore, and this was pre-Mies when Moholy came.

Blum: It was 1937. It was a year before Mies came.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Richardson: The only time I had any personal contact with Moholy was a rather funny one. That was when Owings was president of the AIA Chicago Chapter. In those days, they had Beaux Arts Balls. Oh, gosh, they were great. The year before he was president—he must have been president-elect—they had the Beaux Arts Ball up at the Drake Hotel, and the theme of it was new motion picture movies. This was a really great party. They took over the ballrooms

55 and everything. One of the highlights was Louis Armstrong and his band dressed up as matadors, with these little pump shoes with little pompons and matador hats and matador suits. And Louis Armstrong was standing there in this silly matador suit with this handkerchief in his hand, blowing his heart out with sweat pouring down his face and all these other guys behind him in matador suits. But that's the highlight of my memory. Each one of the offices did a set, and I did one of the sets. Everybody was quite excited about it. It was an entirely different kind of artwork for me. It was a little bit more abstract but I got all kinds of rave notices about it. But I just did it because it was fun, and, of course, I got a free ticket to go to the dance. I can't remember who I took at this time, but I took a lovely girl. We had costumes. Speaking of jazz, I was also a fan but I was never involved in it. I spent the whole evening, I think, watching Louis Armstrong, listening to Louis Armstrong, and the other sets were really neat and so on. It was a pretty drunken business, you know, and pretty wild, and here I was only about seventeen or eighteen years old or something like that. So, it was a little old for me but anyway, it was wonderful fun. To go on with the story—back to where Moholy came into this—the next year, Owings was the president of the chapter. The Beaux Arts Ball had been such a huge success at the Drake—I don't think they had had them all through the depression—that they decided to go ahead and do it again. So they hired the Trianon Ballroom out on the South Side on Cottage Grove, which I was very familiar with as a dancer. I loved to dance, so I would go over there. So, again, Owings was in charge. Well, he was the king of the ball that year. I remember Holabird and Root was involved. They had booths, and everybody took their clients. There was a big build-up. I remember Root—sometimes known as John "Stillborn" Root to us younger guys was complaining bitterly because his booth wasn't in the middle of things. He was talking about how he had to have the best booth for all his railroad presidents and all. I was just a young guy just helping out. Al Eiseman was in charge of our office at that time, so he, naturally, was delegated to go down to the Trianon and take charge of setting up all of these booths. Well, among other things, the Seagram people—liquor, of course, was in at that time—were setting up a bar there that they had sponsored. The Institute of Design had agreed to do all the decorations. Well,

56 of course, you could imagine, the Institute of Design decorations were really way out. They were beautifully done —all kinds of mobiles and all this color and everything. This guy, Moholy, was out there. I was just helping out. I was running errands or whatever and Moholy's very arty, and these Seagram salesmen came around and wanted to put up these Seagram signs, naturally. You know, like a Budweiser sign on the back of a bar. Well, Moholy just went through the roof! He said it couldn't be done, and he began spouting off in Hungarian. The Seagram guy said, "Goddamnit! We paid for this booth and we're going to put up our sign!" He said, "No, absolutely not!" And every time the guy would put it up, he'd run over there just like a kid and snatch it down and tear it up or whatever. He said they weren't going to ruin his artwork! So finally, it came to pass that Al Eiseman went over there, and he was supposed to be in charge of this whole business of setting up. He saw this argument going on, and he went up to Moholy and he said, "Now look. This man is paying for this booth or his company's paying for this booth, and he's got a perfect right to put up the sign." Well, that didn't help things at all. Moholy said, "I designed this booth and by God...!" He and Al Eiseman were yelling back and forth. Finally Moholy, who was a short guy, turned around to me—I'm just a young kid standing there—and said, "Who's this man I'm arguing with? Who's this man I'm arguing with? We haven't even been introduced!" The only other story I can tell you was told to me by John King, who I knew very well at Skidmore. He tells the story about Bill Wurster and Moholy having lunch up at the Tavern Club one time. There was some exhibit where Moholy had a background of a curved thing and then he had some photographs of something sticking out in front of it. He asked Wurster, "What did you think of my exhibit and my technique of showing these things?" And Wurster said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I think it was a lousy idea." There was this long pause and Moholy said, "But at least you admit it was an idea." I loved that. I got to know Sibyl [Moholy-Nagy] fairly well later. Of course, I knew Serge Chermayeff a little bit later because by the time I got to be head of design in Skidmore much later, Chermayeff was head of the school.

Blum: That's in 1947?

57 Richardson: It would have been 1947. That's where [Institute of Design] I first met Bucky. That's where I first really knew Bucky Fuller because I was interested in them as a representative of Skidmore, and they were interested in me as a young designer. That's where a lifelong friendship with Bucky developed, when he was teaching there for a time.

Blum: What was the feeling between IIT and the Institute of Design?

Richardson: Do you mean Mies's feeling?

Blum: Your feeling. What was your perception of the feeling between the schools?

Richardson: I don't think I gave it really that much thought. This is just an impression, but I think Mies rather looked down on it. Although I think they were both offshoots of Bauhaus, weren't they?

Blum: Oh, yes, they were.

Richardson: I never heard him talk about it much. I just got the impression that they weren't very friendly. Now, it may have been a personal thing, too. I don't know. Because these personalities are personalities and why fool around. As Mies once said, "I have very little time to be for something. I have absolutely no time to be against something." I just don't know all the personalities. I mean Schulze's book could probably say more about this than anything I could. I just don't know enough about that.

Blum: The comments that I've heard have been from people in one or another of the schools and maybe in the late thirties, which is when you left school, it was almost too early to have crystallized.

Richardson: I knew of the school, and I knew some of the people there. I can't remember now who they were. I do remember the school was very active. I remember getting—some of the people in the office wanted to do me a favor—they gave

58 me a copy of The Language of Vision, Gyorgy Kepes's book, but I think this was later.

Blum: George Fred Keck taught architecture at the Institute of Design for quite a while, and so did Bob Tague.

Richardson: Yes, Bob Tague. Bob was an Armour man, too. He went to Armour. I almost had forgotten about Bob. He worked for Keck, of course. I didn't know Keck at that time. I knew, of course, of his reputation and I knew his work, but I didn't know him personally. I didn't really meet him until much later through his brother, Bill Keck. But that was much later—after I came down to the University of Illinois.

Blum: You spoke a little earlier about the simultaneous influences that were at work on you as you were finishing IIT when Mies was there. You were also getting very practical experience at Skidmore. Step back for a minute. Will you speak about that, the beginning of your work at Skidmore? How did you come to begin to work at Skidmore?

Richardson: That's a story that's easy to tell. I had a terrible tragedy the first day of April, I think it was, in 1937. My father died very suddenly. He had had tuberculosis, and we had no insurance and so forth. We'd lost everything or he lost everything and came to Chicago with nothing. It was a tough thing, but he'd cut back. He was doing pretty well, but then he suddenly died. So, we had to kind of regroup our forces. My brother was out at the University of Chicago, as was my sister, and I was down at IIT. So, with the three kids in school and everything, it was pretty tough going. So, my sister—bless her soul—agreed to quit after that semester and took a secretarial course and became a very fine secretary. We felt my brother being the older had done very well in school, and he was on his way to practically a master's degree.

Blum: In what field?

59 Richardson: In accounting. In any case, I really needed to get a job. I didn't think I could get back to school. I needed something simple. I went to Henry Heald, I think, first. He helped me out a lot. He gave me a loan for a scholarship, but that was later on. In the meantime, just by pure chance I said, "I've always been lucky to be in the right place at the right time." Loebl was acting head of the school at that time, since he came and went. All the visiting crits would come on Thursday afternoon when we had the life classes, because the girl was posing in the nude and knew we could count on all the crits coming around that afternoon. So, it was probably Thursday, and Jerry was there. He called me in and said he wanted to talk to me. The school was small, so they knew all the students. He said they had an offer from a little firm over across the street, Skidmore and Owings. I knew who Skidmore was, but I didn't know who Owings was. They wanted to interview for an office boy job. This was just a matter of days after my father's passing. So, this really meant a lot to me. They picked two other guys to interview and myself. So, I called up and got an interview. I set it up for ten o'clock on Saturday morning. I remember I had a bunch of drawings I put under my arm. I had been lucky enough to do pretty well on those sketches among other things. As a sophomore, I had passed the first preliminary of the Paris Prize. Well, this was pretty unusual for a sophomore to do. At the University of Chicago, I had been on the freshman fencing team, and the only sweater I had was this athletic sweater. I wore that there. But anyway, I rushed up there. It was up on the top floor at 104 South Michigan. It was underneath that gable up there. The conference room looked out over Lake Michigan. It was a wonderful area. Their conference room was beautiful. It had blue carpet and a cork wall. Al Eiseman met me. I was lucky because he had never won a competition but he had known some fellows who had, and he was a great competitor when he was in school. So he was really taken by these Paris Prize drawings. He thought that was pretty terrific. I guess the other two fellows were interviewed already. I don't know when they interviewed. But, anyway, I told them about my office boy experience out at Curtis Lighting earlier and that I felt I could handle it. So, then he said, "I think Mr. Owings had better talk to you." So he came out of a little hatch, a little doorway coming out of his office. To me, at that time, he looked huge, but he was a small man,

60 actually. He had on a red vest and a gold chain, and a really dark snappy- looking jacket with bronze buttons. Yes, boy, if this is what an architect is, that's for me! He was the most glamorous-looking guy I'd ever met in my life. Really he was fantastic. Here I am in my little old sweater. So, he said, "Al, what do you think?" He introduced me. He was very cordial, of course. He grabbed the drawings and he stomped his foot. He was always a great one to stomp his foot and laugh. He made some wisecrack, I'm sure. I thought, boy, this guy is really great. Al, by this time, had stuck up the drawings by the bulletin board, and Owings said, "These are pretty good." Al said, "Looks like he can really draw. Looks like he'd fit in pretty well." So, they just briefly told me what I would do, and Owings says, "Well, why don't we sit down and talk it over. Well, here's what I want you to do." They didn't have a switchboard there. They just had a phone and maybe two phones. But anyway, the girl or whoever was secretary took care of that and she did all the typing. It was just like any other small office. Everybody did a little of everything. It was just down the street from the Art Institute, so it was easy to go over there from class and vice versa. He said, "What I'd like to have you do is come over here at noon, while the secretary is out to lunch, and take the switchboard, answer the phone and so on, and then come back here after you get through with class." Carl Anderson, who was one of his colleagues or Al's that had worked at the world's fair, was working there. He was one of the original ones. He says, "They'll tell you what they want you to do and then you just put in your hours, whatever you think, and then come in on Saturday morning. We want you to keep the flat files of drawings and do a little filing. Maybe there will be some errands here. Occasionally a sketch or something to do." Then I said, "How much time do you think it's going take, Mr. Owings?" He said, "Oh, I'd say about nine hours a week." I said, "Well, how much salary is it?" He said, "Well, we'd pay you ten dollars a week." Well, that's what I made as an office boy out at Curtis Lighting—ten bucks a week. That sounded pretty good for nine hours. I said, "Well, that sounds very satisfactory to me." After all, that's over a dollar an hour. My going rate as a tour guide had been thirty-five cents an hour. So, I thought, a dollar an hour is pretty good! Well, needless to say, I felt like I was walking on air. I not only got a job but in a firm that was some thing more than any other firm

61 was to me. I had heard of Skidmore, and we'd been kind of thrilled that he was going to be sort of a hotshot guy. We didn't know whether Skidmore and Owings were going to keep on. There was very little work. I was pretty sure they didn't have that much—a couple of houses, I think, about that time. I didn't even know why they needed an office boy except to answer the switchboard. Well, anyway, that was my first lesson in business. It turned out that it was still ten dollars a week, but I was putting in about thirty hours a week. I kept coming over there at noon, then they'd keep me working. That was the first winter that I went up to Neenah, Wisconsin, and did the drawing. I became a kind of a good luck piece for Owings. I was kind of his mascot, and he treated me really like a younger brother and gave me all sorts of opportunities. It was a very great experience. I began working every night there, but, not as much as I did the following summer. I worked, of course, full-time and then the following years, my junior year and my senior year, was when I really put in the time that I worked. I worked almost forty hours a week for them at nights.

Blum: Still for ten dollars a week?

Richardson: Oh, no. He had raised me by that time. I think by the time that I graduated as a senior, I was making thirty-five a week and most of my classmates were being offered—if they got a job at all, which a lot of them didn't because it was still depression—about twenty to twenty-five dollars a week. So I was up there. Well, hell, even Gordon was only making eighty bucks a week.

Blum: Well, you had years of experience. And you were good.

Richardson: I was valuable by that time because I could do a lot of their renderings and drawings. I did the matting and a lot of small jobs. By the time I was a senior, I actually had some stuff built. That's one of the reasons I didn't feel like going on for graduate school or anything. It never occurred to me to be a teacher or anything at that time. I had never thought about it. I was working awfully hard, but I was pretty dedicated to that firm and to that man, I'll tell you.

62 Blum: How did Nat Owings and Louis Skidmore interact?

Richardson: Well, I think they probably would have had a lot of difficulty—at least they both told me this at one time or another—working in the same office. I mean, the fact that they had the two offices and their contact was purely on a brother-in-law basis. I think they both ran their own shops, period. There's no question about it.

Blum: So, Skidmore was really in charge of the New York office and Owings the Chicago office.

Richardson: Yes. That happened because Skidmore had gone to Chicago and had gotten this world's fair work. See, that was the first job he got, and I've forgotten how many buildings they did for the 1939 New York World's Fair. So, it was only natural that he would gravitate there. The interesting thing about this, Owings never liked Chicago, never wanted to live in Chicago, and loved New York. He'd started in New York. They both had started in Indiana. Owings was in Indianapolis and Skidmore was over in Hammond, I think, when he had his first practice. But he loved Chicago. So, it was really a kind of interesting thing that they ended up just the other way around.

Blum: How did the office work? What I mean is, describe a typical day in the office.

Richardson: When it was small and very young when I first was there, Al Eiseman was sort of the executive officer, if anything. He wrote the specifications. He was primarily interested in selecting the contractors, doing the paperwork. He didn't design at all. Charlie Dornbusch was just working part of the time. I don't know that he was ever there full-time when I was there, but, he, of course, was designing. Carl Anderson was designing and also doing some working drawings, but two or three other fellows were doing working drawings. There was a very skillful man named Harold Johnson, who was an extremely good production man. Then there was this wonderful character that I met. This guy was fascinating. I learned an awful lot from him. He had

63 been a young architect in Spain when Richard Halliburton was going through there. His name was Paul McGrath. He's written up in The Royal Road to Romance, in that whole Spanish incident about swimming at the Alhambra in that four-inch pond or whatever. It's in that book, and this was the young man, at that time, traveling through it. It turned out that he was one of the young architects working at Skidmore. I don't know what his background was. It must have been the world's fair, too. But he was the greatest raconteur I’ve ever heard. He told these wonderful stories, particularly in English dialect—he could do it in any dialect—and I still tell his stories to this day. He was so great. But one of the interesting things was that he was very kind to me. He taught me a lot about working drawings. It was great experience. I was the only young guy working with these people—of course, I thought they were old. They were thirty years old. They were teaching me all these things, and I would trace their drawings. We were still using cloth, linen at that time, and I would do a tracing, and they would explain how these details worked. They did a lot of full-sized details, too. It was like Louis Sullivan. The practice was quite different. We didn't have all these fancy lamps or anything. We had these little gooseneck lamps, and everybody smoked. All our boards we had this smoke all up and down. We had no air conditioning. If you opened the windows all the soot would blow in. Just keeping the drawings clean was a thing it itself. But McGrath helped me a lot. I'll never forget, no one could understand why it was, but he had a hole right in the middle of his forehead and he had a piece of cotton in there. I never did know what it was. It was fascinating, because it was hard to keep your eyes away from it. I didn't dare ever ask him what the heck it was. I don't know what it was. It was amazing. But he was a great teacher. We had a whole series of draftsmen that had all come from the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition. That's how they got together. Well, not how they got together because they got together early, but how they worked together. Skidmore was chief of design, and he got the job of chief draftsman for Owings, who was out on the East Coast at the time and still a student, practically, or just out of school. Skidmore was picked to be chief of design for the Century of Progress after they had already agreed to get a fellow named Don Nelson—at least this is my story. I heard it from others. They

64 were looking around for a chief of design. I don't know why. I thought they had made a deal with Nelson, but apparently not. They didn't know who to get, and they asked Raymond Hood, who was the great architect for Rockefeller Center and the Tribune Tower. He said, "Well, when I was over in France, I saw this young fellow, Skidmore. He was working with Sam Chamberlain doing a book on architecture and doing these beautiful drawings. I was very impressed with him. Why don't you give him a shot at it?" So, that's how they happened to get Skidmore for the world's fair. He came and found that they hadn't really developed a drafting staff. Owings wasn't doing much, he was just a young draftsman out in a New York office. I can't remember the name of it. But anyway, Skidmore called him up and asked him if he'd like to come out to Chicago. So, he came out and he took over the job as chief draftsman. I don't know how old he was at that time. He was not too long out of school. He was about thirty when I first met him, I guess, so he couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. That's how they got together. They found out very quickly that there were people who didn't have architects who were going to build buildings. Well, they just suggested themselves, and they did moonlighting. So, they hired these same guys from their own little office, to work on the fair at night. It was kind of a moonlight office. I guess the fair people didn't object, and I don't think it conflicted in any way with what they were doing for the fair. That's how they got Wonder Bread Bakery going and all this stuff. They got to be imaginative and well known as world's fair architects. In the meantime, Owings's office was next to the chief of concessions. The chief of concessions probably wasn't that interested in the job. Whether he was a dilettante or whether he just didn't care, I don't know. But in any case, when this guy was out, Owings would talk to everybody who came into the concession office because his was right next door. So, the first thing he knows, he is not only getting all these contacts, but meeting people who need architects. He had a wonderful package going there. The next year—he'd done such a great job of this and seen all these people—the world's fair people asked him to be chief of concessions for the 1934 fair. He took that over. That's when he promoted the Skyride. He was the one responsible for all of these fantastic things. He did so well at that. Through all these world fair people, who were the wealthy

65 people of Chicago, by and large, he and Skidmore naturally could get socially involved. It was really a great thing. That's how he met Emily Otis. They got married, though not until after the fair, I think. I really didn't know about his personal life. He did tell me this story. They took a substantial trip, if not around the world, for their honeymoon. When they were in Egypt, I think at Shepheard's Hotel, they bumped into one of the Swifts, whom they had met through the world's fair. Swift was so impressed with him, he asked him if he would be chief of advertising for Swift and Company. Owings said, "How much does it pay?" I don't know my figures exactly, but it was some fantastic amount like $75,000 a year. At that time, $5,000 a year was a lot of money. So, it was really a wonderful job. He said, "How much vacation do I get?" He said, "Well, just like I do. You get two weeks or three weeks." Owings said, "I don't know. I'll have to think it over." Just after this discussion, he got a cable in Egypt from Skidmore asking him if he'd like to go into business with him. He had a couple of houses to do and whatnot. Owings wired back "yes." That's where it started. They named it Skidmore and Owings. Skidmore also thought that he was going to get this job at Armour Institute, so he would have that as a back up. He'd have the practice and so forth. Most of their connections were from their world's fair experience, but at the same time I think, through Emily, they had all these social connections. I thought—I may be wrong on this—that he met the Kimberlys through her. I'm not positive about that at all. Somebody told me not long ago that Jack Kimberly and Owings were roommates at Cornell. That's the first time I had ever heard that. I don't know whether that is true or not. First we built a couple of houses up there for the Kimberlys. Then the job I went up on was a big paper factory.

Blum: For Kimberly-Clark?

Richardson: For Kimberly-Clark. To my knowledge, they're still clients. I don't know. They were for years. They were very definitely our clients when I got back after the war. That was one of the things about Skidmore—he kept a lot of clients for a long time in spite of changes in personalities.

66 Blum: In terms of the staff in the office, you think that all grew out of the contacts at the fair?

Richardson: All the ones that I know of.

Blum: Well, you didn't.

Richardson: I didn't. Al Eiseman, I'm not really sure about. I don't know whether he is still alive, but I expect he is. He's kind of an ornery guy, but he had worked for David Adler. So he brought all those details, and knew the proper people—Joe Carp and some very good contractors.

Blum: Earlier you referred to Gordon Bunshaft, and I know that you have written a very interesting article about that time in the office at SOM, and how you felt it was a master/apprentice type of education. Now, this was going on for you at the same time you were at IIT. Would you talk a little bit about this time in the office, when Gordon was brought to Chicago from New York?

Richardson: I'll start with some of the history of his coming. This would be 1939, I guess, my last year of school. I don't know exactly when he came out, but it first came about when they decided to do this fancy hotel suite. They called it the Stevens Suite in the then-Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton Hotel. The idea was to combine several rooms and make a fancy, luxury apartment or two or three luxury apartments for visiting VIPs. They actually did call them, I think, the presidential suites. At that time, work at the New York office where Gordon was working along with Walt Severinghaus, who was a partner later, and Bob Cutler, who also was a partner later, was beginning to fall off a lot. The New York office, as I said before, was primarily based on work for the 1939 New York World's Fair. As a consequence, when that work was finished, the office obviously quieted down, and Gordon was one of the ones who wasn't that busy. At that time, the only designers we had in the Chicago office were a young man who had been a LeBrun Prize winner, Matthew Lapota, Carl Anderson, and myself, who as a very young person and still a student was a junior designer, but certainly was not in the league

67 of doing something like this Stevens suite. By that time, Gordon with his talent had already been published and won some competitions and so on. I guess Nat and Skidmore got together and decided Gordon would be available. I remember he actually did a plan for this and a presentation out in New York, and they shipped it to Chicago. It was all done in airbrush, and it was the most beautiful thing. At that time I thought it was superb. They actually did bring Gordon out to do this. They decided to go ahead with these fancy suites, and it was very avant-garde. He came out primarily to work on that. Also, there was another project, which I had been working on at this time, which was kind of interesting, with John Merrill. I had been working on it with John Merrill because the offices weren't very busy at that time, and there were a lot of competitions. Among others, there were several competitions for post offices. The U.S. Post Office Department had these post office competitions across the country, and so we applied to do a post office in the Chicago region. I started in working on the competition, although I didn't feel I was too qualified to do it. John Merrill, who was a neighbor of Nat Owings, I think, and lived in the same apartment building at that time, was working for the government, and I can't remember whether it was housing at that time. I think so because that was his specialty. But the way Nat thought was, "Well, he's working for the government, so he obviously knows a lot about post offices." So, he thought it would be a nifty idea to bring John Merrill in as a consultant on this post office competition. I don't know whether John knew anything about post offices or not, but I don't think so.

Blum: But he worked for the government?

Richardson: But he worked for the government, and that was good enough for Nat. That was the beginning of the relationship with Merrill. To my knowledge, it was on a friendship basis, and he came in to be a sort of a consultant.

Blum: It sounds like it was an opportunity for both of them.

68 Richardson: Well, it was. It was an opportunity for Owings. I think he was obviously thinking of a connection because he also thought that way, which is perfectly fine. He was a super salesman in that respect, he and Skidmore both. They didn't leave any stone unturned when it came to looking for opportunities, but obviously we weren't making much progress. Gordon was apparently available, and he also was very skilled in competitions. He had won the Goucher College competition or something. He placed in that as a younger man. So, he came out and took over this post office competition and also did these Stevens suites. I think he was going to be there on a temporary basis. Owings was getting all the work at that time, and Skidmore wasn't that busy out there, so they just agreed that they were going to put Gordon up in the Stevens Hotel. He actually, in effect, became our chief of design and that was it. So, instead of being temporary, he stayed right with it until we all went into the service at the end of 1941. I don't know how long. I may be wrong a little bit about my dates. I know he was there when I was a senior and may have been a little after I graduated. It may have been 1940. I think that he was there for two years, but it was in 1940 when he came.

Blum: You said he sent the drawings or designs for the Stevens suite ahead of his arrival. What was your reaction to them?

Richardson: I was just fascinated with them. They were all done in airbrush, and I think it was done on a purple cardboard and mat—I can't remember all of it—but it was a very flamboyant design. A lot of curves, curiously enough. All of us were working in rectangles at that time but there were a lot of curves. Very Hollywood, and all this fancy-looking furniture. Well, the upshot of it was, when that was done, I had very little to do with it. Others worked on it with him. All the furniture was specially designed.

Blum: He had designed it?

Richardson: Yes. All the lighting fixtures, everything in the whole place was designed by Gordon, or Gordon and whoever was assisting him. I can't even remember now who it was. Then we found a man—and I'm sure it was Al Eiseman who

69 got him—who made furniture. His name was Barney Lieberman. Barney Lieberman had a little manufacturing concern, in which he worked with his father, called the Garland Furniture Company. They did custom-made furniture. Barney hit it off very well with Gordon and hit it off very well with all of us. He was a very interesting man. He'd make anything or he could get it made. So, Gordon designed these flamboyant things. Well, it was good- looking at the time, but you wouldn't accept them now, and Barney Lieberman made them. Beautiful oak and everything about it. At that time, you couldn't buy lighting fixtures like he had or anything. Knoll wasn't even in the picture yet. There was nothing new. Well, of course, there was the European furniture, but "basically everything was custom made. We had no extrusions for big windows or anything. Well, this Stevens suite was so revolutionary because not only was it custom designed from the carpets up, but he suggested on the Lake Michigan side to take out all the regular windows. This was up however high...

Blum: The penthouse?

Richardson: Well, it wasn't the very top penthouse, but it was the very top floor. They took out all those standard windows and put in this glass strip running all the way across. It's there to this day, you can look up and see it. Of course, that was just revolutionary. I was lucky enough to see this whole thing being constructed from the time they knocked out the walls. I suppose I was just a kind of a "dog robber" for Gordon or something. I ran errands maybe, but I learned a lot from it—even in spite of what he says now. It was very fascinating. It was a stage set type of thing, but it was a huge success. We walked into those spaces, I remember, when they were open, and you looked out at this vista overlooking Grant Park and the lake, and it was just breathtaking. This glass didn't go to the floor but it went to the sill about two feet high. There wasn't anything like that in history as far as we were concerned or as far as anybody else was concerned. It was just thrilling. To us, it was amazing. And, of course, the furniture was very flamboyant, but very much fun. He had all kinds of calfskin covers. It was something. It was really sensational. Of course, it was a huge hit with the owners of the hotel.

70 [Tape 3: Side 1]

Richardson: Gordon's background before he had gone with Louis Skidmore had been with Raymond Loewy in New York, the great industrial designer. He had a very good sense of designing furniture and artifacts and all of these kinds of things, as well as his architectural experience. It wasn't architectural really, but it was fun. It was fascinating. It really gave us a big lift.

Blum: It sounds like out of necessity he did the entire project, inside, outside, whatever, and in a way it gave him control over everything.

Richardson: It gave him complete control over everything, plus the fact that it was the first time, I think, that an architectural office designed everything, from the ashtrays to the furniture to the pots and pans. It was a complete thing. I think this was probably an offshoot of his experience from Raymond Loewy. I don't know.

Blum: But also a necessity.

Richardson: Also a necessity, yes. You couldn't buy this nice furniture, Knoll existed, but didn't exist as a figure before the war. As a matter of fact, just before the war, I think Gordon and Bruce Adams gave Knoll his very first order for the recreation building up at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. That was his webbed thing. He brought it in on his back. I don't think he even had a manufacturer at that time. It was the very first order.

Blum: I know the Kecks talk about designing their own furniture, the metal tube furniture, because there was none available commercially.

Richardson: That's right. And lighting fixtures the same way. As I said, everything was done. Of course, it was a lot of fun. I mean, it really was. All of us were youngsters. Even Gordon wasn't that old. We thought it was really great fun. In the meantime, he also—I can't remember the exact sequence of

71 events—but he also carried through on this post office, and we won. They didn't build it, but we won whatever our region was.

Blum: Was there something new or avant-garde about the post office design?

Richardson: Just the way he designed. That's all. He always had a big idea. That's one of the things I learned from him. You always start with a big concept. Nothing creative is worth anything unless you have an idea. It doesn't necessarily mean that the big idea's always a good idea nor does it mean that it's absolutely a new idea. If you look at his things, even later, they always, it seems to me—with few exceptions, which you've mentioned—generally have a big idea. You mentioned the other day that he'd fallen off on the Hirshhorn Museum. I mean, it's not as good as his other things and so on.

Blum: In my opinion.

Richardson: In your opinion. Well, in my opinion, too. But, even though it's the big donut, it's a big idea. It's a little like my story of Moholy. It's an idea, even if it's not a good idea.

Blum: I think my idea about it is, in addition to the building itself, the context in which it appears.

Richardson: Yes, well, that's true. Again, you look at the Beinecke Library at Yale, in which we all admired the space and everything, it was a really big idea. You asked me how we won the competition. I think in every one of the competitions that he was involved in, there was a very strong idea. Even the Stevens suite, as flamboyant as it was and that glass and everything, it was a big idea. That's why it was so exciting. It wasn't exciting because the furniture was tricky or anything, which it was. But it was exciting because it gave a whole new concept on views and looking out, and it really made a big difference to, I think, trends in architecture at that time. I really do. I don't remember the publications. It must have been published. I don't remember that because it really got a lot of stir.

72 Blum: When you talked about his drawings preceding his arrival, you said, "And they were air brushed." Was air brushing something new at the time?

Richardson: No, but they were pretty much for me. No, they'd used the airbrush in the Beaux Arts competitions, particularly in Illinois, for years.

Blum: But you hadn't used it?

Richardson: But I hadn't used it. Seeing all those airbrush perspectives was really something new for me from what I had been working with.

Blum: But what happened in the office when he arrived, when he brought these ideas, the drawings that preceded him? What was the anticipation in the office?

Richardson: I wouldn't want to name names because it's just purely speculation, but I think some of the other people were a little bit apprehensive because he was their age and coming from New York.

Blum: Are talking about Carl Anderson and Eiseman?

Richardson: Eiseman and Anderson, you know, some of the people. By this time, the office had grown to probably eight or ten people. I mean, it wasn't big, but it was big enough that we had to take on a little bit more extra space next to the garret and so forth.

Blum: Who were the additional people?

Richardson: Well, they had moved me up by this time from office boy. I guess if there was a title, I was a junior designer. I was succeeded as office boy by Brewster Adams. He was always known and still is today as Bruce Adams. It really was Brew Adams, B-R-E-W. I think I was one of the few outside his family that called him Brew rather than Bruce. But anyway, he came in from the

73 University of Illinois, and he took over the office boy duties. He hadn't graduated from Illinois but was extremely talented as designer and as drawer. So, Gordon, by this time, glommed onto him as well. We had this young man, Matt Lapota, whom I mentioned had been working. His first assignment, and this was before Gordon's time, really, was Little Traverse Hospital, which Nat had gotten somehow. I don't know the history of it, but apparently he had managed to get it away from another architectural firm somehow. But in any case, that was a small hospital up in Petoskey, Michigan, called the Little Traverse Hospital. Looking at it now, of course, it would be completely out of date, and I'm sure Gordon wouldn't have thought much about it. But Matt Lapota, the young Le Brun Travel Grant winner, designed it, and it was featured on the front of Architectural Forum. This gave this young office of just a few people quite a kick, too. For once it was not the New York office. It was the Chicago office.

Blum: Was there an unstated feeling of competition between the offices?

Richardson: Oh, I think so. Even at that time.

Blum: In spite of the fact that Chicago was so small.

Richardson: By this time, our office was bigger than the New York office because the New York office—at least I think so—had cut down so much. I think about the only people that Skid had left were Gordon and Bob Cutler and Severinghaus.

Blum: But Gordon was here.

Richardson: But Gordon was shipped out here. So, I don't know how many others they had.

Blum: I just wonder if you felt a sense of competition with the New York office?

74 Richardson: I think we all did. I think Nat did, too. I don't think there's any question. Even though they were partners, there was this constant "I'm going to outdo him."

Blum: Was the feeling of competition that you say you felt, because Nat in Chicago and Skidmore in New York had this feeling of competition, and it sort of filtered down?

Richardson: I think so. It was a friendly competition. Don't misunderstand me. We were not trying to cut each other's throats. Nor was Nat, nor Skid. As I mentioned yesterday, I think they were happy to work in separate offices rather than trying to work together in one. I think it was a very friendly competition, a very healthy one. I think it probably exists today with all the offices they have. I'm not that up-to-date on it, but I assume that they still have considerable competition amongst the partners.

Blum: And yet they felt free to move one person to another office if their skills were needed?

Richardson: Oh, yes. And they sent me out to New York later on, for example, to do some projects. There was a shift back and forth if there was a skill needed. Of course, later on, I'm sure they brought a lot of people down from New York to work on the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, project. That was during the war.

Blum: Prior to the Second World War, was this the time that Harry Weese was in the SOM office?

Richardson: Yes, he came in about the same time. That's a good question, because I think he came in just about that time. Then we got a man named Bob Little, who had had a splendid Beaux Arts record at the University of Illinois. He didn't hit it off with Gordon and vice versa. He did furniture designs and whatnot. He was kind of relegated to a corner because he didn't fit in with the rest of us too well. He fit in all right with me, but I mean with Gordon.

75 Blum: Did Gordon decide who did what?

Richardson: Oh, yes. He handled the design. By this time, we really had not officially designated design and production. But Gordon designed everything. By that time, Carl Anderson and the others were only in working drawings and that sort of thing. The design was turned over completely to Gordon—I think probably at his insistence and properly so. There was no question that he was the star, and there was a great deal of jealousy, as I said, between Nat and Gordon. Nat, I think, still fancied himself as a designer. He was a very creative person. He didn't have anything like the design ability that Gordon did, but he had ideas and he had things that he wanted to get across and so on. He and Gordon, I think, clashed on that. But Gordon insisted on the control, and, frankly, I give him credit for building the whole firm in those terms. I don't think there's any question but what Nat and Skid, who are both commercially minded and both marvelous salesmen, would have gone any direction. I don't say they didn't have an architectural conscience, but their prime effort was in the promotion. Whereas, Gordon's prime effort was just in the—I shouldn't say purity of design—but the importance of design not just as an emotional thing, but as a good building, something that's really important.

Blum: Maybe the way this all sort of took shape at this particular time in the Chicago office says something else about SOM. Harry Weese was there and John Dinkeloo and you say Bob Little.

Richardson: John Dinkeloo succeeded Bruce Adams, as a matter of fact.

Blum: These were all very talented, young architects. Maybe this is one of the secrets of SOM's success—that they took a chance on young talent.

Richardson: I don't think there's any question about it. I give Nat credit for that, but I also give Gordon credit for that. When I worked with Gordon later on in New York a little bit, he used his design team just like hands. I mean, we would cut the friskets, and he would do the spraying—literally.

76 Blum: Is a frisket like a stencil?

Richardson: Yes. Cutting is a very laborious task and spraying is a lot of fun. He just used us, which is fine. That's what we wanted. He was designing. All of the ideas were really coming out of him. I would be working on one project and Bruce Adams would be working on another project, and Harry would be working on another project, and Matt Lapota yet another.

Blum: All cutting friskets?

Richardson: Well, whatever needed to be done—cutting friskets or making a rendering, making a study that Gordon could look at and change. But he was a true chief of design, and he was teaching all the time.

Blum: Kind of like a general?

Richardson: No, he was not a general. He was in the line, too, because he was doing a lot of drawing himself. Also giving a lot of encouragement. This got to be kind of a club. We were all bachelors for one thing. He worked a good deal with Nat. We didn't get any overtime at that time, but if we stayed and worked until seven o'clock at night—quitting time usually being five—then he'd buy us dinner on the office. It was just like school. We were having a great time together. We didn't mind staying down. Gordon would go out with us, and we'd have a drink or two and we'd talk about Corbusier, we'd talk about Wright architecture, and we'd have dinner. Sometimes we'd even go to a nightclub or whatever together. It was really a great friendly group. We did the same thing at lunch. We had a regular table over at Berghoff's, a round table—it was an Algonquin Hotel sort of thing—where we all met. Bob Little never fitted into this clique at all. For some reason it just didn't work for him.

Blum: Was it his personal preference not to?

77 Richardson: I think it was Gordon's, too. Some people just don't fit in. But there was always enough for him to do. He still was working under Gordon, but Gordon kind of pushed him aside. But the rest of us, including Harry, worked on whatever assignments came along. There weren't that many, but mostly department store work and interiors. Of course, that's the only thing that was going on. That's why Gordon probably didn't think it was very significant because there weren't that many strong buildings or anything going on.

Blum: It sounds like the SOM environment around you had changed significantly from 1937 until the time you are now speaking about. The average age had become younger, and the attitude had become much more that of an exchange, of a give-and-take with a head designer or, as you called him, a chief of design. There was more teamwork than what I sense you talked about initially.

Richardson: It was a team, yes. Gordon used us as hands really. It was wonderful. It was just like he was an octopus. He could do all the thinking, and he had all of us young guys to do these beautiful drawings for him or whatever he needed done. We just loved it—at least I did. I think everybody else did, too. He was fun to be with. I felt like I was learning something all the time.

Blum: What did you hope for beyond being a team worker and learning from Gordon?

Richardson: By that time, you see, I'd done some small projects. I was looking forward to the time when I could do my own projects, Now there was never any question of being identified by name. Owings and, I suppose, Skidmore, too, were very much against that. In fact, in that Museum of Modern Art show, Owings was infuriated about that. Philip Johnson's little blurb mentioning Gordon and me.

Blum: Why was that?

78 Richardson: Jealousy. Nat Owings was Nat Owings. This was his firm. You don't find Harry Weese giving anybody any credit, do you? I mean, it's Harry Weese and Associates. He never bragged up John Hartray or any of those people he had.

Blum: No, but I think when a job is published, the designer's name is mentioned.

Richardson: Now it is, but in those days, it was always Skidmore and Owings, or Skidmore, Owings and Merrill later.

Blum: How did Bunshaft feel about that? How did you feel about that?

Richardson: He hated it. He's the one that finally insisted on being named. If he hadn't broken through, you wouldn't have heard of Walter Netsch or Bruce Graham or anybody else. That was a whole new breakthrough. But that's very recent. That's after I left. See, I was first mentioned in that museum thing and that was 1950. Owings was infuriated. That's when Gordon broke through and said, "It's about time that some of us got credit." I think he was very resentful that he wasn't getting credit when he knew how much he contributed to this whole thing. Gordon was the design. He thought a lot of me later because he wanted me to head up the Chicago office rather than anybody else. But I left for other reasons. I don't think there was any question in my mind in those early days of getting credit. I mean, I was thoroughly interested in building the firm. The other way I had some hesitation—occasionally I could see Nat was difficult to work with. Prue couldn't get along with Nat at all, for example. I got a lot of pressure from that end. He was very demanding. He wanted you twenty-four hours a day. Of course, I wasn't married at that time. When I was a bachelor, this was okay. But he was difficult to work with. There's no doubt about it. I still was absolutely devoted to him and to Gordon. Gordon built up the firm, too. I talked to him a couple times privately. I'd walk down Michigan Avenue with him when he was going back to the hotel down at the Stevens and I was going to catch the IC. We'd chat and so on. I said, "Gordon, don't you ever think of going into business yourself? If you ever do, I'd sure like to be working for you." He said, "No,

79 Rich. I don't think it's going to happen. I'm a designer and these guys are"—words to this effect—"interested in the business and sales. I'm going to stick with them and use them and they can use me." But he said, "I think it's a much happier combination that way." He probably didn't say "happier."

Blum: And he had the idea early on?

Richardson: Oh, he had that idea right away. I think he probably has followed through pretty much exactly the way he wanted to. I think his biggest disappointment in life, probably, is not getting the AIA gold medal. I'm sure he was absolutely infuriated when Nat got it. He certainly did not come down to see him get it, and he didn't go to that party in New Orleans. Walt Netsch wasn't there either, which surprised me, but I think he had a good reason. Bruce Graham wasn't there. I was there. Walt Severinghaus was there. I think Cutler was there, Emily was there, and Eloise [Skidmore], his sister, was there. Well, anyway that's the story. That's recent. There was always a problem, I think, with the two of them. One of the reasons, I think, was Gordon wanted to go back to New York so much. I think he loved New York anyway. But one of the things that happened at that time, too—and this is really almost pre-Mies—was that we were being influenced very strongly by the Scandinavian architects, whom I didn't mention yesterday. I mentioned Aalto, but also Gunnar Asplund in Sweden. We were interested in what they were doing at that time in housing. Harry Weese had been there, and he brought back a lot of the Swedish or Scandinavian ideas. He had done some small houses, which were very much oriented in that direction, which I saw up at Glen Lake [Wisconsin]. I remember visiting him one weekend. It was just as attractive as it could be for a family. Bob Little had been there, and he had gotten a traveling fellowship and got as far as Sweden and just decided to stay there the whole time. We were talking a lot about Swedish furniture, the artifacts and the lighting fixtures. It was pretty sophisticated stuff for us. For some of us in school and also for me at SOM this really was more significant, at that time, than the International Style. You were asking me before about my reactions when Mies came. I think my inclinations had been more influenced by Aalto and the Scandinavian approach than this hard,

80 German approach. That's one of the reasons I think Mies shocked me a little bit. Of course, once I caught on, I was not a complete disciple or anything, but at least I could see the sense of it and liked him as a man tremendously. He was a terrific guy.

Blum: I think that's interesting that in the Scandinavian approach to design, to furniture, material was so important, and yet somehow in the literature this not well documented.

Richardson: It isn't. It didn't catch on, I think, primarily because Johnson and Hitchcock built up this International Style stuff and Corbusier and Mies, and Gropius were getting all this publicity, and the Bauhaus business was built up. The Bauhaus just took over. I think the Scandinavians, just by their nature, didn't try to fight it. They just went their own way. I remember Aalto came to MIT, and he was there and did those apartments there. Of course, [Eliel] Saarinen had started his firm and school at Cranbrook [Academy of Art]. I think we were all very excited. See, that's where Harry studied, too. Harry had studied at Cranbrook. Gyo Obata had studied at Cranbrook. Of course, I didn't know Gyo until later. There was a strong influence, and then all of sudden this Bauhaus business came in and just swept it out.

Blum: Except when you look at some of the contemporary interiors, it seems that many of them had Aalto-type furniture in those early days rather than the metal, the George Fred Keck-type.

Richardson: No, it was the bentwood and then the laminated wood.

Blum: It was softer. At least in the beginning, in those early years.

Richardson: I think it's important to note that we used wood furniture. I don't think it was just our little group at all. Of course, Harry had this Saarinen association earlier. He studied with Eliel Saarinen, and that's how he met Eero first and all that. I think that influenced his thinking. Bob Little—of course, he didn't carry that much weight in our office—could talk about it, and he was

81 designing furniture in that manner. Also, we were doing everything, doing all this custom design. I think it influenced Gordon, too. I couldn't speak for him, but it seemed to, certainly in the Stevens suites thing that I mentioned. I could see some of the Scandinavian curvilinear design come out. I'm sure he was a great admirer of the Swedish architects.

Blum: To change the focus a little, what were the space house designs with Mies, with Paul Schweikher?

Richardson: We were trying to understand what Mies meant when he talked about a house. Let's take a house on a regular lot. Let's say it's seventy-five feet wide. There is a wall all the way around it, so that you're really enclosing and you're thinking of the exterior—your patio, your backyard, front yard—as a living space. By having the large glass as your only barrier, in effect, you have no barrier at all between your interior space and your exterior. At least visually, the theory is that you don't. So, we would study these wall houses. In other words, instead of a thirty-by-forty-foot house, we'd be studying a seventy-five-by-a-hundred-foot house except that two-thirds of it would be exterior space, either with small courtyards or a courtyard in the front, a courtyard in the back. It was an entirely new concept. You know, to me as a young man, a house was a house, like this one or anything I've lived in.

Blum: The enclosure?

Richardson: An enclosure, yes. I appreciated that Frank Lloyd Wright's houses were different but not in this total sense of Mies. I think Mies could have been happy with our whole society—and I probably could, too—living in walled houses, having your own little garden and your own little backyard or front yard or whatever. You know, good walls make good neighbors. He had whole groups of these things in arrangements, which we did in school, in which he had his projects, which are in some of the books—an arrangement of four houses in a block or eight houses in a block. It was really a neat concept. It's kind of medieval or Mediterranean in a way. You're living within your own little cubicle.

82 Blum: Space.

Richardson: Space. But pleasant, nice spaces. They were pleasant spaces. Even when I taught graduate work, I used this as an exercise down at Illinois, and I have a pictures of those that we did, and they are very fascinating. But that's what Mies was telling us. He was using this vehicle of a house rather than some other kind of building to study space and space relationships and space flow and so on. I got enough out of it so that when I became a teacher, I was able to teach this idea of space moving around planes and whatnot pretty convincingly to my students throughout the years.

Blum: How did Paul Schweikher enter this activity?

Richardson: This was after I graduated, so it would have been in 1940. He had his own—well, I'd call it sort of atelier. There were several of us young men who had graduated and were looking for an outlet, and he met with us once a week. We would do a project, and he'd give us a crit. I remember I did a house or something for him, and he was very kind and very wonderful about it.

Blum: So this was really his own private venture?

Richardson: Yes, I think so. I know we didn't pay him any tuition or anything. It had nothing to do with his office. He was a teacher, and this was more like a club. A bunch of us got together, and we went over and got a crit from him.

Blum: Where did you meet?

Richardson: Up on the Near North Side somewhere, and I'm damned if I can remember. It was on Pearson or someplace near there.

Blum: Was it his home?

83 Richardson: I don't think so. I think he had built his house by then.

Blum: It was built in 1939.

Richardson: I don't know. It was way up. I'm trying to think. It didn't last that long, so I really can't tell you exactly where it was.

Blum: Who else was involved in this atelier?

Richardson: Bob Little went up there for a while. I can't think of anybody else from the office that went there. Bob Tague was up there some, I think. Isn't that interesting? It really wasn't a long enough period. I remember Paul very distinctly, but I can't remember the details of it. My recall is not that good on that. It's too bad, because I remember him very fondly. He was always very generous with his criticism and very appreciative of what we were doing and so forth.

Blum: What was the Ryerson competition that awarded you a first place?

Richardson: That was a sad but interesting story. I mentioned that Mies had decided that there were these Midwest schools—I think about ten schools—that qualified for this Ryerson Prize. This was a traveling fellowship that they gave on a competition basis every year. As far as I know, it still exists. I don't know how it operates now. At that time, they would select two students from each senior class or from each school to compete. They'd give them all the same program to do. Then they were sent in to be judged by practitioners. This one was to be sent to Holabird and Root's office, and it was judged there by several Chicago architects. I know that Illinois was involved and, I think, Michigan was involved and Miami of Ohio and Cincinnati.

Blum: All these universities?

Richardson: All these universities and various architectural 'schools. The program, in this particular case, was a new clubhouse facility. It was based on the Saddle and

84 Cycle [Club] needs but primarily it was also a golf facility. It was sort of based on the Beaux Arts system because these were all Beaux Arts schools. Well, Mies had selected me and this other student to do it. But he hadn't competed, and he didn't understand the rules at all. The rules were that in Beaux Arts you did an esquisse esquisse. Have you ever heard of this? You did the scheme. You sat down, and they locked you in a room and gave you four hours or whatever—maybe it's a full day depending on the project. You did an esquisse, which was your basic big idea and scheme. You sketched it out on tracing paper, and then it was blueprinted. If you "jumped" your esquisse, as they said, that is you didn't follow it, you'd get H.C. I mean, it was not acceptable. So, that's why the esquisse esquisse was so important. There was a big trick. The real clever fellows from Illinois and Princeton knew how to make it vague enough so that they could jump their esquisse and still fall within the rules. Whenever the jury met, they always asked the question: Did this student really jump his esquisse or did he follow through? Well, if you were clever enough and vague enough, you could make it fit anything. But in any case, I did this scheme and my colleague did the scheme. We turned them in. They were locked up in the office. Mies didn't care one way or the other. I told Mies, "Under the circumstances since we were competing, two students working against each other, I would appreciate it if we could work in separate rooms." He was a friend of mine. His name was Bill Wagner, the other student. I think he agreed, too. It would be just a little bit better if we didn't look at each other's work while we were competing. We felt with the pull that Mies had with John Holabird or the Holabird office—this was his first year here—and with the Chicago jury, we thought that the chances of our winning were very strong. We felt we had a real inside track. I could draw better than the other guy, there was no problem about that. With Mies, drawings were all in pencil on thirty-by-forty Strathmore boards, even though we knew that the competition really called for color and everything else. I mean, you had to do it the Mies way. I couldn't argue with that. If I were doing it on my own, I would have done watercolors because I knew that's what they really were looking for. Then they said, in addition to that, you've got to submit ten sketches. Well, that obviously implies they want to send somebody abroad who's got the facility to sketch and all the rest of it.

85 Well, Mies interpreted that as ten sketches of the project or the building in pencil on thirty-by-forty Strathmore boards. Well, again, I can't argue. So, of course, he immediately gave me a scheme, which had nothing to do with my esquisse esquisse. In other words, he changed everything completely and very religiously critted me everyday or every other day. He'd come in with Jack Rodgers and then also crit my friend, who was working in another room. This, by the way, was when we were still in the front of the Art Institute way up at the top.

Blum: In the attic?

Richardson: In the attic, I think. Well, anyway, we were working in separate rooms. They gave us a spot up there, I think, to work. It came time to submit it, and we put our drawings together and they were identical. He had given him the same scheme as he gave me. They were exactly identical! The only differences were in the ten sketches, which were not watercolors or sketches of anything other than this building, I had those, and they were very nice. They were much better than the other guy's. But we had the same scheme. Identical. Of course, I was floored! I was called Amby in school at that time, and a friend of mine said, "Amby, I think you ought to know that Bill is going to go into the office and take his esquisse esquisse and change it to fit his submission." Well, that meant that it looked like I had jumped my esquisse, but he hadn't, that I'd picked up his idea because they were identical ideas—almost identical in terms of location on the sheet and everything else. So it implied that I was the one who jumped my esquisse. I went to the guy and I said, "Bill, I understand that you're planning to..." He wanted me to take his drawings up to Holabird and Root's office for him while he was doing this other tricky thing. I thought that was pretty conniving, frankly. But, anyway, I called him on it. I said, "I understand that you're planning to change your esquisse." He was kind of shamefaced and he said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, if you do, I'm going to mutilate your drawings."

Blum: What do you mean mutilate?

86 Richardson: Cut them or something. I said, "That's not acceptable at all." It was an obvious cheat. He had seen the drawings, and he knew they were identical, too. And by changing his esquisse and faking that in, that would win it for him. We both figured we had a good chance of winning. I was even so confident, I'd gone out and gotten myself a suitcase on sale.

Blum: For your trip?

Richardson: Yes! For my trip to Europe.

Blum: Did you realize at the time that Mies had misled you because he misunderstood what the process involved?

Richardson: Why sure. I don't think he cared. He didn't give a damn about competitions. He was just thinking about a project and making nice drawings, as far as I know.

Blum: So, it was really sort of innocent on his part?

Richardson: I don't know whether it was innocent or not. I really don't. I don't think he did it deliberately to knock us, because he had selected the two of us to do the thing. I was so infuriated. Well, we waited around, and Charlie Dornbusch was up there visiting the jury. I think it was later that day, and he came back to school and he had kind of a long look on his face. I said, "What happened?" Of course, we were so excited, and the other guy was there, too. Charlie said, "To tell you the truth, the jury really couldn't make up their mind about it. They selected yours and Bill's as first, and you got first place. You were both placed first but there won't be any award." So that was the end of that. I never got over it. I never blamed Mies for it or anything like that but it was really kind of a...

Blum: You realized what had happened.

87 Richardson: Yes, I like to go in a competition with the same ground rules as everybody else. One of the guys I knew later was one of the competitors from Cincinnati, and he didn't win either because the jurors just said that they were sort of a hung jury. It was obviously a Mies thing, and ours was the best scheme. How could they judge otherwise, because it was Mies? And that was it. All I'd done is just serve as a skillful draftsman.

Blum: You're right—it was an interesting and sad experience. And your suitcase?

Richardson: I kept that for years. I had to wait until later. Well, as it turned out, that was a bad year to go to Europe anyway, because this was the summer of 1939. Maybe it happened for the best in the long run because it probably would have been aborted. Of course, I think we could have gone to other countries. I don't know what the stipulations were.

Blum: What prompted you in 1942 to leave Skidmore to go into the army? Were you drafted?

Richardson: No. Most of us young guys knew that the war was inevitable. We knew the draft was coming. I figured if I'm going in the army, I might as well go in and be an officer if I could. At that time I was kind of fascinated with flying. For a year I worked only on the third floor of L. S. Ayres Department Store in Indianapolis. That was my assignment. Gordon was looking over my shoulder, but my basic assignment was merchandising, department store work.

Blum: How did that relate to...?

Richardson: That related to my flying because I commuted. I flew back and forth on a DC- 3 from Midway to Indianapolis. I got kind of enamored of the flying thing. When I was just a young boy, I'd been up in a biplane and all that. It was a pretty glamorous thing. I thought I'd like to be a pilot, and I applied for pilot training. At that time it was very difficult. You had to have a college degree plus you had to go through these extensive physicals, and my teeth didn't fit.

88 Blum: What do you mean?

Richardson: Well, I have malocclusion. They don't fit. I said, "Well, what's the matter?" The man said, "I don't know whether you can chew apples." I said, "I've been chewing apples all my life." They said I had a closed septum in my left nostril, so they said you'd have a hard time breathing oxygen, and so they washed me out as a pilot. But they said, "You can also be a flying cadet as an engineering officer." I said, "What does that mean?" They said, "Oh, we're really not sure." This was in Chicago. "We're really not sure, but we assume you're in charge of the engines in bomber flights and whatnot. You're Tau Beta Pi." See, I have a bachelor of science degree, but you had to have an engineering degree to qualify for this flying cadet in engineering school. But they said, "Since you made Tau Beta Pi, it's obvious that you could qualify." So I applied for flying cadet training as an engineer.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Richardson: Harry Weese had gone into the navy as a yeoman, and he just escaped by a pure fluke. He was reassigned or something and all of his original outfit were wiped out in some action. John Dinkeloo went into the Seabees, and that's where he got his marvelous experience in construction. It later developed, as you know, into the Gateway Arch in St. Louis with Eero Saarinen and all the magnificent things he did—first with SOM—he was chief of production there—and then with Saarinen later on.

Blum: What happened? Did your army experience add to your architectural or engineering background? How did you exercise your expertise?

Richardson: Practically not at all. It was just about as far away from architecture as you could imagine except for traveling in England or in Italy.

Blum: Were you the engineer in charge of the plane engine?

89 Richardson: It turns out that I wasn't a flying cadet at all. As soon as I got to Chanute Field [Illinois] for my training, which was January of 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, I said, "What are we going to do?" They said, "You're going to be a glorified grease monkey." I didn't know a thing about engines. I didn't know the difference between a wrench and a nut. I really didn't know anything. All these other guys knew everything. It was awful tough for me. That's another story.

Blum: But didn't you become a major?

Richardson: Yes.

Blum: How did that happen?

Richardson: I was an officer for four years, three-and-a-half or whatever, and finally went up. At that time, we all went in. Bob Little had been a reserve officer, so he went in the tank corps. It turns out he didn't go overseas for a long time. He didn't go overseas until after the war. After I left, Gordon joined the army, and I never was quite sure what his assignment was. I don't know what he was involved in, but he was definitely army. Alan Robinson, who had been working with us there, went into the navy. He had been a good friend of Harry's.

Blum: What happened to-the office when all of these people left?

Richardson: The older fellows took over. But don't forget, there wasn't much work except war work. They were doing the Great Lakes barracks and that sort of thing, started by Gordon and Bruce Adams—I don't know whether Bruce went into the service. I think everybody did, though. So, these older men, the ones who had been there before, carried on. I wasn't there, but when they got Oak Ridge, they began to hire new people from all over because it was a very big job.

Blum: Did you travel during war years?

90 Richardson: Yes. You were asking how I got to be a major, I think. First of all, I graduated from about six months basic training at Chanute Field, which was not far away. Then they gave us our assignments. We had no choice of assignments. I wasn't any hero. I tried to get an assignment through Skidmore. They were doing interceptor stations at that time. I tried to get an assignment to go into aeronautical engineering designing, which I thought I could fit into rather than going into engineering maintenance. I just felt that anybody could do this, but I have a skill either in camouflage or something that might be more useful. I wasn't a coward, but I wasn't particularly a hero, either. But in any case, it didn't come in. I got assigned to wherever I got assigned like everybody else. Well, it so happened I got assigned to a B-25 outfit that was an outgrowth of [James Harold] Doolittle's Tokyo raid. All of these young commanding officers—and they were young—had been on the Tokyo raid. My second commanding officer was one of the copilots on the Tokyo raid. I had a very good rapport with him. My job went overseas. We went to England first and trained there for a few months. We thought we were going to Norway, and instead of that, they kept us under wraps for a long time. We couldn't get out, and finally one night we went down to Southampton and got on a DC-3 and ended up making an invasion in North Africa. My pilot was a DC-3 pilot who was not briefed right. We were supposed to go to Casablanca [Morocco], and I ended up in Algiers [Algeria]. They were bombing and everything. They were still cleaning up the base when I went in. The paratroopers were still there, and they were still shooting. I hadn't been trained for any of that kind of stuff at all.

Blum: For real war.

Richardson: Yes. I had thirteen men, and we had escape kits. We got out of this airplane, and, of course, that pilot took off to the west, as soon as he hit the ground just about. Here I am sitting around with these thirteen men. These escape kits were little plastic boxes, and they had a message in French and in Arabic from President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt.

91 Blum: Who were you suppose to give that message to?

Richardson: To any Arab or Frenchman or anybody if we were captured or whatever. It was a Salaam aleikum sort of thing. They gave us some French francs, a little hacksaw, which was inside a rubber condom-like thing so that we could put it inside of ourselves to hide the hacksaw, and other escape things—some fish hooks and things like that.

Blum: Was this to break out of captivity?

Richardson: Yes, to break out of captivity. Anyway, then they had a couple of crackers and a couple of candy bars.

Blum: For your lunch before you escaped.

Richardson: Yes. Naturally, we got there, and there were a bunch of Arabs around. They were cleaning up the base. I don't mean they were, but the soldiers were, from the army. And, of course, we get there, and there was no place to stay, no orders or anything else. I just lost my outfit. I found some kind of headquarters, and there were a couple of sergeants in there and I said, "Where's the 310th Bomb Group?" And they just shrugged their shoulders and said, "We haven't the slightest idea." I didn't know where they were. Theoretically, I could have still been out there lost, and they never would have found us. Of course, the first thing my men said was, "Lieutenant, when do we eat?" I said, "What do you think we're going to eat?"

Blum: They could eat their crackers and their candy bars.

Richardson: Well, they'd done that by that time. They wanted those French francs. We bought some eggs and some chickens from the Arabs and tangerines. Full colonels were cooking out of their helmets. I found an old place with a bunch of old ropes—I don't know what it was—and we slept in there. I finally attached myself to a little English outfit that was one of the take-over companies, and they gave us oxtail stew, which was awful, but we ate it

92 because that was the only thing that we could eat. We hung around that way, just living off the soil and the Arabs for about a week. I couldn't hitch a ride back anywhere. They didn't know where I was.

Blum: Didn't your company or your group know you weren't located? Didn't they miss you?

Richardson: Yes, but they didn't know where we were. With the invasion, I was just another officer. Well, there were a couple of us officers. I was a senior officer, and there was another one and then our thirteen men. They didn't look for us at all. They didn't miss us. As it turns out, I guessed that they were back in Casablanca. That's the only thing I could think of. Where else would they be? So, each day I'd go out there, and there'd be a DC-3. Well, I finally got an empty, and this guy was heading back to Casablanca. I gave him my sob story. He was a young pilot, happened to be from Chicago, so he said, "Okay, I'll give you guys a lift back." So, we took off and got back and sure enough, when we got to Casablanca, I said, "Have you ever heard of the 310th Bomb Group?" He said, "Oh, yes. They're stationed out there." So, I got back with my unit.

Blum: And you got there, and they said, "Oh, we've been waiting for you."

Richardson: Oh, in effect, something like that. For the first week or ten days in Casablanca, they were bringing in all this gasoline. By that time, the invasion had come, and they were unloading all this gasoline and spreading the drums all over the fields. We hired these Arabs and put them on the trucks and made these groups to distribute the gas drums. Then finally they said, "Well, you're going up to the front." This is all the ground echelon. They put us on a "forty-and-eight" freight car train, just like in World War I, forty men and eight horses in these little cars. We went all the way up through Fez and all the way along through Oran [Algeria] and finally up near Constantine [Algeria]. I've forgotten how long it took us. Of course, we had to pull aside for every ammunition train and all the rest of it. Men took turns sitting on various guards. There was a little cupola above each railroad car, and we had

93 guns up there because we were subject to strafing. At that time, the Germans had control of the air. We had just gotten there, so they were strafing our trains and everything. It was a kind of tricky business.

Blum: One of the things, I know, that you must have had some time for during your war years was to make the watercolors that were included in your exhibition at the Snite Museum at Notre Dame.

Richardson: One of the ones I had in the Snite was made on that very trip up near Fez. I was going through the Atlas Mountains. I did a sketch of the forty-and-eight cars looking out of the train as it was going around a curve. I don't remember whether I did the sketch when I was on the train or did it afterward. I probably did it afterward, but it was a vivid pencil sketch. It was just a quick sketch.

Blum: Did you carry a little sketchbook with you?

Richardson: I had a little sketchbook the whole time I was over there, I think. I didn't do that many—not nearly as many as I should have. But I did sketch whenever I could. I did several there, and then I did quite a few pencil drawings. I kept my hand in. It's really funny how you can be surrounded by all this wonderful architecture, and I didn't even know it. I was in one base later in Italy, and I was only eight miles from Urbino, which is Raphael's birthplace, and to me it was just another hill town, another lousy Italian hill town. At that time, I didn't really take advantage of the opportunities. I got over to Florence a couple of times when I was in Italy. The war was pretty much over by that time, but everything was boarded up. There were no shops, and they had hidden away all the beautiful things. Seeing it in wartime is not the same thing at all. They were just empty towns. You wouldn't see people much or anything. Not like ruins. Some were ruins, of course, from shelling.

Blum: It's unfortunate your army experience seems to stand apart from what your focus had been up until that time.

94 Richardson: I was very much preoccupied with my work, which was a full-time operation. We had to get these planes ready for these missions. I can't say it was that demanding in terms of time, but I had to be there all the time. It was just a different world. By that time, I was married and my son was born. I didn't see my oldest until he was two-and-a-half years old. I was obviously preoccupied with writing to Prue and so on. Architecture just wasn't part of my life then, which is very interesting.

Blum: In 1945, you were released from the army and you returned to civilian life. Why did you go back to SOM? How did it happen?

Richardson: I had kept sort of in touch with them. When I got married, for example, Emily and Nat had been very generous, as I remember, with a gift. When I was overseas, she even sent me a little silver pencil with a scale on it and that sort of thing, although I didn't correspond with them directly. Of course, I was corresponding with Prue all the time. I had every intention, if I survived, of going back. To me, it was still a career place. When I left, I didn't leave willingly. I left because the war was here, and that was all you could do. Yes, it was more of a leave. So, I didn't have any hesitation about it. As soon as I got back, I still had my uniform on, and I guess I called up Nat and went in. I didn't even have a suit, I don't believe, at that time, except my army things. They were real busy right away. The first thing I worked on was a little Kimberly-Clark thing with Larry Smith, and then on the TWA ticket office.

Blum: When you came back to SOM, you say their office was busy. Who was there, what were the jobs, what was the atmosphere?

Richardson: They had grown, of course, tremendously during the war with the Oak Ridge thing. Then they had scaled down again. When I got back, we were up on the twentieth floor of the 100 West Monroe building. We had almost the whole top floor there, which wasn't a big office building at all. Sam Lewis was the famous mechanical engineer whom we used all the time for our mechanical work, incidentally, Frank Lloyd Wright did, too. I remember they were working on the Guggenheim [Museum of Art] in the office there at that time,

95 which was sort of fascinating for me because I got to see all the drawings. We just had the one floor there. There were about, I guess, twenty, twenty-five people maybe, total. It was larger than when I had gone away, but it had grown, of course, very large with the Oak Ridge operation.

Blum: What about the design department? Gordon was gone.

Richardson: Gordon was gone. He was still in New York. I think Nat wanted to get him out of there. The shift had changed. The man who was there who was sort of in charge of design was John King, who had joined Nat. He had come over from Holabird and Root. He was the husband of Howard Van Doren Shaw's daughter. John was very socially high up in the stream. I can't remember what his father did. But, anyway, I think he was a very wonderful gentleman and very handsome and lived in Lake Forest with this daughter. She was a very attractive person, too. I can't remember her first name.

Blum: Was she the sculptress?

Richardson: No, she was the sister of the sculptress, I'm pretty sure. I didn't know her that well. I knew John pretty well because he stayed there for a while and then finally went to the West Coast. He was pretty much in charge of design. Larry Smith, a friend that I've mentioned so many times, was there. He had been through the Oak Ridge experience, and he hadn't gone to service. He had some kind of disability. I don't know what it was. A Frenchman or Swiss by the name of Jack Selz, who later went with Al Shaw and then finally with Al Shaw's son. What's happened to Jack now? If he's alive, he's retired. I'm just trying to think who else was there. About the same week that I came in, Bill Priestley came in, and he was still in uniform. He hadn't worked with us before. This was his first taste with Nat. Bob Little came back. This was all within a month or two, or weeks anyway, of each other. The first thing that Nat did with me is he said, "Well, we need you right away." I said, "Well, I've been away from Prue for three years here." I was overseas three years. I said, "I've got to get acquainted with my family. I've got a little boy I've never seen," and all the rest of it. He said, "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you a

96 month's vacation with pay under one condition." That sounded pretty good to me. I said, "What condition?" He said, "That you start Monday." This being, I think, a Saturday. I fell for it! He was always very persuasive that way.

Blum: When did you take your month's vacation?

Richardson: I never got it. He gave me a check and that was it. I don't know how Prue responded to that, but, in any case, it helped us buy an old house out there. I was living in her mother and father's apartment for several months. I got started back right away. The first assignment I had was to help Larry Smith on this Kimberly-Clark thing. I've forgotten what it was. It was a factory of some sort. I inherited it. Actually Larry had done the basic design, really, in fairness to him, of the TWA ticket office, and Nat turned it over to me—not because he had anything against Larry. It was just that Larry was given another assignment. But nobody was really chief of design at that time.

Blum: In the article you wrote for Threshold magazine, you made a statement, and I would like to read it and have you comment. As you were released from the army and returned to civilian life, you said, "We were no longer the starry- eyed young designers who wanted to rebuild the world in the Corbusier, Mies mold. We did still seek that, tempered by the pragmatism born of an extraordinary, immediate need. The Depression was finally over. We no longer had time to philosophize. We only had time to get the job done." What was your attitude in coming back? What was the difference other than what you said?

Richardson: Obviously, whether we'd had terrible war experiences or rather mild ones such as mine, I think all of us had been tempered. We matured a lot. After all, at that time I was twenty-eight. But by that time, I had had responsibility for nearly four years for every single day for 150 lives, thirty airplanes valued at probably millions of dollars. As a consequence, I felt pretty qualified in terms of maturity and being an executive. I was no longer a starry-eyed kid. I had all of this experience, and I'd seen a certain amount of death and tragedy.

97 You just have a different attitude. I think all of us did. We felt, "Well, now we're grown up. We're no longer students. We've really got to get at it and get the job done of whatever has to be built." Everything was very underbuilt at that time. There was a really big boom coming on, and we knew that. We didn't have time. When I went down to Oak Ridge, which was somewhat later, admittedly, we didn't have time to do two schemes. You drew a scheme, and you built it. It was that urgent.

Blum: Beneath what you're saying, which was a very practical, pragmatic approach based on maturity and war experience and just general growth, was there a hope for your future in architecture? American architecture? Architecture for the world?

Richardson: I think so. Sure. I think we were still idealists. I don't think there's any problem about that. Don't forget the tremendous change in the acceptance of "contemporary" architecture since the time we had been students. When I was a student, a contemporary architect was kind of avant-garde. We were still doing a lot of the eclectic things. But by the time the war was over, in the mid-1940s, this was the accepted way to go, and admittedly most of us were going down the Mies track. Most of us thought, including Eero Saarinen, that that was the way to go. It wasn't a question of argument or anything with most of us. He had shown us a way that we thought was the sensible and logical way to design. You do it on a modular, sensible, structural system. No nonsense. This is a good way to do it, and so everything became boxes.

Blum: Was it just that it was a way that could be quickly designed and built and reproduced perhaps? Some people have spoken about the hero that Mies was in their eyes and how he was the focal point, or about a mission that they felt that they participated in with him as the symbol. Did you share in any of those feelings?

Richardson: Not to the same extent that George [Danforth] and Myron [Goldsmith] and the others did, I don't believe. I don't think I'm that type of person. I'm not

98 really a bandwagon type, but also, I think, had I had more experience with him, I might have been more indoctrinated. Now, mind you, I only had a year with him. Well, I knew him personally after I graduated. I introduced him to Gordon, for example, and that sort of thing, and the three of us would have lunch together. I always felt very friendly, but in spite of what he said about me later, I never felt the same kind of conviction that, for example, Bill Priestley had about him. Bill Priestley was a real disciple. He would commute to Lake Forest. He really liked the stock market pages, and he'd use those all the way home. I said, "You use them on the way home?" He said, "Yes, they're very modular and I can do my schemes on the stock market page."

Blum: That's interesting. I wonder if any of those have survived.

Richardson: I don't know. Maybe. What's happened to Bill? Is he still around? He is? I was crazy about him. I haven't seen him for God knows how many years. You were mentioning the disciple business, and as you can see from my work on my own, I was obviously strongly influenced by Mies. Even the very eclectic-looking Indianapolis Museum of Art is very Miesian in its modular design—everything on the module and everything on the basic structural bay. It's all organized in that way, even though it reflects the eclectic columns and all the rest of it.

Blum: Your work does reflect that, and I wondered if beneath, the more obvious level, there was this really spiritual admiration?

Richardson: Oh, yes. There was. It was definitely there. I just don't think it was the same. I didn't feel like this was a new crusade or anything of that sort. When I was at Skidmore, most of our work was very strongly in that direction. Gordon was strongly influenced in that direction, too.

Blum: Yes. That's very curious because there was a book written about SOM—I think it was the first book that was officially commissioned by SOM, and I think it was SOM 1950 to 1963—that recaps their early history and the

99 achievements of those years. I somehow felt in reading it that there was a very, very strong undercurrent of trying to assert that SOM's work was stronger than Mies's. I felt that at every opportunity there were statements that attempted to prove how limited Mies was and how much more versatile and broader SOM was in their concept. That they drew their inspiration from not only Mies, but from Corbusier and Gropius and other masters in the field at that time. Did you ever have a sense, working on a day-to-day basis, that there was some sort of need to prove yourself better than Mies or to compete with Mies? I felt it, but I'm not clear about what it was.

Richardson: From 1950 to 1963 was after my time at SOM. I imagine—and this is, of course, speculation—that this came out of Gordon, unless you were referring to the Chicago office. Gordon was very influenced by Mies, but he was strongly influenced by Corbusier. He was the one I alluded to yesterday. We really got involved with the Corbusier books when Gordon came. There was a wonderful bookstore called Paul Theobald and Company right around the corner. Gordon spent a lot of money, and all of us spent a lot of time. Bob Little, too. But all of us spent a lot of time in Paul Theobald's bookstore. We knew him and his wife and so forth. They were publishers as well as booksellers. We had all the Corbusier books available, and we knew them by heart. Mies hadn't published much at that time at all. But, of course, we knew his work firsthand, you might say. I think it was a deliberate feeling—not to try to find one great trend or movement or anything, and that was Gordon all over. Let's take the best of everything and come out with something. I remember years later talking to one of his classmates at MIT. He said, "Gordon was the kind of guy that would walk around"—and I can just see him—"and look at everybody else's scheme. He didn't necessarily steal your scheme, but he stole the best of every scheme." When I say "stole, " I use his words. "He stole the best of every scheme, and then he'd put it together and win the prize." Gordon had this wonderful knack for sifting out. I remember talking one time. We were walking down Michigan Avenue together, and they had just put a nice model of 860 [Lake Shore Drive] in one of the show windows there—People's Gas building or something, I can't remember where—and I remember stopping there and looking at it. By this time the

100 Promontory Apartments, the concrete apartments out at Fifty-sixth and South Shore Drive had been built. I remember Gordon looking at it. At that time, he hardly knew Mies. We'd talked to him and we'd met and so forth, but not much. He looked at 860 and he said, "Boy, he certainly is more at home in steel than he is in concrete, isn't he?" He could immediately say, "Well, okay, let's take that of Mies and we'll take that of Corbusier." I'd always thought Corbusier, first of all, was a big idea man, and Mies was in his way, too. But I always thought of Corbusier working three-dimensionally in section and Mies always worked in plan. He never did a building that wasn't just a planar thing. Sure, he had 860, but it's just a series of planes. He never did this other thing.

Blum: Three-dimensional?

Richardson: Three-dimensional thing where it's in section, and these spaces flow this way vertically, as well as horizontally. He was confined to horizontal space. I think I felt this great lack, and I'm sure Gordon and the others did whether they said it directly or indirectly. They felt that they wanted to transcend that. When I was a student, I said to Mies, "The only curves I've seen you use are in those projects of the curve in glass, and then you use it in the Tugendhat house around the circular table." He said, "When I've learned to control the rectangle, then perhaps I'll go into a curve." He may have wanted to, but he was satisfied to say, "This is a plane, and I'm working within the plane." Even in his large structures, it's always one floor. Even in the Crown Hall, it's really one floor. You get down in the basement, you'd never know it was Mies. That's just a hodgepodge of stuff.

Blum: It's very interesting to hear you explain it in that way because on the surface it just looks like an attitude of competition when, in fact, SOM really wanted to assert their own strengths.

Richardson: I've never followed it up systematically or anything, but certainly I felt that Mies—just as [Marcel] Breuer expressed to me—Mies is a jumping-off place. I mean, it's a good running start. I think Mies felt a little bit like this, too. I

101 think that's what [Helmut] Jahn and [Gene] Summers and maybe Reg Malcolmson felt—that they were going to take it a step further. Mies once gave me one of the best quotes I ever heard. For two or three years there, five years, maybe, when I was teaching graduate work, I trekked up to meet Mies with my graduate students every year, and he was always very generous about it. He would show us around, and he'd talk to my students a little bit, which was a great thrill for them. I remember one time I was very concerned because 860 was built, and, quite obviously, the glass on the west was a terrible mistake. When I say mistake, I mean mechanically it just doesn't work. So, I was teasing Mies a little bit, and I said, "How can you justify this glass on the west, when it's obviously creating a lot of heat problems and so forth?" He looked at me and said, "Well, Richardson, it's my generation to state the principles, it's your generation to work them out." It was a perfect answer. I haven't done it at all because I got sidetracked in other directions and all the rest of it. There are people who, whether consciously or subliminally, are really feeling that they're taking this movement—if you want to call it that—one step further and maybe creating their own movement. I don't know whether Cesar Pelli's doing that. Helmut Jahn comes to mind. I'm not that much of an admirer of Jahn personally. I do admire some of his work, by the way. I don't know him that well. In my few contacts, he's been kind of aloof and unfriendly to me anyway. He's sort of pompous and conceited, so I just haven't responded to him. You kind of wonder what Mies would be saying about these former students. Cesar wasn't a former student, but at least he was a student vicariously through me, to some extent. I kind of feel that they are. To me, they are sort of the next step along the way. I didn't go that direction because first of all, I wasn't that strong a disciple, and, secondly, I felt that my forte was in ideas, and I expressed them in a different way. I said there's a lot of Mies in my eclectic art museum in Indianapolis. But I don't think anybody except the director and I—the then director, he's passed away—knew how Miesian it was. He wrote up in the book that I was one of Mies's first students, and the building was really based on Miesian principles. But I don't think that was taking Mies's principles any further, just because I brought it back to a kind of classic expression.

102 Blum: You did talk about transmitting those principles somehow through your teaching.

Richardson: I did very definitely through my teaching. I got so intrigued, at least for a while there, with looking for new structure and really inventive structure, feeling that the future is going to need a lot more than just another forest of high-rise buildings. To me, these are all very ingenious. I saw that latest Inland Architect that had all the high-rises that are projected and so on. They are all very interesting and they all have silhouettes and one's higher than another and finally the needle of Cesar's and all this stuff. But you get all through with it, and it really hasn't solved anything. There's no new trend. There's no new enclosure of space. There's no new moral or social contribution to a better way of life. It hasn't helped the ghetto any. It hasn't helped the city any. It's obviously made a lot of architects very affluent. When you get $300 million—I saw Secretary of State [James] Baker yesterday. One of the things they're asking for now is $320 million to replace the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. That's a Skidmore job, or it was. I have no doubt they're going to rebuild it for $320 million. You get these kind of fees, and you're obviously going to feel pretty cocky. And, my God! I can hardly conceive a $300-million building. I can conceive of a $300-million community. I know it will be.

Blum: It will be a compound.

Richardson: But getting back to my point, it seems to me that we ought to be thinking, for the next half century anyway, on a much broader, basic research scale in the profession for a better community life, for better ways for people to live. Hell, it's disgraceful! Everybody says, "Well, we need more housing, we need more housing, we need more housing." What are we going to do? Go back and build them just like we did in the 1940s and make that horrible mistake again? It isn't just the question of putting money in to get more housing. It's going to be how are we going to do it. Let's think of some new things beside a goddamn dumb high-rise building, which obviously hasn't worked.

103 Blum: Before the 1940s, that was the most current and best solution to the problem.

Richardson: I was one of the guilty ones.

Blum: I don't know that there should be guilt or pride, but it seemed to be the right solution for the problem at the time.

Richardson: We were basically on the old Corbusier thing.

Blum: Do you have Lake Meadows in mind?

Richardson: Oh, yes, and even probably the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority]. What I thought, and what Harry and I think that all of us at that time thought, was that we were going to have this park-like atmosphere with these beautiful high-rise things with great views of Lake Michigan and across the green and all that. We took these doggone pictures of Hilberseimer and Corbusier seriously. We thought it was going to happen. We arranged the thing so that we'd have these wonderful high things coming up. It would be like Sweden, and the kids would be running around and having a great time. We'd have playgrounds and all the rest of it.

Blum: Was that your big idea?

Richardson: Well, that was our ideal. It wasn't really a new idea. It was just that idealistic point of view. What happened, of course, is as soon as we put up one of those high-rises, the politicians take a look and say, "Hey, there's a little empty land right next door here. Let's put up another one." So when we did, we lost the point completely. It was the same principle. We could control that. That was a private thing, and it was agreed that they were going to have so much land, and our floor area ratio was not going to be so high so we couldn't maintain that park-like atmosphere.

104 Blum: But what happened? It wasn't built as you planned. What actually took place to change things?

Richardson: I had gone by that time, for one thing, and the project was inherited by Chuck Wiley. I'm pretty sure, because he inherited most of my work. In retrospect, I think it all happened very much for the best. I was terribly disappointed. I remember I was up in for some reason in Chicago…

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Richardson: …and had lunch with Nat or somebody certainly who was familiar with the project, and they told me at that time. Although I was then teaching down at the University of Illinois, I was still very active in Chicago, and I was very disappointed when I heard that they had changed the scheme. In fact, I was really very emotionally upset about it because I'd thought about it for so long and it had been published and I'd had so many comments. I remember when I was presenting it before the city council in Chicago—I can't remember what alderman it was. It seems to me it was Pucinski, but maybe it was a different person. And he said, "The only good thing about this design is that if one of these long buildings falls over, it won't hit the other one because they're so far apart." So, it was a very controversial design. I remember showing it to Hilberseimer, the great urban planner cohort of Mies. He made some comment about it being too big. In retrospect, I think they were all absolutely right. Not the alderman, particularly, but I think the others were right. When it was published, Nat Owings referred to it as "sidewalks in the sky." I think the New York Life people were very excited about it; everybody was. It was going to be kind of a multistory row house, in effect, with this gallery scheme along the north and looking out, not across the lake. I was very positive about that, because looking out across the lake is one thing, but looking up and down the lake is a much more interesting view. That's why the plan arranged these buildings directly the way they were, going east and west and looking up and down the lake. That was the reason for that rather rigid design. Also, I didn't need to stagger them, because they were far enough apart to create a very controlled interior space and yet be able to see the lake

105 from each side. I know Gordon and I argued about it. He knew it was my design but he wanted to know whether I shouldn't have slanted the two buildings more to orient them more toward the southeast and look down that way. I finally convinced him that it was a stronger design the way it was, and he agreed with me. By that time, I was no longer his stooge, but more of a colleague, and he respected me. I was by that time chief of design in Chicago. Nat Owings started calling me his design coordinator, and then he finally elevated the title to chief of design.

Blum: So Gordon was chief of design in New York and you were in Chicago?

Richardson: Yes. Actually, I didn't achieve this distinction until three years after I got back. We really didn't have a chief of design until Nat designated me as chief of design. First he just made me design coordinator. In other words, I was responsible for assignments and so on, but not for actually looking over the junior designer's shoulder and directing him.

Blum: So you came back to SOM in 1945, and it wasn't until 1948 that you were made chief of design?

Richardson: Yes. It might have been even 1949. I can't remember.

Blum: Just fill in for a minute how New York Life came to underwrite this first large project that Chicago had undertaken, which was what I'm calling urban renewal.

Richardson: It was.

Blum: I'm not sure if that's really a current term.

Richardson: It was not only the first large project for Chicago, it was the first one in the country. It was called Redevelopment Project Number One. They had gotten into the housing business a little bit earlier. They had had a private development at Flushing Meadows in New York. I don't remember the name

106 of it now, but it was something Meadows, too. That was not done on the government. Now, the whole theory of urban development was that the government could condemn the land and buildings and then pay the current tenants for that land. And then in turn, they could sell it to a private developer. They thought at the time at least that they would kill two or three birds with one stone. One, they would get rid of the slum areas, which is what it was primarily designed for, and then they would turn it over to a private developer, namely New York Life. SOM was hired by New York Life as the architects. We weren't part of the development process at all. At that time, it was very experimental. This was the first time it had happened.

Blum: The city Plan Commission was involved, and Nat Owings was on the Plan Commission.

Richardson: He was chairman of the Plan Commission at that time.

Blum: There was a lot of flack at that time. What was that all about?

Richardson: There was. Go back a minute. The first place, the newspapers felt it was a very direct conflict of interest because the chairman of the Plan Commission, Owings, was a paid or retained architect of the New York Life people. They wanted to close a major street, namely Cottage Grove Avenue, which was one of the main arterials serving the South Side down to the Loop. This wasn't on the part of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill so much as on the part of New York Life, with the property that had been selected for this redevelopment project. Cottage Grove Avenue, this main artery, was slicing it almost diagonally in two. So, it was really two neighborhoods, and the whole purpose was to make it one neighborhood. So, Nat, one way or the other—I'm not sure of the details—used his influence—or at least that's what the newspapers claimed—as chairman of the Plan Commission to close this major thoroughfare. As a consequence, everybody was up in arms. But there were a lot of other problems, reasons why we had to go before the city council and everything. There was a tremendous problem of displacement of families. It wasn't necessarily a slum area. A lot of it was like some of the

107 West Side where there were well-kept neighborhood homes and communities. These people had been living there for years and years and years. When they were told to move out and be displaced, many had no place to go. The replacement problem was really something. There was a controversy because obviously we were displacing these poorer people who had been really maintaining a good neighborhood. It wasn't really a slum—at least this was the argument—and we were replacing it with these comparatively well-to-do, in other words, moderate-income or even middle- income families, who would live in this fancy, new development. So, it was a really controversial political thing and moral thing. When I was appearing before the city council, which I had to do to justify my design, they called me a murderer. These people got up and called me a murderer.

Blum: In the city council?

Richardson: In the city council. Well, what had happened was that, in some cases, the people wouldn't get out of their places, and the city turned off their water and their utilities and everything. They could have frozen them to death or anything like that. Well, they blamed that, of course, on the architects. Like anything in a lawsuit or anything else, everybody's involved. I was representing the design, and I was obviously representing the "enemy, " and Nat was representing the enemy, and they felt that it was a conflict of interest, mainly. I know he was tremendously upset about it. I think that that's probably one of the main reasons he went to San Francisco. We'd started that office out there, but we had Jack Rodgers and Jack King out there running it, and he hadn't really taken over. I think there probably were other reasons, because, number one, he wasn't really that fond of Chicago, and number two, I think he felt there was a growing office out there and they needed him to promote it. So I think there were several reasons, but I certainly think this problem with the New York Life project and the Plan Commission was one of them.

Blum: He did resign from the Plan Commission. He declared himself very much on the side of the builder of this project.

108 Richardson: Yes. He resigned. But it was really kind of a shame because he had been a very active and, I think, a very able director or chairman. I know this was a different mayor. It was Mayor Kennelly at that time. We were all, of course, very upset about it.

Blum: Nat’s departure or his resignation?

Richardson: About the fact that he was put in this position. Probably, in retrospect, as soon as he accepted the commission for New York Life, he probably should have resigned and then avoided this instead of being put in a position of conflict of interest. I don't think he got the proper advice, whomever he was asking. I don't know whether he was asking his lawyers or what.

Blum: Could it have been his own ambition that made him stay on the Plan Commission at the same time there seemed to be a clear conflict of interest?

Richardson: There could be, because I think he really enjoyed the position, the authority of it, and I think he really enjoyed the planning. I think even his career right up into those last few years of life was very much involved in planning—not only the Pennsylvania Avenue project in Washington, but in Baltimore and other things much after my time. I know when I saw him in Washington a few years ago, he was still actively engaged in that Pennsylvania Avenue thing, which he wrote about in his book.

Blum: One of the things he did write about in his book about the Lake Meadows project was that the real problems beneath it all were slum landlords not wanting to give up the revenue from the old dilapidated houses, and, therefore, they resisted any development of the area. Was there any truth to that?

Richardson: I think that's no doubt true. I think that some of it's true, at least in my little experience with it. He had a lot more because he was on the firing line all the time, and I was just the designer. The problem I saw was kind of like the

109 [University of Illinois] Chicago Circle Campus. They had a lot of problem with replacement there. It displaced an awful lot of people. Mayor [Richard J.] Daley just shoved it through. Whether that's right or not, it's a real problem. The Comiskey Park thing is a little that way and the West Side arena thing now, but not to the extent of the number of families we were displacing, and we were building back housing, which was admittedly housing these people couldn't afford. If we were building back something that they could afford, that's one thing. You could justify it and say, "Well, this is replacement." The displacement is temporary, and then they're going to move back in. I don't think it could ever have been justified that this was going to be on the same-rent basis. Now, it wasn't really expensive like Lake Shore Drive but because New York Life had this subsidy, they got this land for virtually nothing thanks to the government. I think they sold it for a pittance of what they paid for it. It was a good deal for New York Life. But New York Life, by that time, had been in the housing business quite a while, not only with the office thing. As a matter of fact, they asked me to do a design—this was before the New York Life Lake Meadows project—for a proposal for a faculty apartment complex out at the University of Chicago. I worked on the design out in SOM's New York office. I went out there to work on it so I could communicate with Jack Gurney and General Nelson—General Nelson being the vice-president in charge of building development and Gurney being the New York Life architect. I went out to New York to work on it with Gordon looking over my shoulder. This was some time before the New York Life project, Lake Meadows. Anyway, I did the design there and I came back. That's when I first got really acquainted with Jack Gurney and General Nelson. I got to be pretty good friends with them because I came back on the train with them, and we had supper together and so on. It was very pleasant. I had met them several times in the office, of course, and with Gordon. I have to digress here a little bit and tell you a very funny story about that, because Gordon had met Gurney and General Nelson very briefly, as I had. We were going to have a presentation of these plans, these sketches, that I had in SOM's New York office. At that time, it was still the original 5 East 57th building, which is where they had started. We were in the conference room, which was not that fancy a place. They came in and they

110 looked at the drawings and everything was fine. Gordon was going out of the conference room, and he tried to open the door and the door was stuck. Here's the door to the conference room of the architect stuck! He put his foot up on the door. He stood on one foot and put his other foot up on the wall to get leverage to open the door, and as he did so, he turned around to Gurney and Nelson and said, "We do a better job for our clients." I've never forgotten the incident.

Blum: He could think on his feet.

Richardson: He had that kind of a sense of humor. It was funny. It was a good experience for me, too, because with that project I got acquainted with the people in the New York office, which had grown again, too. I've forgotten how many there were then. Maybe thirty, forty. They were busy again. It got me acquainted with the New York partners. I think I stayed in the Algonquin Hotel, maybe. I don't know. I got to get a little bit more acquainted with New York. I'd been there a few times in my early days. Nat had sent me out there to look at department stores at one time very early before the war, but I really didn't know New York City. But this gave me a little bit of chance to get acquainted, as I said. That happened before Lake Meadows. Lake Meadows came a little bit after that. We didn't get the job, by the way, at the University of Chicago. I think Philip Maher, as I remember, got that job. It was a competition really, but for some reason, they liked the scheme he had better. I don't know what the reason was. Maybe we submitted our design too late. New York Life didn't finance it, in other words. It was one of those deals where they hired the architect, and we submitted it to the university. That was one of the first times we had ever been exposed to that. We were paid, of course, but New York Life was taking the chance. Somebody else had hired Philip Maher, and the university apparently liked his scheme better, so we didn't get it. It was wonderful for me because, I think, in effect, Jack Gurney and the General liked me as a young designer so much, personally. I think they kind of indicated to Nat that they wanted me to work on the Lake Meadows project when we got it. So, that's why I was in charge of design on it. I'm pretty sure they asked for me.

111 Blum: When the Lake Meadows project came in, and you were presented with this problem to design housing units for x number of families, how did the design you finally came up with—which was these two very large, sleek, slab buildings with outside walkways set in this large green area—evolve for you? How did you arrive at this concept?

Richardson: It's an interesting story. We'd gotten the job, and we'd been doing some site studies and site models. We did a lot of alternative schemes. We had a system at that time—they still may use it in some places—where we would cut blocks in a little model shop. Ferd Kramer of Draper and Kramer was advising the New York Life people all the time. He was really very much a part of the team and telling them of the feasibility. He was—if you want to call it—the "dean" of housing really, and still is in his way as a much, much older man. But they relied on him, I think, for all the feasibility, you know, of what the rents could be, how many people should be there, and so forth. Of course, it all had to fit within the ordinances of the city of Chicago as well. The program was pretty, well set for us. The alternatives were whether we should have a combination of high-rise and low-rise buildings or whether we should have all high-rise. We made quite a few schemes. In the meantime, I had done some housing plans and so on, but I was certainly by no means an expert. How Nat Owings sold Jack Gurney and General Nelson in the first place on our doing a housing project is unclear, because I don't believe we had done any significant housing projects at that time. I could be wrong. I just don't remember. I know we had done some studies for other people. In any case, he did, and they were convinced we were the firm to do it. Part of it may have been this little experience we had with the University of Chicago before, because we had very pleasant relationships. But I remember very well that it was a Thursday afternoon. This is the drama of working with a guy like Nat. No, it was an early Friday morning. He was in New York, and he called me up and said, "Rich, this is Nat Owings. Skid and I saw Jack Gurney and he's going to Europe to look at housing for three weeks." He had married a French woman. He said, "I want you to go over there and look at everything he's going to see. I want you to see it before he does. Here's what I

112 want you to do. I want you to go, " and he named off about five countries. He said, "I want you to be there by next Tuesday and be back at least a day before Jack Gurney gets back." I'm paraphrasing a little bit. It seems that the night before he and Skid had gotten this big Ford Motor Company building, which I think was in that MoMA [Museum of Modern Art] thing, and no doubt they were celebrating. I'm sure they were, because Skid liked to celebrate just as much as Nat did, as far as I could see. I think they whooped it up the night before and decided this would be a hell of a lot of fun to send Rich over. It would be good for him, and it would scoop Jack Gurney. Well, of course, calling me on Thursday and wanting me over there Tuesday was kind of fast. I said, "I don't even have a passport." Well, of course, I didn't know anything. I didn't have a passport. I immediately went over to the American Express office. I was given carte blanche in drawing express checks and so forth. I don't know how much I drew, but Owings said, "Spare no expense" and I took him at his word. So, I went over to the express office and got a bunch of express checks—I think, maybe $1, 000 worth, I don't know—on the firm. I said, "How can I get a passport?" It so happened that my friend, Jack Selz, the Swiss, knew people all over the country. He said, "I know a man in the Washington office of the passport office in the state department, and maybe we could expedite it." So he called him, and he said, "Yes, I think I can expedite it if he can get a photograph made. I can get him a passport. If he comes to Washington, I could get it for him by Monday." I got a reservation on Pan American on one of those Stratoliners, and I got a reservation for Tuesday morning that would get me over to London. I don't think I made it by Tuesday, but it was that hurry-up. I went down to Washington over the weekend and bumped into some old army friends who lived there. Then I went to the secretary of state the next morning, and I got my passport. That afternoon I went on up to New York, and Skid wanted to brief me over dinner with him and Eloise. I went to their house for dinner. He told me, among other things, that he wanted me to go to Denmark and see some young architect friends of his who had been introduced to him by Howard Myers, who was the famous editor of Architectural Forum. They had visited in New York, and he was very fond of him. So, that gave me one entree. He didn't give me any specifics on anything else. He said, "Nat and I

113 just want to leave it up to you. Cover as much territory as you can." I said, "Well, I've got my bookings to London, " and I wanted to see the Scandinavian architecture because I still was very interested in its development. They had done more in housing. I had booked myself to Denmark, and I booked myself to Sweden. Then back to Holland and back to London and back home to make it one day before Jack Gurney got back. I did all this pretty much over the weekend, trying to figure out how to go. It was a fantastic trip. I was terribly frightened of flying at that time because of my war experiences when I had to fly test flights a great deal with the engineering thing. I never went up in an airplane unless something was wrong with it, so I was very apprehensive. It was a great big double deck bus, really, that Stratocruiser, and it had a bar on the lower level. I think I spent most of my time down there going over. Anyway, we stopped off at Gander [Canada], and then we stopped off in Ireland. I'll never forget, we were running into Ireland having an Irish whiskey when we got in in the morning. I wasn't the only one. Everybody did over in Ireland. "Let's get an Irish whiskey." Anyway, I ended up in London, and I couldn't get a hotel room. I didn't know quite what to do, and the Pan American people said, "If you don't mind, we can get you a room out in Sussex in a wonderful old hotel that used to be an estate." So, I said, "That sounds fine to me." They arranged for me to have a limousine, and the driver drove me out there. It was very expensive but, of course, I was loaded with money. I went out there, and here was this magnificent estate. They had a room in the annex, but they didn't have room in the estate itself. There was a golf course and everything. It was a marvelous old Tudor mansion. They said, "You can stay in the annex, which is just across the way." It turns out that the annex was the ancestral hall of Anne Boleyn's family. I went in there and, of course, they had this grand fireplace and all the rest of it. While I was there, I suddenly heard all these bells ringing in a small nearby church. Having read the Nine Tailors, I figured out they were change ringing. By this time I'd had supper in this wonderful old house, not the ancestral home of the Boleyns. So, I asked the maid, "Is that change ringing?" She was very surprised to know that I knew anything about it. She said, "Yes. I'll tell you what. I'm going to be off work in just a few minutes, and it's right on my way home. I'll take you down

114 the lane and you can watch them changing." That sounded pretty exciting. She was very nice about it. I walked down the lane and, sure enough, here are all these people on these bell ropes. The vicar was there. They were all different lengths of ropes, and there were young people, old people. It was kind of a club, and they'd have this kind of score like a music score, and they'd ring the bells and then let the thing go and it would go up and down. They asked me if I would like to try it. I said, "Oh, sure, I'll try it." I had some fun ringing the bells. In the meantime, I was booked to leave the next day to go to Denmark. Again, I took a limousine and took off for Denmark. I stayed in Denmark, and the first thing I did was look up Hjorth Andersen, who was this young local architect whom Skidmore had told me about. Sure enough, I found him home, and he and his wife took me in completely and became my guides. I stayed at one of the newer hotels at that time. In the meantime, they invited me up to their place in Jutland for the weekend. They showed me all the architecture, all the housing. They introduced me to the other architects. You see that little zebra up there? That was done by the famous Kay Bojeson, the sculptor. They took me to his shop, and that's where I got the zebra. I got some other things, a lot of artifacts. Of course, there were beautiful things there in Denmark at that time, even though it was after the war and the scarcity was fierce. Of course, the hotels where I was staying had everything, and it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. Then I decided I had to go up to Sweden, and I caught a plane up there. The weather was terrible. I remember I was terrified again, but this is an English pilot. I was flying British European Airways, and I asked him about it. Of course, I knew enough about airplanes so that the pilots would let me ride up front. I asked him about it, and he said, "Well, I think we can worry it through." That didn't help me much. Anyway, we did get into Stockholm where I had a reservation. That's when I went to the HSB, which at that time was the local housing—I think it's probably comparable to our FHA [Federal Housing Authority] or whatever—but they were the authorities on all the housing. I told them who I was. They gave me a guide, a young woman architect. They gave her a car, and for a couple of days I saw everything in Stockholm and the whole area—all the housing, went inside everything. They gave me all the plans to everything. They just opened up the whole thing for me. They

115 took me to lunch. In the meantime, they introduced me to several architects there, who just took me in. I met some young Americans. Of course, it was great to hear somebody from home. They knew who I was or they knew about Skidmore and Owings, and they were very impressed to have me there. They wanted to show me around, too. They were really students. Well, they had finished up but they were American students, and they were working for Swedish offices. That was a marvelous experience, and I got to see all that housing. In the meantime, I was taking pictures of everything.

Blum: Had you done the same sort of research in London and Denmark?

Richardson: I didn't have a chance that way, but going back I stopped. Then I went to Holland. In Holland I stayed in the Amstel Hotel, the old traditional hotel. That was very interesting because I didn't know how to get around, so again, I hired a chauffeur and a guide and a car. I think it was fifty dollars a day, which was astronomical at that time. But I got to see all of Holland in two days. In the meantime, the first night, which was fascinating, I came back to the hotel and was having a cocktail. The cocktail lounges there, you know, like the old hotels, are more like a lounge, more like a club. There are no booths or anything. You sit around a cocktail table. I was sitting there all alone, and all of a sudden I saw this familiar-looking older man with another older man and a young man come in and sit down across the way. I recognized him immediately as Sinclair Lewis, the writer, and he was quite old at that time. He had a very pockmarked face and so on. I had read in the newspaper that he was going to be there, and he was making a speech over at The Hague the next day. I was a young brash guy as usual, and I went over and introduced myself. He said, "Sit down." He was drinking wine at that time. He wasn't drinking anything else. So I said I'd have a cocktail. It turns out the older man was his older brother, who had never been to Europe before, and the young man was a reporter. The young man left after a few minutes, and by this time, Lewis knew that I was interested in reading and that I was a young architect and so forth. He said, "Everyone's referred to me as Red Lewis, but all my friends call me Hal. I want you to refer to me on that kind of basis and how about dinner together?" I said, "It sounds wonderful to

116 me." He said, "Do you have any particular place you'd like to go?" I'd read Fielding's guidebook, and he recommended a new restaurant called the Five Flies. I called the Five Flies, or had the maitre d' call and see if we could get a. reservation and told him who it was. We went over there and, of course, they welcomed me and the celebrity with open arms. We were treated like royalty there that night. They made a plaque to put on the back of his chair so they could have that as a memoir. The upshot of it was that his older brother went to bed, and he and I sat and chatted about books and things we read and about his books and characters and architecture and everything until, I suppose, about two-thirty in the morning. It was a wonderful experience for me, and one that I'll never forget. So the next day, I wanted to see [Willem M.] Dudok's work and a lot of those things. In the meantime, he called me fairly early in the morning and he said, "I enjoyed the evening so much, Richie. I wonder if you could have dinner with me tonight, and I'll choose the place?" I said, "Well, of course. I'd just be delighted." In the meantime, I rented this car again, saw Dudok's work, had this marvelous day in Holland, and then again went to dinner with Lewis and his brother. I've forgotten where we went that night because he chose the place. He told me all about his early life, and he told me about his marriage, and he told me about his brother. Again, we sat up until early morning or early hours talking. He was leaving the next day. He was going on down to Italy. He died that year. But he did finish up his last novel, which was not a very good one. It was about a young architect traveling in Europe.

Blum: Had he started that before he met you?

Richardson: I don't know. But I figured out he was doing his own research while we were having fun. I enjoyed him thoroughly. He was a very pleasant man. He seemed to enjoy my company. He asked me if I wrote, and I said, "I've not done any serious writing. I've thought about it at times." He said, "Well, if you do, I probably won't read it, but all you have to do is send it to Bennett Cerf at Random House and tell him I said to publish it." I never followed up on it. It was a wonderful two evenings. These things stand out. It was all because of this interesting trip. To follow up that story, I saw everything I

117 wanted to see in Scandinavia or could see in the time. The time was growing short. Nat wanted me to cover Europe, but I couldn't do that. I hadn't done London and, of course, they were doing a lot of planning and doing a lot of new things in London. I went back, and I loved that country place so much—I think it was called Seldstondowns—I decided to just go back there instead of trying to book myself in a downtown hotel in spite of the fact it was out in the country. So, I just went back there, and I've forgotten how I commuted in to see the city and all the bomb damage and so on. I saw as much housing as they were doing, but I didn't get to talk to any of the town officials or anything as I had in the other places. So, it wasn't quite as satisfactory. I used up most of my London time, frankly, writing up my notes and getting my slides together to show to Nat when I got back.

Blum: You said you saw Dudok's work.

Richardson: Are you familiar with Willem Dudok? He wasn't an Internationalist, but he was a contemporary of those guys. He was like [J.J.P.] Oud in Holland except that he was more influenced by Wright. The Dutch were some of the first ones to pick up on the Wright theme, and Dudok was extremely expressive. I would compare his work to Eliel Saarinen's work, maybe—perfectly magnificent brickwork, and the prime examples that I saw were at Hilversum. Prue and I are going to be over to Europe in April, and I'm hopeful that we're going to be able to pick up on that. Later on, by the way, when Dudok came to this country, I had the privilege of taking him to dinner and spending the evening with him down at the University of Illinois. Again, it was a perfectly delightful experience. I remember he gave this talk at Illinois. He spoke English very well. He said, "One of the first things I wanted to do when I came to this country was to see Frank Lloyd Wright's work. I was always very impressed with that Unitarian church in Shorewood Hills [Wisconsin]. I've just come from there, and I must confess that it just looks like an angry fish." You know, it's got this big prow sticking up. But he was very amusing and, of course, his work to me was perfectly beautiful. It's just timeless. It's so good.

118 Blum: If I recall the work you're talking about, it's in brick.

Richardson: There's a city hall. It's all brick.

Blum: And sort of intimate, small dimensions.

Richardson: Well, their city hall is fairly large. It's not huge.

Blum: No, I'm talking about the space but rather my impression of the concept. Was there anything from such a structure that you were able to take away with you and incorporate into your thinking as you integrated all of these ideas?

Richardson: No. I was over there specifically to see housing. Of course, that was the goal. The goal was to scoop Jack Gurney. But obviously while I was there and having known about Dudok's work and having heard Mies refer to Oud and these other Dutch people, I wanted to see what I could in that short time, and I was able to see quite a bit that Dudok had done.

Blum: What did you see in Europe that perhaps, influenced your thinking in some new ways?

Richardson: I was most impressed, I think, in the housing thing, with the things in Stockholm—the star houses, the ingenious systems that they had. Subsequently, Prue and I have been there and seen more contemporary things. But at that time, these were classic examples of point houses, as they called them, and these towers, these high-rises. They were ingenious plans and very attractive and on a very domestic scale, I think. I got a lot out of the housing in Denmark, too, but that was all low-rise. In Holland, they say they can't build high-rises because the land won't support them. You just can't do it. But I don't know. My biggest impression was the housing in Stockholm, Sweden. Curiously enough, it really didn't affect my thinking on the design of the New York Life project much at all.

Blum: Did you have an idea in mind before you went?

119 Richardson: I don't know. I suppose so because at that time, the whole idea of the single- loaded corridor was catching on, the gallery scheme, and so forth. I think Rapson had done one, maybe. I don't know. It strikes me. I've forgotten now. It seems to me he had done one at MIT or something. I can't remember where. In other words, it was not a unique idea. The idea was, of course, that you didn't have that dismal central corridor, and you could orient everything to the south, which is what we preferred to do. I had the bold scales simply because it seemed to me we could concentrate this thing into a minimum number of towers and open up the space. My original scheme, for security reasons, had the whole thing elevated. The whole garden would be elevated about twelve feet so that people couldn't climb over that wall or just run. In other words, it was kind of like the idea of the garden at Lake Point Tower. It was up above so that you had a control. In that neighborhood, I thought, well, control would be good.

Blum: So, it's like a little platform?

Richardson: Yes. It was a big plaza idea. They didn't think that was very friendly and also expensive. It wasn't. You were kind of shutting yourself out from the world, and for public relations purposes they said, "No, we want to open up this park. We're going to do this park, but we're going to open it up." Going back to your original question, how did the scheme come about, I was just trying to view the lake, the orientation, and the gallery scheme and the biggest amount of open space. These are supposed to be 800 feet long. Everyone was enthusiastic and thought it was great and dramatic. But the more people thought about it, they thought, "Gee, this 800 feet of corridor is going to be constricted, and it's probably going to be terrifying." In retrospect, I think it would have been.

Blum: You had it broken up into elevator banks.

Richardson: We did have it in banks, but even so, it was a long stretch. We worried about how to get the snow off. It was outdoors, and we wanted it screened for

120 security and safety, but we also had figured out how to get the snow off. We went through extensive discussions with Jack Gurney and all the others before they really approved the plan, and they did approve that scheme. That's why it was published and then the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and everything else. That's why, again, I was terribly disappointed when they decided to modify the scheme.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Richardson: They went back to a shorter building using the same basic arrangements of apartment units but using a double-loaded corridor, which allowed one bank of apartments to look out to the south and one to look out to the north. It was arranged for four buildings rather than the two long buildings, but at least the parallel arrangement was basically the same, so that they could get the north view of the lake and the south view of the lake.

Blum: Why do you think that change was made?

Richardson: I don't know all the details, but I assume that along the line people began to think about the long corridor and the long building in the serious terms that I mentioned. There were probably some wind-loading problems. As I say, I wasn't there so I don't know all of the details. But as I've said several times in retrospect, I think it was probably in the long run a move for the better, in spite of my emotional reaction to the loss of a scheme that I had generated in my own mind and was very thrilled about. But those things happen in any kind of creative activity. I think it worked out very well. As a matter of fact, later on they added a few more buildings including one that my later partner, Jim Scheeler, designed, and it's still a very attractive building, in my opinion, to this day. Gertrude Kerbis was working for SOM at that time. As I remember, she designed a recreation building for the project, which I think is, again, very attractive to this day.

Blum: So, your connection to the project was really in the planning stages and the first design version?

121 Richardson: The New York Life people, before building these very big buildings, decided to go ahead with more modest project at the south end involving some twelve-story buildings, which had double-loaded corridors and which were kind of guinea pig or trial buildings, and I designed those. Those were constructed just as we had planned them. They were not very dramatic buildings in any way. They were very practical buildings, and they did offer the same kind of amenities in terms of view and open space and so forth. They didn't have the drama of the larger scheme by any means, but they were very successful buildings. So, those were built just after I left Skidmore to go to teach at the University of Illinois.

Blum: As perhaps a last comment about this, Christopher Woodward in the book he wrote about SOM said of Lake Meadows, "If not for the creepy social engineering, Lake Meadows would have eclipsed Park Hill in Sheffield, England." He thought your design of course, was outstanding.

Richardson: I never had heard that quote. I, of course, can't say.

Blum: It's his opinion.

Richardson: I think it's a dramatic piece of architecture. It would certainly be very, very exciting even to this day. But whether it would really work as a good living unit I strongly question. We were going back and we were talking about the public housing and the high-rise buildings and so on and how sort of idealistic the young architects and designers were at that time. Most of the CHA housing—I don't know about—New York or other places—was being designed by young bachelors.

Blum: For families?

Richardson: Yes. Our idea of family living was a little bit naive. I remember I was a strong advocate of the high-rise idea. Wrong as I was. I remember one time getting into a serious argument with Catherine Bauer, who was a properly famous

122 authority on housing, public housing, mass housing. Of course, she was advocating even at that time, and this was in the late 1940s, a stronger emphasis on the low-rise, garden-type development. Of course, she was absolutely right. But I remember getting into an argument with her about it.

Blum: Was Elizabeth Wood around?

Richardson: She was the head of the Federal Housing Authority at that time.

Blum: Did you have any contact with her?

Richardson: Yes, I had contact with her occasionally. Actually, our office, while I was there at least, didn't do any public housing projects. Al Shaw had done them, Harry Weese, and several of the architectural firms, but for some reason, I don't recall that we did any. I certainly had no connection with them. Maybe it was done after I left. One of our people had been with us at Oak Ridge. He was chief of construction and then he was project manager down at Oak Ridge, so-called C.E. "Buck" Humphrey, a former colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He had been originally a client of Skidmore and Owings in the early part of the war. Owings had hired him after he got out of the army.

Blum: Was he an architect?

Richardson: He was an engineer. He was a very able manager and after he left Skidmore—I don't think he was her successor, but I think he worked for Elizabeth Wood—he was the chief of construction and kind of the overall project manager for a lot of the housing that was being built at that time. They were building an awful lot at that time.

Blum: Were you aware of any of her philosophies?

Richardson: Oh, I think we were. I don't recall working with her personally—I met her several times—because we didn't have any of the public housing projects. I

123 think we took a different attitude with New York Life and that market that we were looking for, as opposed to the public housing market.

Blum: In what way?

Richardson: Well, I think that we were looking for something that offered a few more amenities. It was more expensive housing, a little more space. We weren't confined to the limitations of the public housing. I think we relied more on the experience of Ferd Kramer and the other people who were in the private housing market, and we worked more closely with them. As a consequence, I think the apartments we designed—just like the ones at Oak Ridge—were considerably more—I shouldn't say serious—but more spacious and offered a better range than the public housing projects.

Blum: But, in fact, Lake Meadows and some of the public housing projects were high-rise buildings.

Richardson: Oh, yes. There's no doubt. That part was similar. I think the great advantage that Lake Meadows had was that we were committed to open space, whereas in the public housing projects, the open space disappeared very quickly, and they became very dense, which, of course, has spawned all the problems that we have in these public housing projects. There's no question about it. The architecture affected the way people lived and the consequences of that mass of humanity in a small area have been a terrible tragedy, really.

Blum: That was the best thinking at the time.

Richardson: At the time, we thought it was great.

Blum: After the war you were with SOM until 1951, and during that six-year time period you worked not only on Lake Meadows but also on several other projects, one of which I found very interesting. It was the Greyhound Terminal and office tower. The project was published in Architectural Forum (August 1949). And there's an architect's statement here that I found rather

124 curious because you were the designer. I'd like your comments. It's called the "Architect's Statement by Nat Owings." He said that several years ago he was asked to prepare a paper on the ideal office building of the future because they thought that the Terrace Plaza in Cincinnati had developed an ideal hotel-and-store combination. He goes on to say that to do his ideal project he "selected an imaginary site in the granite caverns of Chicago's downtown Loop and described and made sketches of a project, which as far as I knew, was strictly on the dream side. Today, this dream-child project, in almost identical shape, is going into working drawings, and a portion of it is already under construction for the Greyhound Bus Terminal, in those very caverns in Chicago's downtown Loop." What did Nat Owings and his dream project have to do with the design of the Greyhound Bus Terminal and tower, which I was under the impression you designed?

Richardson: I did design it, but I think what Nat was referring to there ought to be clarified. When he referred to the Cincinnati Terrace Plaza Hotel, the big concept, the big idea there, was rather than using up the expensive ground area—as you know, first floor, second floor in a department store is the most valuable property or square foot area—for a hotel lobby or things that could be elsewhere, why not make the hotel lobby up above and make use of that valuable rental space on the ground floors or the lower floors. Why put the activities that don't require that proximity, that premium rental space, on the upper floors? So, the big concept in the Cincinnati Terrace was to bring people in at a lower level but then bring them up on elevators to the eighth floor, I think it was, and have the lobby there. It worked out extremely well. Nat simply meant that he was looking—as a hypothetical idea—to use the ground or lower floors in high-rise buildings to much greater advantage rental-wise and so on. I had nothing to do with the Terrace Plaza. I saw it later and stayed there. If I recall, the department store or all that rental use on those lower eight floors virtually paid for the hotel above. In other words, it was a big advantage commercially to do it that way.

Blum: What was the connection with the Greyhound Bus Terminal and tower to which he referred?

125 Richardson: For the buses, you have to make use of ground floor or lower floors. Of course, it would be ideal to bring the buses into the Loop and not have them at a peripheral location, but also in an expensive location to make use of the ground floor as a commercial location. Bring in the buses on the lower level so that you wouldn't have to use up expensive ground-floor level.

Blum: You mean below grade?

Richardson: Below grade. And yet, use the, if you will, air rights above for rental space for offices and other things. You could build the whole base, if you will, and make that pay through commercial rental or the bus terminal underneath, but still have the opportunity to create a high-rise building on top of this, which would be a practical high-rise solution. With a few exceptions, that's exactly what happened in Lever House, except at Lever House they went even further. They opened up the ground floor at Lever House to make a garden-like open atmosphere out of it with a tower coming out. But, again, making appropriate use of the ground floor for rental and commercial things.

Blum: Was it your design that was published as the Greyhound Bus Terminal and tower project?

Richardson: Yes, that was my design.

Blum: That was in 1948. Lever House wasn't built until several years later. What was the connection between you and Gordon and the exchange of ideas, or did that happen?

Richardson: Yes, it happened, but I think it was all just part of the whole process. For example, I was looking for an exterior material that would not weather or stain and would last for an indefinite length of time. It sounds like I'm trying to take credit for a trend and I'm not at all, because I was influenced by Mies. I was also very influenced by my trip to Egypt during World War II, where I saw all of this wonderful Egyptian glass that was approximately five

126 thousand years old. It had weathered the sands, it had weathered the blowing, and it had weathered all the weather and was still impervious. Mies, although he had the idea for different reasons, had the idea of sheathing a building in glass. It occurred to me that aside from the light, aside from everything else, glass was a very appropriate thing, just as a weathering material. At that time, of course, there were glass panels, the solid colored glass panels, and so forth. But I was thinking of a thinner glass sheathing, just like our window glass, used not as a window but as a panel, which would withstand almost anything except rocks and bullets. I sort of persuaded Nat that this would be a nice idea to look at it, and I got very excited about doing a glass building. I think it was just about that time that we were involved in designing a veterans' hospital in Toledo. I designed it and I was chief of design on it, but I delegated it to one or two of the other designers, and we decided we were going to sheathe this whole hospital in glass. At that time, this was a rather unique idea. But in the meantime, I was very concerned with what had happened with the glass at 860 [Lake Shore Drive]—how you controlled it and how you washed it. I developed a little invention, magnetic window washers so that you could wash the windows from inside. I also developed a kind of a movable sunscreen that you could use on the west and so on. Both inventions were to make the use of glass more functional. As far as we went with the Greyhound thing, the concept was there with the lower rental base and the building was finally built—the lower part, the terminal itself—and it was designed with the foundations in. Still to this day, the foundations are in for a twenty-story tower above.

Blum: Why was the tower not built?

Richardson: I guess they just didn't have the money at that time. I don't know. A lot of reasons. Of course right now, that twenty-story tower probably wouldn't be economically sound anyway. You'd probably have to tear out the whole thing and go over it.

Blum: Was there an exchange of ideas or drawings or any exchange between you and Gordon before he brought forth the Lever House drawings?

127 Richardson: It's a very curious thing because we'd had this concept, and Gordon was very aware of it. I'm not suggesting for a moment that this gave him the Lever House idea, because I think the time had come when we reached Lever that we were all talking this way, "Let's build a glass tower on a plinth and open it up." As a matter of fact, I had nothing to do with it. When Lever House came about, there was what was called a Project X, and we had Chuck Wiley working on a Project X in Chicago. I was out of it. It was so secretive. It was done when I was at Oak Ridge, primarily. It was so secret that there was a Project X in New York and a Project X in Chicago. The Project X site in Chicago was the old Potter Palmer Estate where Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett later built an apartment. Lever House had decided to move out of Boston, and so they wanted alternative sites studied, one in New York and one in Chicago. Gordon had the assignment of studying the project in New York, and Chuck Wiley studied the project for the Chicago site. Curiously enough—now, I wasn't there you see, I was elsewhere—but to my knowledge they had no contact at all and both of them came up with the same basic scheme, the idea of the plinth and the tower above it, both in Chicago and in New York.

Blum: There must have been some forces at work.

Richardson: Well, I think we were ready. We'd all discussed this idea from Greyhound on. I don't even know if that was my idea. Maybe it was Nat's. He implies that it probably was his, and it may have been. He was full of ideas. I'm not saying he wasn't. I recall working on Greyhound with a young man named Bill Hasskarl, making the model and all the rest of it. Hasskarl finally went over to the Chicago Housing Authority. I don't know what's happened to him now. But, in any case, we worked on that project. Later on, I visited in New York when Gordon and his team were there working on Lever House, and I saw the beautiful studies and so on. I hadn't seen the things in Chicago at all. I was very impressed with what he was doing. It was very carefully studied and very beautifully rendered and so on. I was almost as excited about what he was doing as about what I was doing.

128 Blum: Well, Gordon was one of your heroes, it seems.

Richardson: Oh, yes. There's no doubt about that. I liked the way he thought and I liked his boldness and so forth. I didn't like some of his crudeness but, you know, as a man who'd been in the army and everything, I could handle that. I wasn't working directly with him or anything at that time. I think when he was working on Lever House I was out on the New York Life thing for the University of Chicago.

Blum: You talked about Oak Ridge. I know Oak Ridge was a commission that SOM was given while you were still in military service. When you came back, you worked on it. What work did you do at Oak Ridge?

Richardson: Someone else would have to give you more definitive details about the Oak Ridge operation during World War II, because it's a fascinating story in itself. I don't know who to recommend to you. I think Larry Smith would still be available. I think he worked on the project. There are still some people in New York who were very much involved. Everything I've heard about it has been primarily stories that others have told me about how they got the job. Skidmore told me how they got the job and so forth.

Blum: Apparently, there was a great deal of secrecy that surrounded this because it was part of the Manhattan Project in the beginning. Material has been published about it.

Richardson: Not much.

Blum: Some, not a lot, and certainly not from an architectural point of view, because it seems to me there was an article in the record that said, "Oak Ridge is strictly engineering. We can apply words such as mighty, staggering, solid, vast, utilitarian to Oak Ridge, but not aesthetic." This was somehow this writer's opinion.

129 Richardson: When was that written?

Blum: It had to be in the 1940s.

Richardson: I'll tell you a little about the story that I heard about getting the job originally, if you want to hear that. That goes back to wartime. I heard it from Skidmore's mouth and Owings's and so forth.

Blum: They told the story to you?

Richardson: They told it to me, so you're getting it secondhand. I'd say it's probably pretty close to the truth. They were in the Chicago office and had an appointment with some army civilians, who wanted to talk to them about a major project. I don't know who was there representing Skidmore and Owings. Now, mind you, at that time, the firm had been doing work for Great Lakes for the navy. They had been doing these interceptor stations across the country through Skidmore's connections. These were advance-warning stations in New York and the coast and whatnot. They did have these connections, and although it was a fairly small firm on a comparative basis, they were interviewed for this mystery job. So the question was—at least the way I heard it from Skidmore—they asked these people was, "Where is this project?" They said, "We can't tell you." They asked, "How big is the project going to be?" They said, "We can't tell you." They asked, "How many people is it going to involve?" "We can't tell you." And went on to all these things and, of course, there were no answers to any of the questions that the architects had. They said, "Do you think you can accomplish the project?" And Skidmore and Owings—knowing the kind of people they were—said, "Of course!" Their theory was get the job first and then figure out how to do it. Well, apparently, these civilians, representing General Leslie Groves were so impressed with this confidence that they said, "Well, you're the twelfth architectural firm we've interviewed and the first one that says you'd even touch it." Well, it turned out to be Oak Ridge. They had located this site just west of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mountains there. They were given aerial photographs, but they didn't know where it was. Now, mind you, Skidmore, Owings and

130 Merrill weren't asked to do the factories, these huge plants. The first time I really understood them at all is in a wonderful book I recently read on the history of the atom bomb. It tells a lot about it and the magnitude of these plants. The Skidmore and Owings contribution was to build the housing, and they didn't know how many or anything else at the time. They got some city planners, and they beefed up their staff with young people. By this time, they had done some consultation with the U.S. Gypsum Company. They had this Cemesto board, which was kind of a combination of a hard board—really I think it was called Transite, which was really a hard asbestos board that didn't have dust and so on—mixed with an insulation and plaster. It was a panel they developed. Skidmore and Owings helped as consultants, I think. I was told later—and I don't know this to be a fact at all—that Owings, I don't know about Skidmore, had invested heavily in this, to. Maybe they threw in their fees or something like that to have an interest in the firm. But in any case, according to what I've heard—as I say, I don't know whether this is true or not—Owings eventually made a great deal of money out of this investment—not that it was any conflict of interest at all. It was just that this thing caught on—and I'm sure it wasn't a conflict there—that by coincidence, they were developing these pre-fab houses, which Oak Ridge used. I don't think there was any connection at all except simply that they were very good temporary, prefabricated housing units, which they could bring in on trucks and just plunk down everywhere. They didn't need foundations. They just had an umbilical cord. I mean, a lot of them didn't. The smallest ones they put down on a kind of a foundation of heavy timbers and then they had an umbilical cord for the plumbing and that was about it. Of course, they could just set them all over the terrain. John Merrill, at that time, was a limited partner. He was never more than a very limited partner. The army responded to him. He had had this work with the federal government and so on. They pretty much made him in charge of the project, and he just fit in beautifully with the army corps of engineers, which was the Manhattan Project. He told me himself it was amazing. Suddenly on a railroad train, 5, 000 toilet fixtures would arrive out in the wilderness. Everyone's wondering what they are going to do with all these things. They built this whole thing in secrecy. They laid out the roads and everything else. There were several valleys, and the

131 housing was not located in the same valleys as the plants at all. Everything was super-secure. This was a very successful development. I've forgotten how many thousands of people they had down there before the war ended. There are a lot people that could give you a lot of detail about that. I remember one funny anecdote that Larry Smith tells that I have no doubt is true. Owings didn't get along very well with the people in charge down there, namely a fellow named Jackson, with whom I later worked. So, they relied on John Merrill pretty heavily as their liaison. The firm, although they did the housing primarily, were also involved with the planning of some of the industrial sites and so forth, but only the sites. They didn't do any of the engineering, that you were quoting about a little while ago. It wasn't aesthetic, either. It was a crash landing, crash program. It was aesthetic in its way because it's a lovely area, and there were some very lovely things about it that I liked later. But, anyway, they sent Owings down there because they needed him as a super salesman to put this particular plant in a certain valley. There were three valleys and so the planners brought in Owings—this sounds so typical of Owings—and they briefed him on it. He said, "Well, I think I understand." They said, "It's going to be a tough selling job because these generals or whoever was in charge, want to put it in this other valley." So, it was a question of those two valleys, and they briefed Nat, and he went in there to give all the reasons for putting it in this valley. He didn't come out and he didn't come out for about an hour. So, he finally came out just mopping his brow. He said, "Boy, it really took a lot out of me, but I sold it, fellows." They went in, and he had sold it down the wrong valley! This is a story told by a million fellows who were there, but, knowing Nat, I think it's probably true. Anyhow, back to the original story, they decided after the war that they would keep the place open. In other words, the federal government decided after this fantastic investment that they were probably going to be using more warheads and more plutonium and so forth, even though it was peacetime, and so they wanted to keep Oak Ridge operating. But they didn't feel that they could attract these scientists and other important people to work on the project unless they made the city or the town more attractive. It actually had been a temporary town. We called them flat tops—little pre-fab houses. Some of them were slope-roofed and very attractive, but most of

132 them were small. They decided to—they used the word, or I use the word—"permantize" the town, make it a more permanent town. They developed a program to build a couple of new communities: to build schools that were of a permanent nature, to build an extensive number of apartment- type houses rather than just these pre-fab houses—garden apartments, not high-rises—and a new shopping center. These projects, totaling at that time in 1948 about $130 to $140 million worth of construction, which under the present circumstances, would be several million dollars worth of construction. So, anyway, we had to staff it. I had my young group in Chicago, and Owings said, "Well, we've got to send somebody down there to head it up because we need some designers down there." By that time, they had created a staff of production people. Among others there was a man named Robert Ward, whom Nat had known before, a very nice man who had worked for Holabird for years. Then he had collected a couple of people whom he had known who had worked for civil engineers before, and he got them as production men. I don't know where he found them. There was a cadre of production people down there doing the routine work of getting the office set up and so on. The arrangement was this, that we I didn't have a fee as such, based on a construction job, but what they did is pay a company called the Roane Anderson Company. They created a corporation to run the town, to build the buildings, to be in charge. It supplanted the Manhattan Project organization. It was no longer military. It was civilian, but it was a government agency. It was called Roane Anderson Corporation—Roane and Anderson being the two counties down there. They hired the city manager, they ran the schools, there was no democracy at all. It was all run as a kind of a socialistic little town. The deal was they would pay all of our salaries, they would pay all of our overhead, they would pay all of our expenses, and then give us a fee. In other words, you couldn't possibly lose. John Merrill, in fairness, probably negotiated it. I don't know. He got along very well with these people, whereas Owings was always abrasive to them and vice versa. John was kind of an easy-going, wonderful, nice guy. He was fun and he could smile and you could get along with him just fine. I don't know who negotiated the contract, but it was a fine contract. I don't know what the length of time was, but I think it was a year's time, maybe, to get all the

133 drawings done, to go ahead with all these various projects. Maybe it was even less than that, because I knew it was another crash program. I don't know whether they had a lot of political pressure or what on them to get it done just as quickly as we could. Owings, of course, gave me the job of trying to staff it design-wise. I had a few young designers there, as I said. I talked to Bill Priestley about going down there, and I talked to Bob Little, and no one wanted to go. It was way out in the boondocks, and the facilities were not primitive, but not really great. You'd live in these temporary buildings, and we knew it was going to be pretty hard work and so forth. I talked to Jack Selz, who was then with us. He was the man I mentioned earlier who had worked on Oak Ridge during the war. I don't think Owings felt he had the capability of running it, although he was an older man and a very good designer. I think he was really the one behind the Cincinnati Terrace Plaza scheme, as a matter of fact. He was a good friend of mine. I don't think Owings felt that he had the capability of really running this whole operation, and so we cast about. We didn't know what in the world to do. Finally, he called me in and he said, "It looks like you're going to have to do it yourself." I didn't have much choice. That's when I went down there. There were two or three young fellows whom I had not screened but who had been hired for the job. Because we had to build the staff so quickly, just as they had done during the war, we had a personnel manager who did the hiring and firing and so on. I really didn't have much chance to interview these people first. In the meantime, they had hired Buck Humphrey, the man I mentioned who was later was with CHA, to head up the whole office as a kind of project manager. He was this hard-boiled former engineering colonel. He knew the army and so on. He could deal with Jackson very well too. They were two of a kind. They were very able administrators, both of them. I went in to see Jackson as soon as I got down there. I went in and introduced myself, and I said, "I'm Ambrose Richardson from the Chicago office. I'm down here to be the head of the design crew." Well, he looked at me, and he just laughed and said—he was a very profane guy—"Well, hell, Nat Owings told me he was going to send down his chief of design." I said I was chief of design. He said, "The hell you are! You're a goddamn, snot-nosed kid. You're wet behind the ears." He took me aside and he said, "Well, let me tell you, kid, Nat Owings is

134 a damn fool"—he used worse words than that—"for sending a kid like this down. What in the hell is he thinking? Does he realize and do you realize that there's a $130 million of work hanging on what you're going to do here in the next six weeks?" And I said, "Well, I guess he does because I'm here." So, he said, "We're going to see." Well, it turned out that I inherited Tallie Maule, who later on in his career turned out to be the head architect for the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] system in San Francisco. There was Carl Russell, who was an old friend of Tallie's. I have a feeling maybe both of them had been at Holabird and Root. I'm not sure. In other words, I didn't hire them. Somebody else hired them. And Walter Netsch was working on detailing. This poor guy. He had been originally working for Morgan Yost, and he had gotten this job with Bob Ward of Holabird, and they had him down there detailing coal bins or something, you know. Here was this design talent. Of course, he was delighted to switch over to design. I was attracted to him right away. I was delighted, of course, to have him. Then there was another fellow on my team up in Chicago named Dan Nacht, who was a bachelor. He now has a very successful practice out in Sacramento. In other words, all of these people turned out to be distinguished designers and architects in their own right later on. Then there was a young city planner named Tom Via. I wasn't really in charge of the urban planning. There was a man there by the name of Dave Geer. I can't remember how you spell his name, and he had gone to Cranbrook, as I remember, and was very skillful. He was somewhat older than we were but a very skillful designer. Then I brought down Jack Selz, who was willing to come down and work on an interim basis, at least. He was a big help. He was a bachelor at that time. Again, it was almost like the Bunshaft days in a way, except I had become the guy that was going to do the basic stuff, and they were going to be my hands, which is exactly what happened. They were just marvelous. We got along, fortunately, very well together, and we lived this bachelor life. It wasn't much of a life because we were working about fifteen, sixteen hours a day because we had to get this project out. I think we were given six weeks to do these 600 apartments or whatever, 450 apartments, and all this stuff. Not the whole project, but we had to do that apartment project with all the different varieties and everything else in a matter of six weeks. Well, we did the plans, the

135 renderings, the models, and everything else and went in after six weeks to this man Jackson and his boss, a man by the name of Ernest Wende. I remember him very well, and I liked him. Jackson was kind of the ramrod, and Wende was the overall administrator. But Jackson was the guy we had to deal with, this tough fellow. He was really tough. We went in and presented it, and we had done everything to working drawings—definitive drawings showing all the elevations of every apartment room, showing where the outlets were, and everything else. Well, Jackson was just overwhelmed when he saw all this stuff because we had been working night and day. He called me and he said, "By God! I would never, never have guessed it, Richardson, but you really came through."

Blum: I bet that made you feel good. You were then the Bunshaft of that group.

Richardson: It was terrific. Then, of course, the guys—Walter and Tallie and Carl and Dan—all felt a part of it, too. It was a real thrill for us because we were established. In other words, the designers were no longer just young, nutty guys that the production guys we're talking about.

Blum: So then, you were designing permanent buildings for Oak Ridge, which was to be its phase postwar?

Richardson: It was postwar. When they decided to move on with the operation at Oak Ridge, they wanted to make it more permanent. I don't think they made it fully permanent, but they certainly wanted to provide more permanent and attractive facilities to attract the scientists and whatnot.

Blum: As far as the housing was concerned, was it still prefab?

Richardson: Yes. We lived in it. Prue came down later on, and she lived there with me and our two little kids for a year. This little house was twenty-five by twenty- five.

136 [Tape 5: Side 1]

Blum: What was the American attitude toward prefab housing?

Richardson: You mean at Oak Ridge or generally?

Blum: Generally. Oak Ridge, I think, was a special circumstance.

Richardson: I don’t think it was terribly acceptable. I remember very well—this came somewhat later, of course, the efforts in the Lustron house and other things, and Bucky Fuller’s various attempts at trying to solve the problem. But in spite of all the efforts, it hasn’t been solved, I don’t feel, to this day. I think it’s one of the great opportunities to do something. The closest thing to it, of course, are the prefab things that we do right over here near South Bend, the big trailer industry or the mobile home industry. It’s the biggest area right here. There are big factories right here in Elkhart, Indiana and across this area. That’s come closest to it. I think it just hasn’t found any favor for some reason. I think it’s mostly because of the nature of the American mind. They just want something that’s individual. A house is a castle, and the biggest achievement in the United States is to have your own house and your own property and your own yard and all that kind of stuff.

Blum: Could it be the unions?

Richardson: I don’t know. They’ve pretty well solved that problem by now. I think they did hold back things a great deal without any question. I don’t think it was the unions so much. There are a lot more people that know a lot more about this subject than I do, but my personal reaction is it wasn’t the unions so much as it was public reaction. For some reason, the public has just never responded to prefab very well unless you're down at the end of the line. Then you want to work up. But even with the number of prefabricated units, the so-called mobile units and all those, it still has never caught on very well. It's a sort of secondhand citizen thing. You live in a trailer in a trailer camp just waiting for the time that you can move up the ladder and get out and do

137 something else. The year I spent in Oak Ridge was one of the most interesting years I've ever spent sociologically. There was no problem of keeping up with the Joneses. There were some people, for example, our top people—I could have rated one, I guess, but I didn't ask for one—who had larger houses with pitched roofs. Some of our people and some of the scientists lived in them. There were some very nice houses. These were all still made out of Cemesto board, but you couldn't tell that house from any other suburban house, except it was obviously light gray and it was made clearly out of this. Nice big windows and all the amenities were there. I don't think there was any stigma there. And even all of our young people lived in these flat tops, these little tiny things. But as Prue said, "We're all the same age, " basically the same age. The average age at Oak Ridge for adults was thirty. That's an average age, and that's pretty young. This included the scientists and everybody else. So there was a great sort of camaraderie and a lot of social life and a lot of children, of course. There wasn't that much else to do. The birth rate was very high and the age was right. As I say, there was no keeping up with the Joneses. All of our furniture was furnished to us. It was mostly made out of plywood. Very well designed and so on, made out of plywood. We had a coal stove to heat with. We had a little kitchen with a deep sink and a shallow sink, and Prue would bathe the older kid in the deep sink and the younger kid in the shallow sink. It was that kind of thing. We didn't have a tub. We had a shower. It was enjoyable, and we got to know the Jack Trains. The Trains were there at that time. They were a little younger than we were, but he was working in the engineering as a structural engineer so he wasn't under me or anything. We got to know them socially and so on. As I say, we had a really very interesting social life, I thought. Of course, we were very busy all the time. But I don't think Prue had the same kind of reaction at all about my being busy or working at night there. I was within walking distance, practically, of the office, and I could come home for supper and go back and so forth. It was an entirely different atmosphere than Chicago. She thoroughly enjoyed the year, I think, as much as I did. In the meantime, curiously enough, before she'd gone down there, we'd worked on this charrette and finally got this man convinced that these young people could do the job. From then on, we had pretty smooth sailing, frankly. I

138 mean, we could do pretty much anything we wanted design-wise and everything else. We had no problem getting approval. Once we had convinced Jackson, the tough one, that we knew our business and could do a good job, he was even complimentary. We had no problem. John Merrill was a marvelous diplomat. He was a wonderful man in many ways. He was just a complete opposite of Nat. He was easygoing and mild and quiet and serious. I don't think he ever made a decision. I always like to tell the story of when I was in the army. This old, old-time sergeant came to me and, I was then a captain. "Captain, " he said, "I wish you'd stay in the army. You're a good officer. They need people like you." But, he said, "If you do stay in, I'm going to give you some words of advice. It's simply this. To get to the top of the army, you got to know three words." And I said, "What?" He said, "That's all you have to know." I said, "What are those, Sergeant?" He said, "I don't know. However you say it—I don't know. If you know how to say those three words, they'll think you're the smartest guy in the army, and you'll go right to the top." Well, evidently, John Merrill had learned this. All the time I liked him, admired him, roomed with him, traveled back and forth with him, got to know him quite well, worried about him because Nat had him just completely buffaloed all the time. He was terrified of Nat. He was a wonderful man. Again, I told him if he ever started on his own, I'd be glad to go with him. But I never saw him make a decision.

Blum: He didn't know?

Richardson: Yes. They'd come to him. As I said, he knew how. But they loved him, they wanted him back. He'd come down for two or three days, and the only thing he'd do the whole time he was down there was to meet with Jackson—he called him Jack—John would call and say, "I'm down here." Jackson would say, "It's good to see you John, good to see you." He'd sit around with a piece of graph paper. His hobby was doing house plans and apartment plans. He'd sketch those all day long. Never built them. That was just what he did all the time. He'd come down, and he'd spend two or three days. Fred Kraft was down there, too. He succeeded Dave Geer, I think, as the urban planner. Maybe they were there at the same time. In any case, Fred pretty much

139 headed up the urban planning thing. He, of course, was very close to John in their work, and he often needed decisions from John as to whether to fire somebody or something. John would stall him every time. Fred would get to the point when he would get in a cab and go to the airport with him, which was in Knoxville thirty miles away, to try to get an opinion from him. He said, "What should I do about this thing?" He said John would invariably end up getting on a train or the airplane saying, "We'll talk about this the next time I'm down."

Blum: That’s a subtle way of keeping control.

Richardson: It just drove some of them mad. It didn't bother me because he wasn't involved in design. The designers in Skidmore from Bunshaft's day on were king, and I think a lot of the others resented it. The designer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill is like the pilot and the other guys are just maintenance officers or maintenance people.

Blum: If that was the hierarchy, were you accorded the same kind of dignity as Bunshaft demanded and got?

Richardson: Oh, yes. You mean down there from my guys?

Blum: Within SOM, yes.

Richardson: Oh, sure. Owings told me, of course, "Now Rich, you're down there and you're representing me and you're it. You're the boss." But he never told Humphrey this. Fortunately, Humphrey and I got along very well. There was no friction between us at all. There was friction among some of the others—Jack Train and some of the other people down there. They'd keep coming to me because there was sort of a clique that Humphrey had of officers from World War II, who were friends of his who had come from the same regiment, that he had hired as opposed to Jack Train and some of the others. I was kind of caught in the middle on this thing. Of course, Owings never straightened it out. I got along beautifully with Humphrey, but it was

140 kind of an embarrassing thing for him because I'd be talking to Nat. He'd call me personally, you see. He went around Humphrey all the time talking to me, and then I didn't have the authority to do much about it. It wasn't terribly unpleasant but it was awkward, let me put it that way. No serious difficulty developed out of it. Humphrey and I had a great deal of mutual respect. We were quite opposite in many ways, but he was a fine administrator. He thought I was the most brilliant designer in the world. He wanted me to quit. I'd met some of the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] architects down there. He wanted me to quit and be his partner and start an office down in Knoxville. He felt that strongly. He knew at that time I was pretty unhappy with Nat. I was commuting. I was getting Nat at one end, and then I was going back to Oak Ridge again. I was back in Chicago about three or four days out of every two weeks, so that I was trying to run Greyhound or whatever was going on in Chicago at the same time I was handling all the stuff at Oak Ridge. That's why I mention this. It was terribly difficult, and Owings wouldn't accept any other thing. I couldn't delegate as much in Chicago. I think Chuck Wiley was probably my main backup, but he didn't get along with Owings very well and vice versa. He was a talented man, by the way. But I didn't have any number-two person and Priestley didn't want to run a whole operation. I mean, Priestley was Priestley. He was a wonderful guy, but he didn't want to run a whole operation. Little wasn't acceptable to Nat. He was an individualist. So there really wasn't anybody in charge while I was down at Oak Ridge. It was hard to maintain my feet 600 miles away. The upshot of it was that we were down there a year. We got that housing done and well underway. We designed literally all the things I mentioned, a complete town. Priestley came down and stayed for a while. Jack Selz was there for a while. I had people that came and went. Dennis Blair is primarily a residential architect that works around Barrington, and I haven't seen him for all these years, but he has had a very successful career of his own in his way. His stuff is very interesting.

Blum: Did he work on housing at Oak Ridge?

141 Richardson: He was residential, but he was one of my young men. We'd rotate back and forth, and I think everybody was reasonably happy. Tallie and Bob and Walter pretty much stayed down there after I came back to Chicago. Then the last project that I had much to do with was that high school project. I think Tallie and maybe all of them worked on it. We finally brought the working drawings back to the Chicago office and finished it there. By this time, we pretty much closed that out. We kept a small cadre of people there just to carry through. In the meantime, the Okinawa thing had developed, and the air force wanted us to build some bases in Okinawa, maybe doing the same kind of thing. That's when we were talking about going to Tokyo. I couldn't go. At first they wanted me to go to Tokyo, but they said it had to be a partner. They wanted me to be the partner in charge to go to the Okinawa operation.

Blum: Was a partnership ever offered to you?

Richardson: No.

Blum: Did you somehow feel it should have been?

Richardson: No, I was pretty young still.

Blum: In 1950, there were about nine partners?

Richardson: The only partners in 1950 were Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Bunshaft, Cutler, Walter Severinghaus, and—who was the other one in New York? There were four in New York, but that was it.

Blum: What about Bill Hartmann?

Richardson: No, he wasn't a partner until later. None of us had partner status until after I left.

Blum: You had been there longer than many people.

142 Richardson: Oh, yes. I started back in 1937.

Blum: That was an association of long-standing except for the interruption of the war. In 1950, SOM was given an exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art, the first architectural firm to be accorded such recognition. We've already talked about the fact that people were not identified as designers, but the firm's name was given the most prominence and the only mention. And some of your things were in that exhibition.

Richardson: Some of the Oak Ridge projects were in it and a later project, the New York Life project that we talked about earlier. And then Bill Priestley's hospital, which is right down the street from your hotel, here in South Bend, by the way.

Blum: There was an article in the New York Times, written by Aline Louchheim, who was later Eero Saarinen's wife. It is rather interesting that she was questioning this practice at the time. She wrote, "This is indeed a group, and it prefers to be know as such. Each partner insisting on the anonymity of a firm name, yet, even the least perceptive of reporters cannot be put off from recognizing that certain men dominate the designing. For instance, Bunshaft in New York and Richardson in Chicago and seeing an individual, a guiding hand, in each project. Through all, they have a basic common style." So, she identifies you and Gordon Bunshaft as having distinctive signature designs, so to speak. What do you think the difference was that she picked up on between your designs and Bunshaft's?

Richardson: I think the things that were displayed that Gordon had on review in that exhibition were really much more urban in character. I don't mean to say that the New York Life slab apartments weren't urban. You may not know the exhibition that well, but there was a Ford office building, a big, massive high- rise office building. It wasn't an urban thing, but it was a big corporate-type image.

143 Blum: Who designed that?

Richardson: Gordon, as far as I know. It was done in the New York office. For all intents and purposes, it was done by him. The hospital that they exhibited was down at the Narrows in New York, which again is large, high-rise, Corbusier-like, strong expression. I think that the things in the show that I had done were much lower key—the garden apartments in Oak Ridge, which were identified. Something of Bill Priestley's, which I didn't design was, again, much lower key. The apartments in Lake Meadows represented an urban project, it's true, but primarily a garden project. Even though it was high-rise, the whole emphasis from my design point of view was on the green. Not the whole emphasis, but in proper balance of green. I'm a strong believer that a building cannot be better than the setting that it's in. That's one of the reasons, I guess, I'm not so keen about this great number of new high-rise skyscrapers just growing up in clusters with no place to breathe. I remember a quote of Owings, "A person can't grow where a tree can't grow." I've always liked that because I haven't been a landscape planner, but I've been a strong believer in the landscape identified with any building. In everything I did later on at the University of Illinois and even at Indianapolis and even here, I've been very concerned about the setting and the relationship to the other buildings and the relationship of the building to the landscape. So, I guess if I were trying to find out, not knowing the two individuals, what the difference would be, I would say it reflects the character of the individuals. That garden is primarily an urban mind. At that time, I was primarily more of a non- urban mind. I don't know whether that's right or not.

Blum: It's an interesting observation that you're making. In 1948, you took an executive training program at the University of Chicago. What was that all about?

Richardson: The University of Chicago offered at that time—I think they still do—a series of night courses, open to anybody who had a degree, whether you got a degree in liberal arts or whatever. In two years time by going to school two nights a week and by following the reading and going to the lecture, you

144 could earn a master's degree in business administration. I looked at it this way—I knew the man who ran the program. My brother had gotten a similar degree at the University of Chicago and had introduced me to this man who ran the operation. He was very intrigued and said, "Well, we haven't had any architects in this program." I could get all my books and tuition on my GI Bill, which was still in force. So, I decided that I knew a little bit about architecture, but I knew nothing whatsoever about business. At that time, I suppose I had in the back of my mind that I might be sitting in the front seat some day. I don't know. But I thought that the business training would be a really good experience for me. Also, I knew that my clients sooner or later would be business people. And if I could talk to them in the same language, about finance and about accounting and about statistics and about marketing and so forth, this would be a very useful weapon in the arsenal of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. I wasn't really thinking about myself that much. I was always thinking about the firm. Always the firm.

Blum: I see. You were not thinking of breaking off and going on your own?

Richardson: No, not at that time. Well, I had thought about it, but not to go into my own business particularly. I was not too happy with Nat, but that went off and on. That was a love-hate affair for years. But anyway, I decided to take this, and he found out I was doing it and he was infuriated. He thought it was a waste of time. He wanted me twenty-four hours a day. I found it very difficult, because of trying to maintain my own schedule and trying to study and read all these books on economics and everything. See, I was thrown into this class of fifty or sixty young executives, who had already been to business school. They knew all the terms, they knew everything. I really felt at a loss. I stuck with it and I, at least, got to meet these people, until I went abroad on the housing inspection trip that Nat and Skid wanted me to take involving the New York Life project. I, of course, was gone three weeks, as I mentioned earlier, and that just knocked me off schedule completely as far as accomplishing any papers or getting my homework done or doing the readings or anything. Knowing how Nat felt about it and, of course, I was still under tremendous pressure to get all the work done in the firm, I

145 decided I had to give up that venture. But I felt I got a lot out of it, nevertheless. I heard some good lectures. I met quite a few young executives, who went on to do other things. In fact, I thought of that as being a potential source of business later. In all honesty, I thought I could meet these people and become a member of the business circle in a way. At least I would know the people, and if I were in the clubs or whatever, at least I had a jump on some of the other young architects who might not be able to speak the same language. I still think it was a good idea, and I've recommended it to my students for years. By all means, get some business experience if you possibly can. It's proved out. People with business experience have had, I think, a big advantage over those that haven't. It's all very well to be a great designer or a great drawer or a great draftsmen or even a great salesman, but you still have to have the know-how to finance things and put them together. I think that's proved out more and more over the years with the developers and so forth.

Blum: We're sort of jumping the gun, but now that you've had years of experience as a professor of architectural education, have you been able...

Richardson: Excuse me. I haven't really been a professor of architectural education. I've been a professor of architecture. I mean, I just want to clear up on the terms, because I don't think that there really is anything such as a professor of architectural education.

Blum: Thank you for clarifying.

Richardson: We can go into the architectural education thing later because we'll probably want to discuss my feelings about that since I was involved so intensely with the accrediting board and architectural education generally.

Blum: What I wanted to ask was that after you had an opportunity to teach some of these courses to young people, did you ever try to organize a class in business administration for architects in the context of the architecture school?

146 Richardson: Indeed I did. Of course, I never claimed expertise in teaching any of the business courses as such. I mean, I don't even know how to do a decent balance sheet. I know some of the theories and so on. It started down at the University of Illinois when I first went down there. I had a course in professional practice, which I taught at Illinois and I taught here at Notre Dame for all the years I was here. I taught much more intensely here to the fifth-year students at Notre Dame. It didn't involve much about accounting and so on, but it did involve basic business principles and marketing and how to get the job and all the processes of organization and personnel and so forth. I still have the notes. In fact, I've had many, many students—and goodness knows how many students I've had by now—but I've had many students that have written to me and talked to me and seen me at AIA conventions and said that's the most valuable course they ever had. There's such a difference between practice and—I shouldn't say theory—but the architectural curriculum, which really is not a hands-on thing. It's not like medicine. It's not like law even. It's an amateur situation. You have a hypothetical problem and you have a hypothetical answer, you have a hypothetical client. It's a play-acting type of thing. There's no realism involved in it. What happens is that these youngsters—I say youngsters, but some of them are not so young—have been built up with this idea that being a designer is the greatest thing in the world. That's what they've been working for all these years. All the all-nighters, and all the charrettes and so forth, they are getting this aura of being a designer and being a creative genius. And they start working in an office feeling that they're creative geniuses. They've been told this, in effect, by their professors. These people really walk out on a silver cloud. They finally get their job. They feel great, and then there's this horrible letdown. It's just like being dropped from a plane. All of a sudden they get this big bump and say, "Oh, my God, this isn't what I learned in school at all." This is a process where you have to sit down and do some drudgery, number one. It's not just a question of making models and a question of doing perspectives and a question of talking theory and the transcendentalist space and all the rest of the junk they talk about in school. This is a place where you got to go out and get a job, get the commission, put it out on a budget, put it out on a time schedule, and still

147 make money on it. This is no joke. But it suddenly comes with that horrible, horrible reality that they didn't get a bit of this in school. Then they get bitter and say, "My, God, I was never told this. Why didn't anybody ever tell me, wise me up to the fact that this profession isn't what it's cracked up to be?"

Blum: It's still a business.

Richardson: It's still a business. You can't do good design unless you can stay in business, and you can't stay in business unless you make some money. It all goes together. That doesn't say for a moment that you have to sacrifice design. The trick is how to do design and still make money to stay in business. That's what Skidmore and Owings and Merrill did. They maintained that standard of design and still made money—and they made a lot of money. A lot of it was, of course, they got big commissions, but it was because they knew how to do it efficiently.

Blum: What was it that made you leave? As long as this was a successful, rolling firm, you had interesting projects, why did you leave in 1951 to become a professor of graduate architecture at the University of Illinois? It was so different from the practice.

Richardson: As I mentioned several times, the pressure on an individual was tremendous just because I was trying to manipulate too many things at once. By this time, Oak Ridge had pretty well wound up. We had a few people down there, but by this time also my Oak Ridge group of wonderful designers had, except for Dan Nacht, gone off on the Okinawa project. Tallie Maule and Carl Russell and, incidentally, John Weese went over on that project, too, and Walter Netsch. I had some wonderful designers in the Chicago office at that time, I might add. I still had this wonderful group with Gyo [Obata]. I still had Gyo at that time, I think. I had Joe Passonneau and I had Art Myhrum.

Blum: This was at SOM?

148 Richardson: This was SOM in Chicago. I had Art Myhrum, I had Priestley still, I had John Macsai, I had Bob Diamant, who later became a partner, as you know, and I had a guy by the name of Sheldon Ingerbretzen, who was a very talented young guy. He's passed away since. I just had this whole stable of very able young designers, but they didn't have that much experience. I mean, heck, by that time I was only thirty-three, but I was by far the older guy. I was the Bunshaft, as you say. I don't compare myself to Bunshaft. We're different people, but I was the Bunshaft of that particular time. Everything fell on me. As Prue said, I was just sort of a raving wreck, and I finally went to this—it really wasn't a shrink—I finally went to take some tests to see what could be done. I had an ulcer. I was trying to entertain clients, too. I was spending more time at the Tavern Club with martinis than I was at the office, just about. The pressure was just hell. I wasn't seeing Prue. I wasn't seeing the children. Nat was pouring more on instead of easing off. He didn't have faith in anybody else for some reason. It was a compliment to me in a way, but he'd say, "You got to do it, Rich. There's nobody else to do it." That sort of thing. In spite of the fact that I had these wonderful young hands, there was no one—every time I got somebody really capable like Tallie Maule or Walt Netsch, he would shoot them off to the West Coast or someplace. It sounds conceited now, but I would get these guys kind of trained, and as soon as I got them trained, he'd say, "Oh, he would work out real well in the San Francisco office." That kind of thing, which is the way business goes. In the meantime, the pressures were getting worse and worse on me. Turpin Bannister, whom I knew very slightly but who was the new chairman or head of the School of Architecture at Illinois, had asked me if I knew anybody that might come down. They were still with the Beaux Arts system.

Blum: In 1950?

Richardson: Yes, even 1950. It still exists to a degree, but not in the same sense of having all these schools and doing the scheduling and everything. When I said the system, they were still working on the projet basis. The graduate program was not really a structured program. All the graduate students were doing, such as they were, usually two or three foreign students, was just taking the

149 same thing as the fifth-year students but over again, sort of. So it really wasn't a program. So, he wondered if I knew anybody. By that time, I had developed a little bit of a reputation. As I say, I knew the people at the school of design by then. Donald Deskey, the industrial designer, tried to hire me away. He wanted me to set up his office in Chicago, and he offered me twice what Nat Owings was giving me. There were these kind of pressures.

Blum: Why weren't you tempted?

Richardson: I was very tempted but his partner reneged on it. When he met me the next day, he said, "Donald's talking through the cups, " or something like that. So I said, "Well, hell, if I'm going to be up against that." He had this business partner. And, of course, I was very attracted to Deskey. He was a very talented guy. He offered me everything, and the next day his tough-minded business partner says, "He's crazy. I'm not going to offer you that at all." I said, "Well, if that's not the case, I might as well stick with it." It was up and down and up and down, and finally Turpin said, "Do you know of anybody that would like to come down to Illinois for a year and kind of get this thing moving?" I thought about it. He said, "You know what I'm really talking about?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "I'm talking about getting you down here." So I thought about it. I'd always had this sort of teaching instinct. When I was overseas, I started a school there for my GIs, and I taught math and blueprint-reading and stuff like that. So, I'd always had this kind of desire for teaching, and I'd always thought my experience with the younger people at Skidmore was teaching in its way. I really enjoyed being a crit and all that stuff. So, I thought, well, gee, it might be worth a try. Of course, Prue was tickled to death at the thought of it because she was so disappointed at the way things were going in Chicago and worried about my health. I said, "Well, gee, it's great." I had the impression that I could go down there and take a year's leave, which would straighten me out. I don't think I needed straightening out, but at least it would get me back into health and good spirits and all the rest of it. That's kind of the way I was looking at it.

150 Blum: When you told Nat you were leaving, did you tell him you were taking a year's leave or did you say, "I'm leaving"?

Richardson: I don't know. I remember the letter. It was a hard letter to write, of course. I didn't have the guts to go in and see him, because I knew damn well he'd sweet-talk me into staying on. He just had magic. As mean as he could be, he could be just as equally the other way. So, I knew that he'd probably offer me a raise and say, "Oh Rich, you can't go. What am I going to do without you?" All that stuff, which he'd always do. Anyway, I just told him that I'd had this offer to go to Illinois. And it was a bona fide offer. He said, "Well, we could give you full professorship." I knew how long it took my father-in-law, an eminent guy at the University of Chicago, to get a full professorship. Here I am thirty-three years old. I accepted the job and went down there. Prue said we were at Fish Creek, Wisconsin, and he still tried to get me to turn it down.

Blum: Nat?

Richardson: Nat. By this time, I had resigned, and he still sent out this messenger.

Blum: You had resigned. You didn't say, "I'm taking a leave"?

Richardson: No. I resigned to take this professorship at the university. He could have brought up the leave if he wanted to. He probably could have persuaded me and said, "Well, Rich, go down there for a year and see how it goes." But as it turned out, we went fishing up there. He didn't call me. Mildred Steelhammer talked to me, and she said, "Mr. Owings wants you to come back and meet with him right away." You know how things were. They were always right away. She said, "He wants you to go over to Morocco. They're going to build three air bases over there, and he wants you to go over and head up that operation." Well, by this time, I really had made up my mind. I said, "No, I'm not going to be enticed." I knew that Lorelei song or whatever. I'm not going to get persuaded again. Of course, Prue agreed. She backed me completely. We went on down there and rented a house and sold our apartment in Chicago to Reginald Isaacs. I don't know why he was still in

151 Chicago. He'd gone to Harvard and came back. I don't remember. Anyway, I know that's who we sold it to. We went on down there, and, of course, Prue loved it from the beginning. I say "loved it," she had been a city girl all her life, but the kids were small. By this time we had three kids, and it was an entirely different thing. There were political pressures of this faculty, who were really resentful of this young guy, because I was younger than most of them, of course, by several years and in many cases quite a few years, coming down, getting a full professorship with tenure. At that time, I was one of the highest-paid professors on campus.

Blum: But you went down thinking it was for one year?

Richardson: Well, basically.

Blum: To set up a graduate program?

Richardson: I didn't expect the tenure or anything. Yes. Well, gee, when they offered me a full professorship. I went in to see the provost, and they offered me full professorship and tenure. He said, "Do you know what this means?" I said, "I think I do." This was an older, distinguished man. He said, "This is the first time this has happened in my tenure. Professor Bannister is very persuasive. He wants you awfully much." Of course, I was terribly flattered at that. But it didn't go over too well with some of my colleagues because here's this upstart comes down—some of them were very nice about it but others weren't. Well, I inherited this graduate group who were very nice and two of the first ones were later my partners. They were a great group.

Blum: Your first job was really to design a graduate program?

Richardson: Yes. To actually set up graduate school. They were giving graduate degrees. They were qualified graduate degrees, but really we got those way back when I was in school, too. In the Beaux Arts system, the graduates were the guys that couldn't get a job and they were taking another year of design. I mean, it was really not very meaningful.

152 Blum: This is 1951, and this was a school that was still in the Beaux Arts system.

Richardson: Well, they were using that system. They were using a project system.

Blum: Do you think Turpin Bannister brought you in because you were an advocate of contemporary design? Was that something he wanted to incorporate into the program and that made you attractive to him?

Richardson: Well, it wasn't the fact that they weren't doing contemporary design so much. When I said the Beaux Arts system, it was assigning a project primarily based on the renderings and so on—not models. He thought I—not only with my reputation at Skidmore—could attract graduate students. As it turned out, I did because people had heard my name, I guess. I was beginning to get foreign students. This was just after I came. It was announced and, I think, even in that first semester I had two or three Egyptian students and a Turkish man, Chinese and so on, who had not planned to come before but they heard about, not me personally, but the fact that I'd been at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and head of design in Chicago. It was not a big name, but it was an attractive thing.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Blum: You were saying that you thought that some students were attracted to the program because they had heard of you and came to the University of Illinois. What was it that you actually did to the existing program to improve it or did you just develop graduate studies?

Richardson: Going back just a minute to answer the first question. Actually there were quite a few students who had been studying at the University of Illinois, but when they heard that a real graduate program, a structured graduate program with me coming down to head it up, was going to take shape, they decided to take graduate work. I didn't really attract from a lot of other places right away. But they did find out that I was going to be there, and it

153 made a big difference. As a matter of fact, most of those students were still on the GI Bill, so it was very easy for them to make this transition into the graduate program. So, they looked on it as a great opportunity to study with this man who had this experience at Skidmore. Two of them were later my partners, John Severns and Jim Scheeler. As former GIs, they were more mature, and, of course, the foreign students who came were quite mature and quite serious. So I started with a cadre of about fifteen very mature students, and I didn't have to go into a lot of the fundamentals and so on. I, frankly, didn't try to structure the program right away until I got the feel of what the students needed and what the level was and so on. I immediately started into trying to give them a professional experience like I was running at Skidmore. In effect, just like Gordon's thing, it was like a kind of a graduate school there. The transition for me was pretty easy, too. I treated these young students just as I treated my young designers at Skidmore and tried to give them problems that were real problems in the sense of it. It wasn't a true hands-on situation, but it wasn't just some hypothetical palace for some potentate in wherever. They were real things. In one case, I even gave them a project that I had in Chicago, which didn't sound like much but was really kind of interesting. That was to design a prototype for a national gas station chain. It sounds like a very easy problem, but it wasn't really that easy. They had a lot of fun doing it, because they had to think up the name and did the whole thing just like we'd done at Skidmore. I had all kinds of problems like that. I gave a professional practice course. You asked me before if I carried the business school and the practice course into the school, and I did. I started a professional practice course at that time, and I gave a lecture twice a week. By this time, I had so few students and I wasn't doing any practice, I was able to give them a lot of time, just as Mies was able to give us a lot of time when I was a student that first year when he wasn't distracted by a lot of other activities. As a consequence, I got to know the students very well and, I think in all honesty, they got an awful lot from this. Of course, Bannister, the chairman, was delighted. We did one project for a local church where we had a competition, and they did beautiful models. It was the first models that they had ever done down there but some well known for their architecture delineation. I remember, we had a big public display, and they were

154 tremendously excited about it. Bannister, of course, was tickled to death. It was a big success.

Blum: Somehow in that way, weren't you transmitting what you had learned with Mies in terms of process?

Richardson: As I said before, we even used that same space house as a demonstration, and these young men were just as confused as I had been until I explained, which I could do, of course, in English and he couldn't. I explained what we were trying to do, and they were delighted. As a matter of fact, "I still have some photographs of those houses they did even in that first year.

Blum: Ambrose, you talked about a competition. You know, entering competitions is something that has run through your career from early on, especially in the 1950s. The first thing I remember seeing or at least knowing about was the Marshall Field's competition.

Richardson: That was with Skidmore. That was a very interesting one because we'd done work before the war for Marshall Field's, but that wasn't a competition. This is when Gordon was there, and we did a whole first floor remodeling project—if you can imagine Marshall Field's whole first floor. I don't think we've talked about this before. Unfortunately, this is one of the series of photographs that I've mislaid somewhere. When I find it again, I'll certainly tell you because it's probably the only one in existence. Owings was asked by Hughston McBain, who was then president of Marshall Field's. Now, we're going way back before the war. See, at that time we were into this department store stuff. You know, L. S. Ayres, as I said, and Charles Stevens and other stores. And Marshall Field knew about it. I don't know how Nat managed to get the idea across, but we were asked to do this. We did a very exciting thing. Gordon, with his big ideas, suggested we knock out all the current show windows on Wabash and State and make one big glass showcase out of that whole lower floor. That's the first time that I recall in architecture where the whole big open front was used—glass from the sidewalk level all the way up. We didn't have a show window as such. He

155 used the whole store as a show window. Well, we made renderings of this whole thing and, Bruce Adams designed some very interesting fixtures, the whole thing. I did all the watercolor sketches, and we did an airbrush rendering of the clock corner with the clock in it. Alan Robinson, who drew very skillfully, drew a picture of a Pied Piper in a kind of a Christmas window effect. It was very exciting project. But the window didn't go ahead, and it's just as well, again. We stripped all the lovely Corinthian caps off the columns. You know, modernized the whole thing. That was the whole idea. I don't think they bought it. Looked at it and said, "This is very interesting but we're not that bold." It kind of killed the image except for the clock. In any case, that was fun.

Blum: There was also another Marshall Field's competition in 1949.

Richardson: That was very interesting because Marshall Field's had decided to go out and build a shopping center way outside the Loop. Well, really a suburban shopping center. This was one of the first ones, to my knowledge, across the country. Maybe Victor Gruen or somebody had done Hudson's in Detroit or something. I'm not sure. But, in any case, they were going to be bold and go out and build this new shopping center, and they located a place west of Evanston or up in that area, the Skokie area. They asked Owings and Al Shaw and some Kansas City firm and I believe one of the big shopping center people, maybe it was Victor. I think there were four firms involved. They gave us a basic program of how many square feet we needed in this big shopping center, the traffic problems and the parking and so forth. We worked on that very hard, and I was in charge of the design and Art Myhrum—I referred to him several times. He was a very talented young architect, a little difficult to be with, very temperamental, but very talented and very bright. He had been a classmate of Ulrich Franzen and that group out of the Harvard graduate school. He was, again, one of my brilliant, young team. He was a terrific designer. In any case, we did this, and we had a whole idea of lowering the parking area so you wouldn't see all this sea of cars. In other words, we tried to depress that and kind of landscape it so that you had all the cars with the shopping mall in the center. But you wouldn't

156 have that look so many of the shopping centers have now—just that huge blank wall and sea of parking. Then we developed a large plaza, too, and then a high-rise office building. I did a perspective rendering of this, and we did a beautiful model. We had it built. We had a small model shop at that time and a man named Red Sherwood was our model builder, and he was very skillful. We decided we were going to take it over. Marshall Field arranged the interviews for each one of us, Al Shaw and our firm and so forth. I remember we prepared for it and Nat said, "I want to get some big pictures of Venice." We got some big pictures of Venice and had them blown up to great big pictures. His idea was to compare this plaza historically—and he was a great one on this—with the great Piazza San Marco in Venice, with a tower. We had this tower and there was the big plaza and so on. It was a pretty neat idea.

Blum: Sounds very imaginative to make that comparison.

Richardson: He was terrific that way. The funny part about this story is that we had this large model. I think it was four by eight. We had to rent a station wagon to get it over there. Art and Nat and I were going over with all these photographs and these drawings, thirty-by-forty drawings, and a really beautiful presentation. We were heading over and we were going to meet at Marshall Field's store up in the executive offices. Just as we got to State Street, we were stopped. There was a parade. A big, brass band came down and Art Myhrum said, "There goes Al Shaw with his presentation." I thought that was marvelous. I've never forgotten it. Owings thought it was funny, too. But, anyway, Owings made a superb presentation of this great idea of comparing this new shopping center to the San Marco, which I think they liked very much. However, we did not win the competition. Perkins and Will, I think, were involved in this, too, weren't they?

Blum: I’m not sure, but I know that Loebl, Schlossman was.

Richardson: I was just thinking who the other architects were. But they did not win. Eventually, they hired Jerry Loebl and it's the famous Old Orchard shopping

157 center. That was the beginning of it. Like most competitions, nothing really came out of the competition except a lot of fun and a lot of memories. We were paid, by the way, to do it. It was a paid competition, so there was no great loss on our part. Whenever Skidmore does a competition or any of us, we always put in more effort than we really get paid for. I'm sure it cost Nat something. We did it partially as a labor of love—on Art's part and mine.

Blum: Well, it seems you entered competitions while you were at Skidmore, you did it after you left Skidmore. There's a whole list.

Richardson: My students even up to now—I say "my students" although I've been retired—but the latest is one of my sophomore girls who just won the Paris Prize. It still goes on. I think part of that came out of the Beaux Arts tradition going way back to school, where I said that all of our training was competitive. It's really what it amounted to. I think another thing came out. During the depression, there wasn't much work for architects and so regularly there were competitions to do houses or competitions to do storefronts. We talked yesterday about Paul Schweikher winning this G.E. competition for a house. Hugh Stubbins was involved. All of these well- known names. I think, probably even [Eero] Saarinen and some of those people. The competitions were a way of life. Not that you got a commission, but you got cash and you got recognition in the journals and so on. I remember, the glass block people had a series of competitions trying to promote glass block in every way. I remember doing two or three of them myself as a young man. I did a dairy or a restaurant or something incorporating glass block. I never won any of those, but some of my colleagues did. Harry Weese won several competitions. Then they had the famous furniture competition that the Museum of Modern Art sponsored, and Eero Saarinen won, and Charles Eames. These competitions really launched a good many careers. Although they weren't architecture commissions, they were notoriety, money, and so on. The Chicago Tribune had a rooms competition every year. They were for designing a child's room or a living room. I had to declare a holiday. Everybody called in sick at Skidmore when those things were due. I think we probably took up half the prizes

158 every year. I won one sent in Prue's name because Nat was so jealous of any of these things. That's why they had to lie and call in sick. He wanted us all, as I said, twenty-four hours a day and none of this competition stuff for him unless it was done through the office, and there were a couple. I won one of the top awards one year, and it was very embarrassing because I used Prue's name. They called her up, and the interviewer said she was a housewife who had won one of the top prizes. It was very beautifully done. They published it in color in the Sunday Tribune. It's a big publication. I've lost it. She was terribly embarrassed because she had to lie a little bit. She said, "Well, my husband helped me."

Blum: Do you think there was a reason why competitions were so prevalent, say, in the 1940s and 1950s sponsored by electric companies and home building companies and you say the Chicago Tribune"? Is that still true today?

Richardson: Not nearly to that extent. You'll notice in the AIA publication, and you'll notice in, I think, the others, too, they'll have a list of coming events. There will usually be two or three competitions. Crumlish and Sporleder go to competitions all the time. They win quite a few. There are not as many as there were. That's simply because I think during the 1960s, for example, there were a lot of commissions. A large office just can't afford the time to do a competitions, so you'll find that most of the competition entries are academic people or students. Not too many people can afford the time to do them unless the odds are very good.

Blum: Do you think, that there were in the 1940s and 1950s, so many new ideas, companies wanting to bring out and encourage new ideas, new materials, use of their own materials?

Richardson: I think that was true. I think that was also true in the 1930s. I'm just trying to think back. That's why I'm being hesitant. I think there's even more of that in the 1930s, and, of course, a lot more people involved in the competitions because there was so little work. If you didn't have any work you might as well do a competition on the chance that you would get the money plus the

159 recognition. I was at Skidmore all through the late 1940s, and we entered a couple but those were sponsored as a firm. I remember one in particular. Chuck Wiley, the man I referred to that succeeded me, was extremely skillful at competitions. Nat just had him do it under my direction and we won. He spent full-time working on that competition.

Blum: But for SOM.

Richardson: For the firm. Competition was one of the things that really launched Cesar Pelli when he was with Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall out on the West Coast. The Progressive Architecture people have a competition, as you know, every year for new ideas or new projects. He did this huge hillside complex and showed me the model. He won, got first prize, and was on the cover page and all this publicity. I said, "Was this a real project?" And he said, "Of course not. It was just done for this competition." His big firm on the West Coast paid him. He said, "The model alone cost $3,000." They weren't getting any money out of this, but the publicity value was so good. So a good many of these things, particularly that Progressive Architecture annual award, are largely promotional things. You have big names go into it, as you know.

Blum: Well, it's good public relations.

Richardson: Oh, yes. You get all of your hotshot names going in there almost every year. I'd say it's still a pretty active thing. But going back to my own case, I think I encourage my students to do it—just because of my training. Even when I came up here to Notre Dame recently, I encouraged all my fifth-year people to take the national prizes and the national awards. Many of them have tried for the LeBrun, which I referred to before, which comes every year. It's a very nice prize. I don't know what it is now. Something like $10,000. It's enough to go to Europe and have a very nice trip. And, of course, the Rotch Traveling Fellowship out at MIT—it's just for MIT people—still goes on. Washington University has one. I've forgotten the name of that now, but some of my students in the past have won that. The University of Illinois still gives the traveling fellowship, the Plym Prize, they call it, every year. There's still a lot

160 of competitions that the individual schools are giving, but there are a lot of national competitions, too. There was just recently one that Patrick Horsbrugh entered for a new memorial park in Washington. One of my former students, here at Notre Dame, just won the new competition for the memorial for the Korean War in Washington."

Blum: It still presents a challenge?

Richardson: Yes. Maybe not to the extent as it did, but very definitely.

Blum: And you encourage your students to do that?

Richardson: Oh, very much so. Sure.

Blum: When you were at Illinois, you said you did not make significant changes during the first year but you slowly introduced new ideas.

Richardson: I said I didn't make a structured program until I saw what the needs were. But I gave them problems, not projets, not for rendering's sake, but to actually try to get a thinking process going to see if they could actually solve a realistic architectural problem if a client came in. That's why 'I mentioned this gas station chain or something that wasn't the ordinary, typical architectural problem of doing a wealthy estate home or something like that. So I did do that, and then I introduced the whole idea of the model. But probably the most important thing happened at the end of the year. That was when Charles Blessing, who was director of the Plan Commission in Chicago, and I had worked with him through SOM before, and Harry Weese, whom I had known for many years, decided to do a kind of a project. I don't know who sponsored it or who asked them to do it. In any case, Harry and Charles did most of the promoting on this thing to develop a major exhibit to be shown at the Hilton Hotel in one of the big lobbies there. I undertook to work with them because I agreed with their basic idea—and, of course, knew them very well and liked them very much—to use my graduate students in the summer program to develop all the models and all the visual material and so on. This

161 whole exhibit was called "Chicago's Tomorrow," and it anticipated a thirteen- mile island, two miles off the east shore of Lake Michigan, the idea being that the lake cuts the city of Chicago really in half, if you think of it as an apple and take a big bite out of the apple. I think this is really Harry. I don't take the credit for this original idea at all, because it was Harry's and I don't think he ever gave up on it completely. In any case, we developed this huge model. We built it all. I say "we" because I was very active in the whole thing. I had about six graduate students, I think. We did a satellite town. We did what we called a strip city, which ran across what is now the Eisenhower Expressway, that whole middle strip. We anticipated that there would be a university there, which later became the University of Illinois Circle campus. We anticipated the medical developments and housing and all the rest of it. I did drawings. I did several myself and Jim Scheeler, one of my graduate students and later partner, did a couple. These were large thirty-by-forty drawings, and this model must have been, I suppose, twelve, fifteen feet long. Every little house on it. These neighborhoods laid out. We did a satellite town and all. We did all of this in six or eight weeks time. Charles Blessing, I might add, came down and helped, and then we finally wound up the last three or four days, and he got some space out at the end of Navy Pier. We took all of our stuff, all my team and everything, and we slept on old couches out there and we charretted that for the last two or three days. Of course, by that time, Harry was actively helping. All of us were doing these models. Then we took it over to the Hilton and set it up. It took up a whole—it wasn't a ballroom—but a huge upstairs lobby on the front. Of course, it got tremendous publicity.

Blum: I know it was published.

Richardson: It was in all the newspapers.

Blum: How did your students respond to that?

Richardson: Oh, gosh, they loved it! They were tremendously excited, of course. They were a part of this whole thing, and even though they didn't get individual

162 publicity, I tried to give them as much as possible. Of course, I got as many photographs for them as I could. They felt that they had had a real learning experience. I remember Chuck Wiley writing me at the time. He was still with Skidmore and Owings. He said, "I've seen graduate work before including Harvard,"—he'd gone to Harvard graduate school—"but I've never seen anything like this in my life. This is just stunning." Of course, we were just very tickled to death at that. That kind of really anchored me as the graduate guru or whatever down at Illinois. That began to attract students as well. I mean, the word gets around finally. The unfortunate thing about that whole exhibit was that Charles Blessing—who was executive director of the Plan Commission—was sort of in a position of cross-purposes. It was all right for Harry and all right for me. It really was just a project, just some ideas. I was just an academic guy and Harry was a young practitioner, but Charles was in a position of authority over at the Plan Commission and, boy, it didn't go well at all at the Plan Commission.

Blum: Was the project taken seriously enough to threaten his position?

Richardson: Yes. It looked like it was a position of the Plan Commission, you see, rather than his individual thing, an exercise. As a consequence—I'm not sure of this—but he lost his job, and eventually he went to Detroit. He's been in Detroit ever since. He's now retired. That's why I say it's an unfortunate consequence of this whole thing. He never cried to me about any of this. We're great friends to this day.

Blum: Too bad his role in the project was misunderstood.

Richardson: There may be a lot more to the story, of course, than I know. That certainly didn't help his situation, that's for sure. But it sure helped mine. No doubt about it. It was a wonderful exercise and wonderful fun. I still have the pictures of some of the drawings and models and whatnot.

163 Blum: I've seen some of the photographs and some of the articles that were published with regard to this competition or exhibition. You taught for five years?

Richardson: Yes, I resigned in 1956, so I had five full years.

Blum: When you were hired, did you have an idea of what you thought might be important to communicate to students?

Richardson: Yes, I thought so. I felt I was a good transition. I didn't teach. I was not much of a theoretician. I was always a pragmatic person. I guess it's the engineer side of me. As I said, I can't paint an abstract. I'm just not an abstract thinker. I'm more concrete, and that's why my paintings are realistic or semi-realistic. I realize that may not be art, but it's fun for me and it is what I could do better. I was really trying to fill—I still think it exists in most architectural education and in the profession—the gap. This big jump from the academic, theoretical and, I think, very necessary part of design to the actual realities of budgets, to the realities of business that I mentioned before. So really my program was based on that. Let's give these young men and women an experience that is half academic and half reality, as much as I can. That's one of the unfortunate things about architecture, Betty. It is not like medicine or even law or some of the other professions. It's awfully hard to get a hands-on situation. We don't have any research to speak of, and we can't afford to do an experimental building. I mean, it's done, but you can't do it in the same sense. It's very unusual for a realistic client who's going to build a building to give it to five or six students and a professor and say, "You're my architectural team." It has happened, with Louis Kahn, I'm sure, and maybe it happened in Gropius's case, you know, where he had graduate students who made up his early firm, I think, The Architects' Collaborative. So, it does happen, but I know in my case, certainly no one, when I was down at Illinois, came to me and said, "Look, we want to hire you and your students to be our architects." Because usually when you hire an architect, you want a full commitment in any case. But the point I'm making is it's very difficult to give realistic experience in an academic atmosphere.

164 Blum: Were there any work-study arrangements that you encouraged or that were offered to students?

Richardson: I wanted to do that, and I wanted to do that here at Notre Dame. It's very difficult to handle, but some schools do it very well. For example, Cincinnati has had that system for many, many years, and it's worked fine. Ball State has it and so on. But the internship—if you want to call it that—has to fit into your academic standards. In other words, you just can't say, "Well, I'm going to have this student go out and work for a half a year or a year, " and have him end up making his money in a lumber yard or something very ordinary. If everybody could go to Skidmore or everybody could go to Loebl Schlossman or everybody could go, you know, to fine firms, that's one thing. But you can't always control that. So, I found it a very admirable idea, but a very difficult thing to really work and practice to be sure the hands-on experience tied into their real academic growth or their total growth. It's too easy to say, "Well, let the practitioners take care of it." I tried to fill that gap by bringing my own experience into the projects or problems to be solved or whatever our program was. My close association with the students paid off, I think. I also might add that I gave this professional practice course, and we called it "Theory of Design" at that time, but it wasn't theory of design at all. It was just Bannister's name to make it sound appealing. It was just simply a transition course. I gave it to the underclassmen, too, to the fifth-year students, and they liked it as much, of course, as my graduates. I included the whole thing. I was giving that course at that time to as many as seventy or eighty students. I still see these people years and years later and they say, "Oh, Professor. How are you?" They're familiar faces. It was a very popular course.

Blum: It sounds like a very useful course as well.

Richardson: It was, and they understood it. I found out later that a lot of people say, "Well, why don't you start telling them this when they're sophomores?"

165 They're not interested that early, because they're still on a cloud. They don't know what the realities are.

Blum: Of balancing the budget and running a business?

Richardson: The sad part about it. But the fifth-year students and the graduate students, I think, by that time know they're going to have to face realities pretty soon, and then they'll work it out.

Blum: As you got into the second, third, and fourth years of teaching, away from private practice and the pressures you were experiencing at Skidmore, and were experiencing other pressures in the academic world, how did you feel about the choice you had made?

Richardson: I felt pretty good about that. I was very fortunate, Betty. Skidmore had done a couple of projects down at U of I. Not very exciting ones, but some housing projects. The university architect, Ernest L. Stouffer, knew me and knew of me. That first year, just after we'd finished the Chicago thing, he asked me if I'd be willing to, at first he said "program, " the new building for the Law School. This was at the end of the first year I was there. I thought he just meant help with developing the program. And, I said, "Of course." Well, it turns out he wanted me to do the design of it. So that was the first breakthrough, that any faculty person had done this for fifty years or more. I don't know. When I found that out, I said, "Well, I'd be delighted." So I rented a little office space there in this little campus town. I shared it with one of the other architectural professors, who was working on some houses and whatnot. We set up a little drafting room. I hired three of my graduate students to help build a model in my basement. It was sort of carrying on pretty much the same thing. My client was the University of Illinois, and I had the opportunity to travel around the country with a man who was then chairman of the building committee, Russell Sullivan, who later became dean and a very close friend of mine. We traveled around together looking at schools on the West Coast. We went out to Cornell, we went to Michigan, and we went to Princeton and all, seeing other law schools. When I did the

166 design, it was a very major breakthrough, of course. It was a Miesian type of thing, very cold, sitting on the fringe of this oversized Georgian campus. It created a lot of controversy, and it was a very interesting experience for me because I had this big model in my own basement. My presentation was to the building committee and to the dean and to the dean of the Fine Arts School, too—at that time a wonderful old historian by the name of Rexford Newcomb. I remember it very well. It brought together all these distinguished men. The chief of the physical plant and the university architect were there. Well, I brought all this big gang over to my basement to unveil this model. It was eight feet long. I knew that it was very difficult for the dean of the Law School to read drawings, so I deliberately made this model so the roof came off and every piece of furniture was in it and everything was there. This was an eighth-scale model. This was a big scale model. I had trees made out of wire screen, you know, stylized trees. I unveiled it and everybody oohed and aahed. It was wonderful. Turpin Bannister was on the committee, too. It was great. I served cocktails, and Prue helped me as always. It was wonderful. They were thrilled to see this thing. It was pretty stark, comparatively, anyway. But they liked it. The dean said, "This is just wonderful. I'm so thrilled." The building was named after this marvelous eminent lawyer and legal mind named Dean Harno when he passed away. He just couldn't visualize things very well. As I say, that's one of the reasons we built this big model. He says, "Ambrose, this just looks wonderful. Now, the only thing I don't understand, is what it's going to look like." I had done everything possible! He looked at these wire trees and said, "What are these?" But everybody else, of course, thought it was beautiful. Subsequently, we got it out of the basement. The ones that worked on this model, by the way, were two Egyptians and I've forgotten who else now. I was trying to think if Cesar Pelli worked on it, but I guess not. He worked with me on other projects in my basement. I had a sort of basement studio at that time, aside from this place I rented.

Blum: When you made the presentation, did you use anything you'd picked up observing for many years how Nat Owings would sell a project and himself and the firm?

167 Richardson: I learned from him all the time. See, I had made a lot of presentations with him from the earliest days. By that time, Betty, of course, I'd made a lot of presentations of my own. All the Oak Ridge things I did alone and the Manchester Store in Madison, Wisconsin.

Blum: But wasn't it really different doing it for yourself and not with the prestige of SOM behind you?

Richardson: Oh, yes. It's bound to be. So, I did try to incorporate the drama. I could have taken the model over and shown it, but bringing them over to see the studio when it was 99 percent complete and having it covered with a sheet and taking the sheet off, added a little drama. They liked that. To go into the artist's studio is kind of like seeing a guy sculpting and so forth. And then I had the students standing by, too. Then, I was going to mention, we got it out of the basement, which wasn't easy, and I had a station wagon at that time. We took it over to the president's office, and I presented it to the president, who was then President James Stoddard, the very controversial president. He left shortly after that. He got in a bad situation with that controversial drug krebiozen out on the West Side at the university's medical school. He was a very bright person, and I think he was delighted to see the breakthrough and the contemporary stuff as a change from this eclectic, false-chimney architecture. I think it really shocked a lot of people, particularly with something as traditional as law. If you're going to maintain tradition, the Law School would certainly be the place to do it, and suddenly here's this breakthrough—moving from the Richardsonian stone building where law was down at the other end of the campus to this sleek, new thing.

Blum: Was there any design effort on your part to make some connection with the existing campus?

Richardson: I felt very strongly and still do about context. In this particular case, I was really lucky because this was on the fringe. I mean, it was just pretty far out from the center of the campus, which is very largely this over-scaled

168 Georgian, as I said. So, that wasn't much of a problem. But I did maintain the same family of materials, the same blend of brick that they had, the same pattern of brick, and the same color schemes all the way through basically, even though I was using metal, as opposed to wood-mullioned windows. I tried to maintain that at least. Then, of course, the thing that I liked to do so much and did then, was creating a courtyard, a landscape treatment. I actually developed—this goes back to Mies—this outer space, this outer courtyard space, which we really used for teaching. On nice days, they would actually go out there. I did maintain that. But more importantly at the time, when this building went out for bids, and the prevailing building costs at that time were ranging between thirty-five and forty dollars per square foot, which sounds like nothing now. Of course, you have to realize when this was. I designed it in 1952, and I think it was finally finished in 1956.

[Tape 6: Side I]

Richardson: This was the first fully air-conditioned building. We had the original type of marble from the other building for the floor. We had the same kind of marble floor in the teaching corridor—we called it then—the smoking corridor, which was adjacent to the classrooms. There is a lot of teaching done in the corridors of law school. We got two extra bays of library space. All of the offices were well appointed, and we got the whole thing for fifteen dollars a square foot. I brought in the building, and I designed the building. It literally cost half—with good finishes and all the rest of it. Needless to say…

Blum: Your stock went up.

Richardson: ...my stock went up really high. And the board of trustees was delighted. I remember Park Livingston was then president of the board of trustees, and we became friends and knew each other for years. He thought I was some kind of genius. He said, "The hell with this old architecture! We've found ourselves a way." I finally ended up doing, I think, twenty-six buildings there including all the dorms. I remember at one of the board meetings, Charles Havens, who was the director of physical planning and was the university

169 architect's boss, took me to all the presentations. Talk about presentations—I made all the presentations to the board. Always. Even for some other architects. I was just their right-hand consultant on everything, plus the fact that I was getting the design commission for this. This is an aside, but I think it's kind of funny. At that time, also, in addition to Park Livingston being on the board with some other people that I got very well acquainted with, one was the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, and he was a wonderful, gruff old guy. I was making a presentation of a building—this was much later, three or four years later—and he looked at me and he said, "Ambrose, you've done more damage to this campus than an atom bomb." He was very much a traditionalist. In retrospect, some of' it was pretty raw. I always used the joke, and I think I got this from Bill Priestley—with every commission, I always throw in a bucket of ivy seed to cover up my mistakes. So maybe some of it didn't need a lot of ivy seed. The upshot of the whole experience, just to make it brief, was I did all of these buildings, and it really built my office, of course, the fact that I had this assurance. After the law building success, even before it was finished, the university architect and the physical plant man came to me and said, "We have to undertake an expansion program of residence halls and would you design these residence halls for us?" I did do that when I was still teaching the graduate program, and I got a couple of graduate students to help me with the models and so on, and we got paid for it. So there was an exception. That was really the beginning of the office, because they came to me and said, "Now look, we're so pleased with your consultation, we want you to do a master plan for the university, a ten-year plan, and we'd like to have you do these residence halls. Would you mind if we"—and this came from the president and the trustees—"would you mind teaching half-time and working for us half-time designing the buildings?" Being in effect, the university architect, I suppose, is about what it amounted to. The university architect was growing older, and I think they were looking for a successor, and this would be a very slick way of doing it and saving themselves a lot of money in the process, which I recognized and didn't mind at all. I was being paid by the state and being paid, I thought, very well—a full professor with all the perks that go with it. I said, "I'd be glad to do that." They said, "Well, we'll check with the department." By that

170 time, Bannister had gone. That's a different story. Incidentally, he was scared to death of that law building. He said, "They're never going to accept that. You're going to put yourself in an untenable position. What if they turn it down?" I said, "Well, what if they turn it down? What have I got to lose?" It happened they didn't turn it down. If they turned down the design and it wasn't built, all I had to say was, "Get another architect, " so I was delighted. I was in a pretty strong bargaining position as far as I was concerned. Bannister left. The faculty was annoyed with him, and he got a vote of no confidence and so forth. It was really too bad. So they decided to have a committee system for the department of architecture, and they wrote the bylaws in such a way that I couldn't be on the committee. There was no representative of the graduate program. It was deliberate, but I knew that. As I say, the politics was pretty fierce, by this time, particularly with the success I'd had on the law building and all the other things. Of course, the graduate program had really grown in size by that time. We'd won two or three national competitions, my graduate students and I. These had gotten all the publicity. Some of the faculty, I think looking back, were really very resentful. Here's this smarty comes down from Chicago. So, they said, "No." The faculty voted and said, "No." I couldn't serve two masters. I was either going to fish or cut bait. I couldn't be a professor and still do the university work, too. So I went back to Mr. Havens, who was my client in effect, as the head of the physical plant, and told him the situation. I think it was Mr. Havens who went up to the board. I don't know who all was involved. He said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "Well, I've been a practitioner at heart, and I like the teaching. Frankly, under the circumstances, if you will assure me of enough work to set up my own shop and hire a couple of people and of doing these residence halls and everything, if I can get assurance of a year's work, I'll just resign my professorship." So that was the idea.

Blum: Was this a Mies kind of arrangement where you came to the campus and then were given the campus development project?

171 Richardson: It wasn't anticipated at all. This all came about because of that Law School building. I had no idea of doing a building down there. I went down there to teach that program and that was it. Nor did I have any idea that I was ever going to be anywhere else, truthfully.

Blum: But in 1956 or 1957 when you made a decision to give up teaching to build, did you have some contracts in your hand?

Richardson: No.

Blum: Did you have other jobs?

Richardson: No. The only thing I had was his assurance that they would give me that work at least for a year. I took a gamble. I had a small consulting job up in Chicago with a client of my brother's, but that didn't amount to anything. I had, by that time, done some moonlighting for Naess and Murphy. They, of course, knew about me.

Blum: Who was the connection at Naess and Murphy? Al Shaw?

Richardson: Well, I was dealing mostly with Sigurd Naess but also Mr. Murphy, and Charlie Rummel was there at that time. It may have been Charlie Rummel who got me involved. I did several things with them. I did a high school on the North Side. I did four buildings moonlighting.

Blum: What capacity were you?

Richardson: A designer. I did mostly exteriors. They operated, at that time, the old- fashioned way, Mr. Naess was the planner and Al Shaw had been the designer. In other words, he put on the outside, the facade. That's the way a lot of the old-timers thought of designers. Like Andy Rebori, he never did plans. He was a designer. Al Shaw never did plans, he was a designer. He put on the outside. Well, that's how they thought of me. I was the designer, so I designed the outside. When the Chicago awards were given out—I won

172 three of them in one year—the toughest one for me was the Sun-Times. They asked me to do the Sun-Times building, and I was very excited about it. They had the site on the river. So, I developed a scheme that they followed. You could go right by and see the presses from Michigan Avenue and so forth. I had a scheme, which was based pretty much, not on Lever House really, but a on low-rise building for the presses and so on, and then a high tower—Marshall Field was the owner—and this was a luminous tower. The glass had the lighting behind it. The whole idea was at night you could see the whole thing. But it wasn't just regular glass, it was glass in panels that would stick out. It had a surface to it, a texture to it, as well as the light. Well, anyway, I had this lovely idea. I don't know how high the building was, thirty stories or something, and this low thing, and I took it up. I got very excited about it. They got excited about it. They were going to show it to Marshall Field. I think I had a night rendering of it even. Mr. Murphy called me up about three or four days later and said, "They were very excited about your scheme, but we can't do it." I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "They've already ordered the steel for a low building that Mr. Naess has laid out." Mind you, I got along very well with Mr. Naess up to that point. "There was no problem. He was kind of a tough old bird. At that particular time, they didn't have any hotshots like Gene Summers or so on.

Blum: Well, Al Shaw had been their designer, and then when they split...

Richardson: Originally, yes. I don't know who did the Prudential building. This is right about the same time as Prudential. In fact, Prudential may have been a little bit later. No, Prudential was earlier, because I remember. That was when I was still at Skidmore. I'm not sure. Anyhow, I was very upset over this thing, and I was young enough and temperamental enough to get kind of sore about it. I never swear that much to people because I like to get along with them, but I told Mr. Murphy, "Under the circumstances, I'm very disappointed, and I don't think I can do anything for you." This was a Monday. He said, "I'm coming down tomorrow to talk to you." He rented a limousine from the University Club and drove down—Mr. Murphy, Sr.—to meet with me at Illinois.

173 Blum: In Champaign?

Richardson: Yes. We went to lunch at the Urbana-Lincoln. He said, "You know, I've never seen Mr. Naess so upset in my life as I've seen him, and I've known him since we were young men." I said, "Why's that?" He said, "He's really upset about your attitude about the Sun-Times building." I said, "Well, I'm sorry. That was my scheme, and I thought you were hiring me as the designer." Well, as I said, it was a communication thing. A designer to them was somebody who put on the exterior. He said, "Will you do me a great favor and keep peace in the family? Will you design the Sun-Times building?" I said, "You're not talking about design, you're talking about putting a front on." He said, "I don't know what it is." I said, "Okay." So I went home and drew up those panels, and I've regretted it ever since. I've usually not said much about my relationship to the Sun-Times building, because there it sits for everybody to look at. I did this big airbrush rendering. I remember Cesar Pelli cut my friskets for me and helped me cut friskets, and I did it down in the basement, this airbrush building. And, of course, it had a big front-page spread when they were going to build their building. Here's a picture of the thing sitting on the water and knowing that's my drawing. Every time I see Carter Manny he's always needling me. He says, "You remember the Sun-Times building?" I say, "I wish you hadn't mentioned it." It's not among my favorite memories. But I did maintain very good relations with them until they became really established and they got going on O'Hare Field and some of these things. Then they began to get these people like Gertrude Kerbis drifting over from Skidmore. When things would get a little bit low, the Skidmore people would go back and forth. That whole O'Hare group of designers—I think, I'm not positive—the original ones were basically people who had been at Skidmore working on the academy or something. There was a lot of shifting going on. I guess I just fell out of it once they began organizing their own design group. Looking back, I don't know whether they really wanted me to come back to be "chief of design."

Blum: You mean at Murphy or Skidmore?

174 Richardson: Murphy.

Blum: Did they ever ask you?

Richardson: No, they never asked and I was perfectly happy down there. I was still teaching. Larry Perkins had asked me to come up there, too, but I just didn't want to go through this whole thing all over again. I wasn't about to move back to Chicago.

Blum: Were you afraid of working in another large corporate structure?

Richardson: Sure. It's like jumping back into the same fire. I didn't want to get into it. I was out of that.

Blum: So at the same time you were teaching, you were also maintaining touch with the practice of architecture by consulting for Naess and Murphy?

Richardson: Sure. Well, Naess and Murphy, and there were some other firms in Illinois that I was acquainted with. At that time, though, I was being offered other opportunities. I was a visiting lecturer at various places. Among other places, I went down for three or four years running to Auburn University in Alabama. It was our winter break, really, around February, and it was beautiful weather down there. I lectured down there, and they came up and asked me to meet them in Chicago one time. They offered me the deanship down there. That was back when I was still teaching. Later on, John Rettaliata—this is not publicly known—wanted me to come out there to the Illinois Institute of Technology. He asked me, but I didn't go. At that time, my young business was really very new. But here again, I didn't want to change. He offered it to me on a commuting basis. He said, "Well, just come here a couple days a week, " or words to that effect. I was very flattered that he offered it to me, but I really wasn't that interested.

175 Blum: In 1956-1957, you really made a break with the University of Illinois to establish A.M. Richardson and Associates, which by 1959 became Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Associates. John Severns joined in 1958 and Jim Scheeler joined in 1959.

Richardson: I made kind of a tentative arrangement with them when they were graduate students because I liked them so much. Severns was an engineer primarily, a very practical-minded guy. Jim was a very marvelous delineator and a good designer, I thought, and I liked them very much. I don't know why I picked them, but I told them we were great friends. I said, "If I ever start a business, I'd like to have you fellows join in." I wanted them to get some experience first. It just so happened that the plan followed through. In the meantime, though, when I did start my own business, I had two graduate students who had gotten their degrees, and I took them with me—not as partners.

Blum: Were they associates?

Richardson: They were the associates. So, I rented a place in downtown Urbana in a former apartment upstairs on the second floor and put out my shingle and that started it.

Blum: One of your early brochures says that your firm was established to "act as consultants in planning and in design." Would you explain that?

Richardson: That was exactly my idea. I felt my strong suit, Betty, was design. I certainly did not have the experience of a John Dinkeloo or anybody else in production documents. What I wanted to do was set up a "design" consultation firm. In other words, if somebody wanted to do a school, I would do what Perkins and Will did with many associates. They would do the design and the other people would do the production documents. That's exactly what some of the fine designers had done elsewhere. They'd get an associate to do the construction documents. Well, this is exactly what I wanted to do. It's exactly what Cesar Pelli has done, by the way, and look what a success he's made.

176 You don't hear who his associates are. You hear nothing but Cesar Pelli, but basically his is a design consultation firm.

Blum: Was anyone else doing it at the time in 1957?

Richardson: I got my idea from Sam Marx, Mies's girlfriend's first husband. I had only met him a couple of times. That was his system. He and his partner, Noel Flint, I believe, did all this classy design, and then they had all the production documents—at least this is the way I always heard it—done by some firm in California. That's why he could get these great fees and everything else. Well, I thought, this is my business. Since Murphy had wanted me and these other people, we could develop this design business, and that's the way it started. That's what I did primarily with the university on all of their projects. I associated. For the law school I associated with the university architect's office. They did the production documents. When we got into the residence halls, I associated with one of the local architectural firms. This was ideal for me for two reasons. One, I didn't have to worry about all the details of production documents and construction and all of that part of it. Two, politically it looked good from the university's point of view because it didn't look like—as a state organization, public agency—they were giving me an over-amount of fees because it looked like a pay-off type of thing. In fact, a lot of people thought it was anyway, I think, because I did so much work there. Third, it was really what we did best. It was proper use of talent and efficiency. I was very efficient in design. The ideas came quickly. I knew the techniques of presentation. I knew the techniques of model building and all that sort of thing, whereas the other thing was somebody else's bag. So, I felt this was ideal. That's what worked out for the university and worked out very beautifully. But, oh, no, not these partners. "Money is in the other stuff. Money is in the other stuff." They just insisted. "We've got to get full production, we've got to get full production, we've got to get full production,” and they hammered that at me.

Blum: Were they talking about a matter of control?

177 Richardson: I think mostly it was a matter of fees. No, no we had control. I didn't have much trouble controlling the thing. It was a matter of fees. They said, "Well, you know all the gravy is gone." We lost money on every damned thing we ever touched when we did full production. It was terrible! And we made money like mad on all of our design stuff. It was so damned stupid! Severns is doing this to this day.

Blum: Is doing what, consulting?

Richardson: No, doing full production. It was nothing but a headache for all of us. We weren't skilled at it. That's where all the mistakes are made. The way I had it, we had all the fun, all the gravy, and none of that nonsense. I had to end up getting thirty-five or forty people, and, you know, a worrisome thing to me—all the specifications, all the construction, and all the risks you take. And for what? Oh, we made money on some of it. But it was just the nature of those guys, and I was too nice a guy to say, "Get out if you don't like it." I should have been like Harry Weese—maintain A.M. Richardson and Associates and leave it at that. But, oh, no, they had to have their names in there. Right away—Richardson, Severns, Scheeler. It was really unfortunate that I wasn't more hard-boiled, because, frankly, I'd given it to them in the first place. I should have said, "Look, you want this deal or don't you want it? Forget it otherwise. You've got to do it my way." But no, I was too nice a guy.

Blum: But the firm lasted for eighteen years.

Richardson: They were excellent people. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying I made a mistake there.

Blum: Just a different idea in direction, I suppose.

Richardson: That's right. Later on, in consulting with Orput and Orput, Orput came to me and he wanted that design consultation.

Blum: This was for Niles East, West, and North—the high schools?

178 Richardson: Yes, good for you. I worked with them—primarily Raymond, the senior Orput—for however long it took to do all these jobs. I made the presentations with him and went in for the original presentation to get the jobs and competed with him. I turned a lot of it over to Jim Scheeler, who was very capable of doing it, but Orput was rather resentful of that, of course. He said, "I wanted you, " which I could understand. I mean, after all, that's what he was looking for. I didn't ever back off and turn it over to Jim completely. I could have. I did on many other jobs, because he was, goodness knows, eminently qualified to do it on his own. But when they'd come to me to get design services, they wanted me. So, I did most of the presentations.

Blum: Did you ever think, during the seventeen or eighteen years that you had this architectural practice, of restructuring so that you would be only the design consultant?

Richardson: I thought about it a lot but, here, again, it was just a question of determination on their part. By this time, we had also hired other very good people. One in particular was a man named Philip Greene, who later became a limited partner, by the way. He was a fine designer. He was an all-around person and fine designer, but he felt the same thing. There's some feeling about it. I know I associated with Larry Smith, who's still my very good friend. I've referred to him many times. As much as he admires me and we get along so well, I don't think he ever thought of me as a full architect. I think this is what Severns and Scheeler and Greene felt. They felt they were sort of prostitutes in a way, that unless we did the full service we weren't really architects. I think there was a kind of a strong feeling about that. It was so strong that I think it would have just split the firm, without any question. I talked about it to them a lot, and I talked about it to a lot of our young associates. But I was the only one that felt that way. They all wanted full service, full service, full service.

Blum: It seems that there wasn't the flexibility to have a consulting firm or a full production firm or an engineering firm. It all had to be one big body. But that

179 was the trend. At one time, years ago, engineering was not done by an architectural firm, and architects who wanted to take over full production were not respected.

Richardson: Out East they still do most of it on a consulting basis. It was just a difference in points of view. Cesar has this, and as I said, it's eminently successful and it works very well. Maybe a lot of other firms do it, too. I know Perkins and Will and many of the schools downstate associated with other people. They had a very clear-cut deal. They just got 2 percent for the design, and the other people got 4 percent or whatever it was for the rest of the thing, and that was it.

Blum: Wasn't Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, built with the same arrangement? Perkins, Wheeler and Will with the Saarinens doing the design?

Richardson: I think so, yes. I know that the Saarinens did the design. I don't know what kind of deal they made.

Blum: I think that was the design only arrangement.

Richardson: It certainly worked out for Perkins and Will. It worked out for Orput, too, because the work that I did, for example, on that new Mies school, Niles North with the cluster school, is still there. It's just exactly west of Old Orchard. That was mine. Of course, they modified it some, but that was basically my scheme. I did the model for it and all that. It was such a successful building at the time that they got the high school in Schaumburg and several others based on what I'd done. So, they got a lot from me, too. I might say, though, they paid well. All of these consultation things worked out really well. I could either do them on a cost-plus basis or a percentage basis. I associated with several firms—not only Orput, but Mittlebusher and Tourtelot on three or four jobs, and John Fugard. I'm trying to think. I never did one with Holabird and Root. I did one with a local firm down in Champaign, Berger, Kelly and Unteed. I did residence halls with them, and I

180 did residence halls over at Eastern Illinois University. I had a lot of very good friends. The only disadvantage, Betty, was that once they had picked your brains, so to speak, once they had gone through one successful project that we had designed—I say "we" because the others were in it—then they said, "Well, we can do it from here. We've seen the tricks. We know how to do the models and we know what Richardson is going to do." So, the next time around they just forgot me. That happened with Larry Smith, good friend that he is. I had associated with him on a housing project, but the next time they hired him back, and he felt he didn't need me. The same thing with Mittlebusher and Tourtelot on one of them.

Blum: But that was one of the risks that you took doing only the consulting.

Richardson: It was a risk. Same thing happened to me at the art museum in Indianapolis. I had to associate politically, since I was out of state. You've never seen such chauvinists as the people in Indianapolis, the Hoosiers, you know. They had to have a Hoosier architect, so I had to associate with a local firm. It was a very pleasant association, I might add. But here again, we did very well. It's a terribly successful building, in my opinion. The financing part was great.

Blum: The Indianapolis Museum of Art?

Richardson: My consultation stuff carried the firm and overcame the losses that we took from the production stuff.

Blum: During the seventeen years when you were operating as an architectural firm, you did a lot of planning for college campuses on a consulting basis. The buildings you did, it seems, were mostly campus buildings, institutional buildings, residence halls, so you really became quite specialized.

Richardson: We were. That was because of our University of Illinois experience, because at Illinois we had done residence halls, we had done science buildings, we had done engineering buildings, libraries, and so forth. Of course, having a client like that, a satisfied client, is a terrific thing to sell. All I had to do was

181 call up Havens and say, "What about Richardson, Severns, Scheeler, " and, "Fine. That's great." It has nothing to do with me personally—well, it does in a way. We had gotten this reputation for doing this campus plan, the ten-year development plan for the university. Once you have these graduate students, they'll go out and kind of spread the word, because they wanted to come back and associate with me on certain things. I had one that came over here to Winona Lake at Warsaw, Indiana, and he had started a small firm, and he said, "There's a group here that wants to build a whole new campus, a Bible college." It's a Bible college area around Winona Lake. He said, "They're interviewing Eero Saarinen, and they would like to interview you if you'd be interested in the thing. They've heard about you." And I said, "Sure, I'd be interested in it." So I went over and met with him, and we interviewed this man. He had seen the little Concordia College that Saarinen designed in Fort Wayne [Indiana] and so forth, and he wanted something like that. He showed us the site, and it seemed like it was a very realistic thing. Well, nothing transpired. Then one day, I got a call from somebody saying they were from some college over in Ohio and that they wanted to talk to us about designing a master plan for their college and would I be interested in seeing them. It had to be a Saturday morning or something, and for some reason I couldn't see them. I said, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I can't see you, " but I had reached John Severns and said he was available. I said, "My partner will be glad to talk to you." So, this man came over, and I asked John later how it went. He said, "It went very well. He was very interested in this master plan and so forth." Well, by this time, John had been working with me on a master plan—not the master plan at Illinois—but they had also hired us to do the master planning for the medical center up in Chicago, which they were responsible for. In fact, I was the consultant for the medical center commission on the development of the medical center. This was for the city of Chicago. We got that through Park Livingston, who, again, was president of the board of trustees at Illinois and thought I was the greatest thing since fire in terms of architecture. I don't think aesthetically he was worrying about it. It was because they could save expenses.

Blum: You could bring it in under budget.

182 Richardson: Yes. They weren't used to that. Well, in any case, the next thing we knew, we had this job in Ohio. John went over there. I didn't want any part of it. It turns out it was one of the Bible Belt colleges. They are linked together, all of these little religious colleges. They all know each other, and they have the same boards and all this kind of stuff. It's really like a fraternity. It turns out this man from Winona Lake had told the man from Ohio about our firm, and he asked to come in and see us. John, by pure circumstances, took the thing. It went over so well that we designed the campus for them. The next thing I knew, John was off on a circuit—two or three of these colleges including Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee.

Blum: Is Eureka College another?

Richardson: Eureka College is another. That whole group of small colleges, that was all John. The fact is he got sick one time, and I had to make a presentation up in Kankakee. This was up at Olivet Nazarene. I didn't do many of the designs. I did the one little student union, but I left John alone for most of the stuff. I went in there to make a presentation. First of all, I was ready to make this presentation, and the president came in, and we all had to kneel and pray that the architects would give us a good fee. We had to wait for him for at least an hour because he was singing in the choir next door. Well, I waited around. Then we prayed for the architect to do a good job, and we prayed for the architect to be cooperative—just all this stuff. And it was so embarrassing to me, I just couldn't handle it. But I did, because it was business.

Blum: It sounds funny.

Richardson: It wasn't funny! I mean, these people were serious. I got the job done, and they liked the plan. I didn't negotiate any fee that day.

Blum: Did you join the church?

183 Richardson: Oh, gosh, no. When John came out back, I said, "John, I don't give a darn whether you're sick or not. I'm never going to tackle this thing again." But he ate it up, apparently. It didn't bother him. As a matter of fact, I think he was born a Mormon or something. I'm not sure. To this day, he's still doing that stuff. His partner, Lyle Reid, is one of these Bible Belt guys who had a connection with Eureka or one of these colleges along the way. He's a fine young man. I think he was one of the clients on that board or something. But as far as I know, he's still got a bunch of these things going. He had one over here in Indiana not too long ago. Capital University in Columbus. I don't know how many of them there are, but he's got a whole bunch of them. Of course, he was developing that as we were doing other things. But, going back to the academic thing, we knew all along that we had an awful lot of eggs in one basket, particularly the University of Illinois basket. So, that's why we were delighted to get the art museum in Indianapolis. I tried to get some industrial work, but to break into it, you've got to have a concerted plan and so forth. I really didn't tackle it with any kind of intelligence.

Blum: You were campus specialists, and included in campus buildings were art museums.

Richardson: That came about because I'd done the one at the University of Illinois.

Blum: The Krannert Art Museum?

Richardson: The Herman C. Krannerts were the donors of it. Mr. Krannert was on the board of the Indianapolis museum. He wasn't really that interested in art. His wife was, but he wasn't. But they put him on the board. Of course, that's what you do. Naturally, you want to get wealthy people in these positions. They wanted to do some feasibility studies. They wanted to do something about their downtown museum, which was old and very inadequate for the collection. They'd been promised more collections if they had good facilities. So, they asked me to do a feasibility study. They were so pleased with the museum at the U of I that the Krannerts asked me to do it. Mr. Krannert said he would pay my fees personally for these feasibility studies. So, I started

184 these feasibility studies to study various alternatives for additions to the present building and what we could do. Of course, it was in a neighborhood where we needed to acquire a lot of property if we were going to do an adequate job. The Krannerts paid Richardson, Severns, Scheeler personally. There was no deal with the art museum other than giving our services to them. He carried that on. He agreed to carry that on when they looked at other sites. This went on over a period of two or three years. It would be on again, off again. Someone got an idea of building downtown near the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. Well, you do a study of that. We did model studies and whatnot at the monument site. We had a site over near the University of Indiana Indianapolis campus. We did a study for that. Then there was a site way out north of town in some public park. They had an opportunity there. This took at least four or five years.

Blum: Did you think you were going to get the job after all of these starts?

Richardson: No. These were just studies.

Blum: That didn't materialize?

Richardson: But that he financed. They kept him. We just stayed on. He wasn't that active really. They had an old man who was the director, Wilbur Peat. He was ready to retire and he wasn't really that active in it. There were no young people involved, and so it was just kind of floating along. I did these model studies and everything else. They were very nice studies. By that time, they had hired a younger man from Indianapolis named Carl Weinhardt, who was then director of the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York. He had had experience up in Minneapolis as well. He started there. He was not only a well-known Indianapolis product, but he was a local society man, and they knew him personally and his family personally, and he fitted right in with them. He was an Evans Woollen of the museum world as far as they were concerned. He probably would have hired Woollen. Woollen wanted the job anyway because his family had been involved in the original museum. The first Herron Museum of Art backers were Woollen's relatives. Anyway, the

185 Krannerts had already gotten started on these feasibility studies with me, and so Carl Weinhardt, the new director, just inherited me really. When he came on board, he began to push this thing more strongly. I don't know whether it's true, but I suppose he was instrumental in getting the Eli Lilly family to give them an estate out on the northwest edge of town where the actual building was finally built. Well, then things began to warm up, and we weren't just doing feasibility studies. We were doing actual studies for a building. By this time, the program had enlarged considerably. We never had a real program. We'd sit down with Carl Weinhardt and others and say, "What do you think you need?" You know, it just sort of grew that way. By the time we got the building designed, of course, we had a very good idea of spaces and the needs of collections and all that. But even when we got that site, we made several feasibility studies as to the actual location of the building itself. We still had no approvals. We had occasional meetings with the building committee or something. They had no money. They had the site, but they needed money and so on. I made study after study and all sorts of things. We met with these people over a long, long period. The youngest man on the committee was seventy years old. So, it was a hard row. They were all very wealthy. They were all very opinionated. Their big argument was whether the column caps were going to be Corinthian and whether it was going to be purple marble or whether it was going to be green marble. It was that kind of thing—what kind of urns were going to be on top of the building and so forth.

Blum: Didn't you also have that kind of interaction with a university committee?

Richardson: I didn't have that much trouble with the university committee because, you see, of my university experience. Certainly here, I was involved with the faculty. It's true, I met with faculty committees, but I had enough experience as a former faculty member not to get too upset over that. So, I could handle it.

186 [Tape 6: Side 2]

Blum: Ambrose, you know, as you were talking, I'm wondering as you present a design and then working through the design and integrate the wishes of the client, in your experience, who really decides? Who has the final say?

Richardson: Well, there's always a key person that probably has stronger opinions than others, and they defer to that person, as a rule.

Blum: You're talking about from the client's point of view?

Richardson: Yes, but let me be specific on a couple things. Just going back a minute, you were mentioning about dealing with committees. Dealing with a faculty committee is quite different from my experience. The faculty committee was very concerned with the functioning of the building and the functioning of their plan and their own particular office location and a very limited personal viewpoint of what was right or wrong with the design. Whereas the aesthetic aspects of the design, whether it was going to be one character or another—I say character, and I mean the style and the relationship to the other buildings, the context and so forth. The actual aesthetics were usually either decided by a consensus or, in my dealings with universities for the most part or even with the art museum people, by the person who represented the money. I mean the vice-president, the president, the executives who were really responsible either to the state of Illinois or to the donor. In the case of the art museum, the people who really made the final decision were those who paid the bill. But the other part, from the committee's point of view and the functional point of view, of course, the director or principal or whoever was involved in the process were really more interested in how the building was going to work than actually how it was going to look. By and large, that's been my experience.

Blum: My question goes even beyond that to ask you who decides. Is it the architect or is it the client—whether the client is a single person or a committee or whatever? Is it the architect that makes the final decision or is it the client?

187 Richardson: My experience is not necessarily typical of all architectural experience by any means. I found that I succeeded when we had a happy combination of ideas. In other words, a communication between me as architect and the committee or the client—the individual or collective client. I feel my best successes were—and this happens often—when the client thinks and you lead them to think that this is their idea. They always come up later and say, "Well, of course, the architect had no ideas. They were all my ideas. All he did was just put them down on paper." And, of course, from an ego point of view, that isn't much fun, but for a successful design and a successful client relationship, I'm sure that it probably works pretty well. You met one of my former clients here, Dr. Dean Porter, the director of the Snite Museum of Art here at Notre Dame. My rapport with him was almost a complete mutual understanding. He accepted my aesthetics very well, and he accepted my suggestions for the functions very well. But he obviously had a great deal of input in terms of how he wanted to arrange his artwork and all that. It's a team, in my opinion. Now there are some architects, quite obviously, the prima donnas—and there a lot of prima donnas always—who feel that the answer to it is to shove it down the client's throat. And I've heard them use that word. The client pays the bills, but he or she or they have hired these usually well-known people, and they just say, "Well, I've hired them because they are geniuses and they're going to do it." For example, you certainly didn't ever have a client telling Mies how to design a building. In fact, I remember talking to Mies once about a collaboration with a local architect in Chicago. I won't name the firm, but it was a well-known firm at that time. They wanted to have their chief of design collaborate with Mies. He would have none of it. He said, "No, that's my building, and that's all there is to it." I'm sure you'll find the same is true of many well-named architects that you know. I can pick Philip Johnson because I know him. I'm quite sure that not too many clients tell Philip Johnson how to design his buildings. On the other hand, I think as a general rule in the architectural profession, the people who are involved in the financing and so on have a great deal of input. They say, "Look, I'm hiring you to do a good building, but this is what I'm asking and this is what I want." It's a hard question. I think it works both ways. As I said,

188 I've had the best results when I've been friendly. I have a system that I use, and I taught it to my classes, too. It's invariably worked for me, and I think it's original. Years ago, I had what I described as a client happiness curve. I'd draw this curve out for them in the very first meeting, and I'd said, "You're very excited now, and this whole process of designing a building is a long one. You're going to have a lot of frustrations along with a lot of, hopefully, joy. But, it's going to go on this curve. I'm going to draw a straight line. The left is the beginning of the job, and I'm going to draw the happiness curve along with the job. Right now, the happiness curve is very high. You hired me. I'm the greatest architect that you could possibly get under the circumstances, and you're extremely happy and very excited about this project and everything is really rosy and you'd like to go out and have a nice luncheon. The architect would like to take you out and develop this friendship and so forth. As you get into developing your program of requirements, it gets to be a little duller and a little more frustrating, and so the happiness curve, although still there, drops down a little bit. Then you're waiting for these designs to gestate and get them from the architect, and you get a little impatient, and it drops down a little bit. Then they bring them in, and the first scheme is very disappointing to you. You say, 'I didn't know I was going to get that, and I don't like this and I don't like that.' But anyway, if it's a little disappointing, it will drop down. If it's not, if you're very excited about it and if your ideas are coming to paper and reality, that happiness curve goes up. The happiness curve keeps on going, and we make your final presentation. You see the model, you see this beautiful rendering. You can hardly wait until this thing comes to fruition, and the happiness curve is very high. Then you say, 'All right, ' and you're going into the production documents, the working drawings, which are very detailed, the specifications. You have to spend a lot of time with your architect, and you say, 'Why in the world does it take so long to get these drawings done?' You think the architect is sleeping on the job and so on, and it all goes way down. And finally you go out for bids and the happiness curve goes up a little bit, because now you're going to really find out exactly what this is going to cost, and then we're really going to get underway. The bids come in—the happiness curve drops out of sight on the bottom. You say, 'Oh, God. I didn't

189 expect this. Oh, it's terrible.' So then you begin to modify the plans a little bit, and you lose this and you lose that to save money, and the happiness curve goes further and further down. Then finally, you dig a hole in the ground. You decide to go on it. You dig a hole in the ground and the happiness curve goes up to about level because then you say, 'Well at least we're underway.' They dig the hole, they put in the foundation, and the happiness curve goes down below the curve again. You say, 'My goodness, is this all the bigger it's going to be? I thought it was going to be twice this big.' So, as the construction proceeds, the happiness curve waits and waits and waits and then—to make a long story short—finally this building is done. You cut the ribbon. Everybody is very excited about it. Everything is fresh and new and the paint still smells good like a new car, and the happiness curve is back here at the end where you started. If the amount above the line and the amount below the line balance out, you've gotten a fine job."

Blum: What a terrific measure!

Richardson: I've used it, and I've used it with Dean Porter all the time. Almost every meeting, I'd say, "Dean, how's your happiness curve today?" He'd say, "Way up there, " or "not so good today." It's kind of a neat gimmick, but it also alerts you to the fact that it isn't a bed of roses building these buildings. There's a lot of trouble and a lot of frustration and a lot of joy, too, hopefully. But it's a long process. I think, like anything else, it's good if they're forewarned. I'm not making a joke of it. I know I've had some clients tell me, "Ambrose, the happiness curve ain't good today." I knew they were unhappy, but at least they could express it without calling me up and bawling me out. I can tell when it's not going to be, too. You know it yourself. If a bid comes in too high or something happens, it's very disappointing, and obviously they're going to blame it on the architect. They're not going to blame it on anybody else—and probably it's our fault.

Blum: What do you think your most successful commission has been?

Richardson: The next one.

190 Blum: What has been the least successful?

Richardson: I don't know. I've had plenty where I've needed a lot more ivy seed to cover it up. I'm serious about this, the first residence halls I did at the University of Illinois were done, frankly, on a very economical basis and were pretty raw. I had a terrible disappointment because the working drawings, which were done by my colleagues in town, did not show some very large mechanical pieces of equipment, which were going to be put on the roof. They were never shown on the drawings. I wasn't aware of this, and to my horror, when these buildings were almost completed, I saw these things put up, frankly, almost on the edge of the roof, and they're as big as a trailer truck. You couldn't possibly paint them out or screen them or anything like that. I think that's one of my major disappointments. The buildings were very raw, but fortunately, again, I designed these things so they had a nice courtyard inside. We had very fine landscape cooperation down at the University of Illinois. They had their own landscape architect.

Blum: On campus?

Richardson: On campus, and they did a beautiful job on them. The buildings now, I think, have been very successful. They were done in the middle 1950s, but they're very successful. I've talked to many former students, the ones who lived there, and they thought they were wonderfully successful. But that was one of my major disappointments. It just came as a kind of a shock. It wasn't serious as it turned out, but it was kind of a shock. I think the biggest failure I had was a combination or a series of things at Skidmore. That was the National Institute of Baking, a job that I designed on the Near North Side of Chicago. I think it won some awards. It's up on Pearson or somewhere in there. I've forgotten now. It's still there. It's been added to since. But there were just all sorts of things that went wrong on that job from the very beginning. We had a big cost overrun because of the landfill or the pilings that we had. It was just a two-story building, but we had to use pilings because it was all filled land. The test holes didn't work right. The pilings just

191 dropped out of sight. We had a $60,000 overrun before we even finished digging the hole. The building next door fell into the hole, and we got involved in a lawsuit. The wooden floor in the sample bakery buckled up—just one thing after another. I had an extremely difficult client, and I had to handle the whole thing. This is when I was going through this tough process anyway.

Blum: This is after the war?

Richardson: Oh, yes. This is just before I went to Europe for that housing thing. This was just one of the many jobs I was in charge of. But this guy, as far as I was concerned, I was full-time with him, but I had all of these other things going on, and he was an extremely difficult man. I kept him boozed up at the Tavern Club as much as I could because he loved martinis, but it about killed me in the process just to keep him happy. This part was funny. Finally we opened the thing. Nat had nothing to do with this. John came into the office early on, they talked to me. They didn't even talk to Nat, and it was a good, substantial group of people. Their board had representatives from Wonder Bread. In fact, that's how we got them to come to Skidmore because of Wonder Bread from the old Century of Progress days. Anyway, I was the one that took it up. I don't think Owings ever even met them. He may have, but they were my client, in effect. I did a scheme for them. I remember Skidmore was out at that time, and he did go to present it with me but then that was a different site. Finally they came back again—to make a long story short—and we went ahead with the building. Well, they changed heads, directors in the process. They fired their director, and then they put this tough guy on who was really a hatchet man. It was just one problem after another, but I won't go into detail on it. Everything went wrong. Finally they were going to have the opening, and one of the local florists asked if we were sending a floral decoration, you know, a congratulations to this outfit. I asked Owings about it, if we could afford it. He was just horrified. He said, "It's like sending flowers to yourself. You don't do that." Of course, I was young. I didn't know what the procedure was. I went up there. There's this big opening with this reception, cocktails and everything. Of course, at that time, it happened his

192 curve wasn't bad because it was a brand-new building. It looked really nice. As I say, I think it won the Chicago AIA award or something later on. Again, a nice courtyard. It was a small building, but it was nice at the time. This guy called me over, this director. His name was Howard Hunter. He was in a way kind of fun, but he was also an awful person to have to work with. He called me over, and there was a great sort of funereal wreath with a spray from the First National Bank. And he says, "This is the only decent thing I've seen on this whole job." On the spray were "sincere condolences." That's literally true!

Blum: Was this the florist's mistake?

Richardson: Yes. I guess so. I never knew whether he had done it deliberately himself—to send it to himself to show me. That, without any question, in retrospect, that was the most unfortunate thing. To follow up on that story, when I was in Champaign, I was up in Chicago with one of my young men, one of my young associates. We were walking around that neighborhood for some reason. I said, "By the way, Bob, that's one of my buildings from my Skidmore days." It didn't look bad from outside. They added to the one story above the one story wing. When we had designed it for three stories and a one-story wing before they added one story. So, it had changed in character some. We walked in the front door, and I said, "I was here, " and I introduced myself. I said, "I was involved with the design of the original building." And she said, "Oh, you were." She was very pleasant and said, "Just a minute." Some guy came out and said, "You designed it? Were you were involved in the design of this original building? Boy, I've been looking for you. This goddamn thing is the worst goddamn...!" I said, "Why don't you call the architects—SOM?" In the meantime, this young man with me said, "Look, there was an opportunity. Why didn't we just say that we could fix it up for him?" He was a positive and aggressive young man. I said, "I'm not about to go to that Jonah again!" It almost haunted me. It was like a bad dream.

Blum: It's amusing now.

Richardson: Some jobs are like that. They're bad, not bad but...

193 Blum: Unfortunate.

Richardson: Problems from the very beginning until the end. And then there are other jobs that go—nothing goes completely smoothly—but moderately smoothly. For example, once the design was settled, the Indianapolis art museum was really comparatively easy. We worked with a contractor all the way through. It was that kind of thing. They knew what we were doing. It was not a question of worrying about bids. It was more expensive than we had hoped, but it was a pleasant job. The people, even though they were older people, were pleasant and interesting. Very interesting. I wish I could write a book about that whole episode because it was very fascinating. I don't know. It's hard to remember. There have been some very unpleasant situations, but there were some extremely pleasant ones, too.

Blum: You were involved in the beginning of your career as a practitioner with a firm that had not only national but international aspirations. And your own firm was more a regional firm. How would you compare the two?

Richardson: Actually, we hoped that we would be able to develop into other things. We didn't have any ambition of being a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill by any means. However, I had the theory—it was more than a theory. I called it the "spider web concept""—taking a leaf out of the book of my brother's accounting firm, which started out a little bit like Skidmore and Owings, growing from the same small firm to a very major network. They'd have these central facilities in Chicago for their computer and their tax experts and all this, and then they would associate with, say, a firm in South Bend or Champaign or Kokomo. They would eventually become a partnership where Alexander Grant and Company would be obviously the home office in Chicago, but there would be an Alexander Grant and Company in Indianapolis with the Indianapolis associate.

Blum: Like branch offices?

194 Richardson: Like branch offices, and I call it the "spider web concept." I talked to Nat a great deal about this. I was convinced this would be the future of Skidmore and Owings and told the analogy of these accounting firms. Eventually, it more or less did work out that way.

Blum: For Skidmore?

Richardson: For Skidmore. I was not really thinking of it so much in an ambitious way myself, but I was thinking of associating with a Chicago firm—with a Smith, Hinchman and Grylls, say, or somebody like that—and taking on the design portion of the thing and associating that way. Quite different from the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill network or the Alexander Grant network. So we actually did think in those terms, and for one year, indeed, I had a Washington, D.C., office. A graduate student of mine had established himself in Washington a little bit in government circles. John and Jim, my other partners, and I agreed to talk to him about setting up an office in Georgetown, which we did. It was a small office, and I made several trips down there and made the rounds interviewing various government agencies including the State Department. I didn't have many political connections, although I did know Senator Charles Percy some through the University of Chicago days and whatnot, but I didn't use him. I wanted to get it on my own. I was assured by the State Department that we were on the list to do one of the foreign embassies as soon as the embassy came up. We were listed to do one of those.

Blum: How do you get on those lists?

Richardson: First of all, I went to all of the agencies that the AIA had advised me of. But I also knew at that time—I've forgotten his name—the state architect for Wisconsin before he'd gone to Washington as the design chief for the General Services Administration. I'm ashamed to say his name skips me at the moment, but it'll come to me. He was very friendly, and I had known him for some time. He knew of my design reputation, and he told me the proper people to see in the State Department, which I did, and whom he called. They

195 said, "Oh, yes. We knew all about him." We had brochures, of course, that we could show. Not extensive, but proper photographs and whatnot. He said, "We know about your firm and we appreciate the brochure." We filled out the GSA forms, but I couldn't remember now. I was one of the consultants in Chicago for this region later. In any case, they said, "Fine." Then they sliced the budget at that particular time. We couldn't have tried to start an office in Washington at a worse time. The whole GSA thing was cut, everything was cut just at that time. I think it must have been the middle 1960s, because I think I was on the AIA board at that time. Yes, I know I was, so it must have been around 1965. So to go back to answer your original question, yes, we did have aspirations. We knew we had to diversify, because, as I said earlier, we knew that it was a mistake to have all of our eggs in that same basket of the academic area. I thought maybe getting some of the government stuff and so on would give us leads to other things. I didn't have any industrial connections at that time. I would have had. When I was at Skidmore, for example, I was the one that got the United Biscuit job because it came through a relative of mine, so there was no question about their getting the job. William Hartmann finally ended up being the project manager. I did the basic design, again, with Myhrum. That was a big job. Keebler bought out United Biscuit. They were close personal friends, or the family was with my family, so that's how we got it. The fact is when they called me up to give me the job—it was a multimillion-dollar plan—they thought I was with Holabird and Root. In other words, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill didn't mean anything at that time. They were very good clients as it turned out. As I say, Bill Hartmann took it over as project manager and did very good managing. Indeed, I was out of it by the end of the design period. I went back and visited it several times with my students from Illinois. To get back to that, I didn't really have any industrial connections or really anything in the housing area except my residence hall exposure. We did do a few small apartments in Champaign with a developer, which were successful. They are very ordinary things, which one of our young men designed. As I said, it was in the brochure because he was the one that designed the brochure, so he naturally put in anything he designed. He was my associate dean down at the School of Architecture in Champaign. I was on the board from 1963 to

196 1966, and then I got involved in the National Accreditation Board for Architectural Schools.

Blum: What board were you with first?

Richardson: The board of directors of the American Institute of Architects. I represented the Illinois region. It's funny, I always got into these positions but never solicited them. A lot of people actually sort of solicited for these kind of assignments. By a pure fluke, I was at a meeting of the AIA. They had a state meeting up in Chicago, and there was a man there that you've probably heard of who had been a former president of the Chicago chapter and former director of the Illinois region. At that time, there were just seventeen regions. His name was William Bachman and although he practiced in Hammond, Indiana, he was active in the AIA Chicago chapter. We had known each other indirectly, not very well, for a long time, and he saw me there. At that time, I was president of a central Illinois chapter. He introduced me to one of the vice-presidents from Washington who was there. He said, "This is a good man to take over the Illinois region." Well it turns out that the Illinois region was represented—they sort of traded off, they still do—a downstate man or woman for one term and then a Chicago one. So it was time for a downstate director, and the man who was doing it had a stroke. So they asked me to fill in until he was well. So, it was my first experience going down to Washington, so I agreed to do it. Bill Bachman talked me into it. I thought it would be interesting, and my partners agreed it would be nice. I could establish some Washington contacts maybe. It was good for business, even though I didn't know what we were getting into. It turned out, I went down there and went through that thing that I was telling you about a little while ago. When I got down there we had this lovely lunch the first meeting. First of all, I was briefed. I didn't know a thing about the organization of the institute or anything else, but one of the staff members briefed me. We went over to the Octagon building, and they had a beautiful buffet with a white- coated attendant tending bar and this marvelous spread. It turns out that all of us were from the same mold. We all wore tweed jackets. We all smoked. We all liked martinis as far as I could tell. We all liked the same things. Right

197 away, after my first lunch, I felt perfectly at home. I was, I think for the most part, quite a bit younger than most of them. I'm sure they were much more affluent than I was because when I finally got into it, I found out it was a kind of a closed little club. They had these meetings every year, and although the AIA paid your traveling expenses to come, you were expected to bring your wife on your own. It became kind of a social thing as well as a business thing on our part. For three years, this man unfortunately that I replaced did not recover or at least was not well enough to assume the directorship duties. They made me full director instead of acting director. I enjoyed the experience. I know we talked about the AIA a little bit before. I enjoyed the experience very much indeed. I found out that not only was I compatible with these other people, but we shared the same kind of problems with management and the same kind of problems with marketing and getting the jobs and the same kind of ethical problems, which we discussed. Really to me, it became quite interesting, aside from the fact that I enjoyed the social aspects of it. We did work hard in terms of the meetings all the time. We usually had our dinners together, and we'd have our wives there, and we really got to know each other on a very friendly basis. We still correspond with some of them. I think for the most part, the wives enjoyed it from their point of view. Of course, they didn't have to worry about the meetings. They would be shopping or had their own tours or whatever. It wasn't that structured. They just had sort of a good time together. As Prue said, "Well, they had to have their wives because there were some situations where there were certain indiscretions." A couple of wives—or one of them that we know of—ran off with one of the other directors. That sort of thing. So, as Prue said, "The wives had to go along for protection." Some of the personal difficulties that architects had are absolutely true of this group as well. In other words, there were certain ones who were indiscrete and certain ones who overdid their habits. So, it was sort of a cross-section. They were all prominent people. They were all successful people. Usually out of that group, that cadre of directors, came the officers. By and large, you had the experience as a director and those were usually the ones who decided they really wanted to stay on and run for office and so on.

198 Blum: At the national level?

Richardson: The national level. I'm speaking about the national level completely now. That's why I got these wonderful trips to the West Coast and all these things. It was a three-year stint. You could run again if you wanted to, but that depended on your constituency, whether the Chicago chapter wanted you to do it. I'll never forget, one time when I was director, Paul McCurry was president of the Chicago chapter. Mies van der Rohe having gotten the gold medal from the institute and I've forgotten what else, the Chicago chapter finally decided to recognize him and give him a medal. So, we were at the Arts Club, and I was sitting at the head table with Mies and McCurry and the officers. This was not a formal affair. I think it was lunch. It was very pleasant, though. I was sitting there with McCurry, who was a pretty good friend. We went to these AIA conventions and whatnot. He didn't look like a friendly guy, but he was very friendly to me. But at this particular time, I'll never forget it, I mentioned the Chicago chapter—I was representing them as well as the architects downstate. He said, "In case you haven't met him, on my right is Ambrose Richardson who is so able he resented the Chicago chapter." As it turns out, I burst out laughing with everybody. I don't think Paul had a great sense of humor. I don't think he even apologized.

Blum: Do you think he noticed?

Richardson: He didn't even notice. I made some remark about it. I think that was a Freudian remark. Anyhow, I knew most of them and still do, the active ones. I think I represented them pretty well. I didn't have any complaints. Profession-wise we were responsible. I'm not trying to sell you on AIA because I find a lot of faults with it myself. In retrospect, all in all, I got a lot out the AIA, and I got a lot out of my activity in it. I think it does help the profession a great deal not only in terms of the documents, but the insurance advice, all the various pieces of advice we get for all architects, not just members of the AIA. I think in the long run, I can speak certainly from my experience, and my experience was well worthwhile. I don't regret a minute of it. We got a lot done, in my opinion. I'll tell you an anecdote about how I

199 got on the National Architectural Accreditation Board [NAAB]. Usually some of our afternoon meetings were a little sleepy, under the circumstances, after a very nice lunch. A lot of us found out very quickly how to get things done. Everyone got really tired about 5:00, 5:15, 5:30, and everybody got very thirsty along about then. So if you wanted to get something through quickly, you made a motion and arranged for somebody to second it and vote it and go, just so you could break up and get to the cocktail lounge. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but basically the important thing about it was it was fun. This one afternoon somebody said, "Well, what about Ambrose?" I kind of woke up a little bit, you know. Fact is, they wanted me to run for vice- president. I just couldn't afford it. It was a very expensive hobby, I can assure you. They said, "Would you be willing to represent the institute, be the AIA member on the NAAB?" Well I thought it was the NCARB [National Council Architectural Registration Board]. All these acronyms, I couldn't tell. I said, "Oh, I suppose so. Why do you want me?" They said, "Well, because of your educational experience." They knew I'd been a professor. I didn't even know I was on the National Architectural Accreditation Board until I was on it. At that time, it was made up of two representatives from the AIA, two representatives from the registration board, and two representatives from academia. You have a six-year stint, and then you end up being president and so forth. Well, that turned out to be a very fascinating experience, too, because, not only did it bring me back to academia, which I still was interested in, but I had always been interested in modifying the schools. I thought they were all pretty terrible and still do really. For the most part, there's too big a gap. I'm not questioning what they're teaching or the theory or keeping up to date or anything of that sort. I'm just concerned about how the architectural education, the academic education, relates to the actual practice. This gap has been there for a long time.

Blum: It was really your focus when you took on your first professorship.

Richardson: This had been a real thrust, frankly, all along. I've known more or less four young people who have committed suicide because of this tremendous disappointment, this disenchantment when they get into the profession. It's

200 terrible. It's awful. Of course, when times are really slow and they end up working in McDonald's, which some of them did, too, it's really a very, very depressing thing. To get back to that, I got on the board, and I won't go into details about the operation of the board, but it gave me the opportunity to make visitations to at least three or four schools as a visiting team member every year. I was finally made president. It wasn't my sixth year, my fifth year I was made president. Then they asked me to stay on another year. So, I was president at the national accrediting board for two years. As a consequence, I had to write more reports and had to really, I felt, take care of the trouble schools. I say trouble schools because when I first went on, there were no black schools that were accredited. There were a lot of other smaller schools that were not accredited, which probably could at least be considered. So, I helped open up the whole accreditation thing to Tuskegee Institute. I think I made three trips to Tuskegee. I made two to Hampton Institute. I made one or two to Prairie View A and M University. These are all black schools. They were really kind of bootstrap operations. I even sent some personal equipment to Hampton. They were so strapped for any kind of supplies. I sent exhibits and whatnot down to Tuskegee or really some drawings to show them samples of what the standards and demands are. But that was a real thrust. But in the meantime, I also got to go to a lot of other schools. Oftentimes I would give a talk or something while I was there. The team was there. There were always three or four of us, and we even brought students in as team members. A by-product of this whole experience, besides helping the educational process, was that I got to meet such interesting people, because the people that we had on these teams were oftentimes deans of schools or they were educators or they were practitioners. I remember Bill Lacey was on one of my teams. John Hejduk from Cooper Union was on one of my teams. Several AIA board members were on my teams. It was really a great experience from that point of view, and I got to know across the country not only some of the educators, but I also got to know a lot of practitioners. By the time I finished my six-year stint, I could almost figure in any major town or university town in the country, I would know one or two people whom I could call or see or whatever. I developed a pretty broad acquaintance that way.

201 Blum: Was this networking you were doing reflected in more jobs for your firm?

Richardson: As a matter of fact, as far as the office was concerned, it didn't help in any way. In fact, as I expected, it was a real hurt because I wasn't there. In other words, it took so much of my time, that John and Jim had to carry the load. I think it was tough for them.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Richardson: As a result of the experience of jumping around to these various schools, talking to these educators, meeting all these other people, and also having to write so many reports on these schools and their programs and their goals and their status, I was naturally very intrigued with trying to upgrade the various academic programs—not only the individual schools, but in general. As a consequence, I gave a lot of thought and a lot of writing and so forth to architectural education in general and to the specific programs as well. In this process, having been offered or at least discussed the possibility earlier of going back into the academic world as an administrator, word got around that I might possibly be available for such an opportunity. It so happened that all the University of Illinois work had changed priority because the statewide priorities in higher education had changed. They were developing the junior colleges. They were giving more emphasis to the other universities. The elementary and high school programs had diminished. There was not that kind of work going on anymore. Things were pretty slim in terms of the actual workload of our office, and it was getting more and more difficult and more competitive to really keep up the momentum that we had developed. Jim Scheeler recognized this as well. He had the opportunity through one of the directors from the Illinois region to take a job with the American Institute of Architects in Washington as one of their executives for one year. Having tried an office in Washington, and having it abort, I thought and he thought that this was a good opportunity, again, if we ever wanted to start a Washington office, to establish some connections down in that area. John and I were all for it. He was going down on a year's leave pretty much. Not to

202 change the subject, but it subsequently happened that he decided to stay on, and he just retired this last January and did a very fine job, too. In the meantime, I was contacted indirectly and directly by Georgia Tech and Tulane and Notre Dame, all of whom were looking for new deans or new heads of departments. Specifically" I got calls from Tulane and Notre Dame. I was so close to the University of Illinois at this time, and I was a personal friend by this time of the people who had been so kind in giving me these commissions but who could no longer get me commissions. I went to seek their advice. I said, "What do you think I ought to do?" I wanted to acknowledge any opportunity to continue our relationship at Illinois. But they said, "Well, we would love to have you but we just don't see the work." In the meantime, the [University of Illinois Chicago] Circle Campus had taken priority in Mr. Havens's mind. He had talked to me privately two or three years before. Although I could have the design for Circle Campus, he would have to release me from any design of the Urbana-Champaign campus in exchange. He asked if I wouldn't stay under the circumstances at the Urbana campus, and they would get an entirely different team for the Circle Campus. And they did. They got Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. I'm not sure of this, but I originally introduced Havens to Walter Netsch at a private party with the then-dean of law, Dean Russell Sullivan, the man whom I had met when he was a building committee chairman. That was Walter Netsch's first contact with Mr. Havens. Subsequently, Skidmore, as you know, got the Circle Campus job, and Havens devoted most of his time to it. That was during the last two or three years that I was down in Champaign. Walter went on and designed the "campus and so forth. In the meantime, I was looking around for my next step. Charlie Rummel was an old friend of mine. He had long since left Murphy's office, but he was with another man, and we discussed several times the possibility of a merger there. So, I was thinking about maybe coming back to Chicago after all those years and starting a merger in Chicago. My children were grown, except for one child, and were in college. I really didn't have any strong magnet to keep me. Prue was teaching by that time in Champaign, but I really didn't have any strong ties nor did I have any obligation to the firm to stay.

203 Blum: You were looking not only for a new position in education but also in private practice. What had really come apart in your practice to make you be...?

Richardson: I really wasn't seeking the educational position at that time. I still was in practice, but the problem with the practice was our main client—our bread and butter—had been the University of Illinois in Champaign. They cut that money out, the state priority was to develop junior colleges. Well, we tried to get some of the junior colleges, and I made a tie-up with the Berger, Kelly and Unteed firm for that very purpose. We made two or three interviews, but we had such strong competition from the Chicago architects, Perkins and Will and others who were school oriented, that we unfortunately never got one. Had we gotten one of those junior colleges, I think we...

Blum: Would have remained?

Richardson: We came very close. We were selected on one major one down in the southern part of the state, and then one of the board members, one of the interview members, who had an unfortunate experience with Berger, Kelly—not us but Berger, Kelly—ten years before turned us down. We never got the job. So nothing really very much developed. Berger, Kelly finally got one, but they had to associate with Ernie Kump from California on a junior college in Champaign and were, of course, delighted to have us be a part of the whole thing. But there was nothing that we as a design firm could offer. I mean, Ernie Kump was the designer, so we just withdrew.

Blum: So really the well dried up.

Richardson: It really did. That's what happened. It was terribly competitive and terribly worrisome, and here I had all those mouths to feed. I had something like thirty people, and we even retained a man to go out—a kind of a birddog—to look up leads and all the rest of the stuff that people do. I had this tie-in, as I say, with Rummel, and we thought maybe we could work out some kind of a deal. We liked each other personally at least. We had nothing tangible at all. Suddenly I got these calls about these academic opportunities, and Jim, in the

204 meantime, had gotten this opportunity to go to Washington. It all happened about the same time or certainly within months of each other. Finally they asked me to come up to Notre Dame. I talked to these friends of mine at the University of Illinois, and they said they couldn't offer me anything. I told them about this opportunity to go up to Notre Dame or Tulane and this guy shook his head and said, "They're both Catholic universities. I don't know. If I were you and I had a choice between them, I think it's too bad, but I think I'd go to Notre Dame." Well, I'd been to Notre Dame on the accrediting team. I was the chairman of the accrediting team two years before. I had recommended that my predecessor, namely Frank Montana, step down.

Blum: Why?

Richardson: Because during the 1960s there had been so much student unrest, even here. People had literally threatened him because he wasn't getting along with the faculty, he wasn't getting along with the students. It was just one of those circumstances. When we came here with the accrediting team—John Hejduk was on that team, by the way—things were really in a very bad state. It was perfectly obvious that it was a personality problem, and he'd lost control of the faculty and the students and everything else. It was just a shambles, and the dean knew that. At that time, when we made that report and suggested he step down, the last thing in the world I thought of was taking over. I got teased about it by one of my visiting team later. Dan Boone was his name, from Texas. He said, "What do you think about a guy that goes to a school and has the dean fired and then comes back later and takes his job?" The long and the short of it is that I came up. I'd known Sporleder, who was on the faculty. His partner was on the faculty. There was another man, an Englishman, Featherstone, who was on the faculty who had come to study with me in graduate work at Illinois, but I'd quit before he came. I had at least met him. Patrick Horsbrugh was on the faculty here. I didn't know him that well, but I knew him and he knew me. I'd known Montana indirectly. I met another one of the faculty members through the AIA. The Notre Dame system, right or wrong, had been pretty much like the Illinois system. There was another man on the faculty, Ray Stuermer, whom I had known way back

205 in Chicago. So when I came up here, I didn't feel that I was jumping into a new environment. I felt all of the faculty, most of them, were friends. There was a lot of dissention among them when I came because of Montana's handling of things. I knew I was walking into a hornet's nest, and the dean and the provost told me that. But in any case, they interviewed me. The students interviewed me. The students locked me in the lecture room and grilled me. See, at that time, even in 1971, the student thing was still tricky. The students had a lot to do with it. They liked me and my background. Of course, for the dean, I had the academic background, I had the practical background, and I had the Tau Beta Pi. I had all the credentials that they wanted except I wasn't a Catholic. We had five children, so everybody thought we were Catholic. I know several of my friends said, "Gee, I didn't know you were Catholic." In other words, we looked good. There was this young provost here at that time, and I interviewed with him. I had met him before through this accreditation thing. I had met the dean before through the accreditation thing. I felt fairly comfortable. They offered me this job as chairman. I inherited the problems, but I also inherited the good things about it. We had a wonderful facility, a fine building, the old library building, which Frank Montana had converted very ably into a good architectural physical plant. I didn't need to fight that. Our budget wasn't great, but it wasn't a question of coming in and finding a poverty-stricken school or anything. I had, for the most part, an experienced faculty. I knew that we had disagreements, but that wasn't a problem, and I knew that I'd have an excellent selection of students. Notre Dame is more known academically now than it used to be. Notre Dame is to most Catholic families the Harvard of Catholic education. Most of the students that come here are highly selected. Most of them are in the upper 10 percent of their graduating class. There are exceptions, of course, because they like to get cross-sections of people. Obviously the students who come here in architecture are highly motivated. Many of them are very, very skillful. You have awfully good raw material to start with.

Blum: You were offered the chairmanship of the department of architecture? Were you expected to teach class?

206 Richardson: I wasn't asked to nor was I given tenure nor did I even ask for tenure. It didn't occur to me at that time. Of course, Prue was wonderful about it. I went back to Champaign, and the dean called me up. He said, "Ambrose, do you want this job as chairman? We were interviewing eight people, and we still have three more people that we haven't interviewed. We want you to take it, if you want it." I hadn't arranged any details. I had the impression that I could maybe commute for a transition period.

Blum: You mean live in Champaign?

Richardson: Live in Champaign and come up here, like a lot of people do. He called me up, and he said, "We want you to take the job. If you want it, then we just won't interview the other three people." So Prue was back in the bedroom or something, and I said, "Prue, they offered me the job." He was still on the phone from Notre Dame. I said, "What do you think?" She said, "If that's what you want to do." She had to give up her job. "If that's what you want to do, let's go." So I said yes. Under the circumstances it was a very happy choice. I don't need to go into any particular detail about my career here. I found out it was a full-time job. The dean was quite demanding in that sense. It turned out that he was an engineer and had really not that much interest in architecture. He was supportive, but not nearly as supportive as he would be to the other departments that he was obviously closer to and had research grants and so on. Our whole strength in the college of engineering was just our enrollment. We had more students than any of the other departments by considerable numbers, which was represented in his overall budget. It didn't really bring in income in terms of research and all of that stuff. We always felt, and I think the alumni and the students and the current faculty still feel, that we were second-class citizens in the College of Engineering. I found this almost every place I went during my accreditation experience. This is always a problem. So many architectural schools are in the college of engineering. They just lose the autonomy and the prestige of standing on their own feet somehow. They're always at the mercy of the budget that the engineering dean gives them.

207 Blum: Was there anything you could do in the six years you were chairman to rectify that or perhaps to equalize it?

Richardson: The budget constantly increased, but only as the university budget and the college budget increased. I never felt that we were really hurt at all in terms of the faculty salaries. We certainly weren't hurt too much in terms of physical facilities. We were hurt, I think, in terms of travel allowance. He was very fussy about that kind of expense or getting visiting speakers. I had no extras, in other words. I couldn't do anything exceptional. The second year I was here, we had a seventy-fifth anniversary of the forming of the school. I thought it would be a wonderful promotional thing to invite the alumni in for a football game. I went through a great deal of effort to publicize this. As a matter of fact, Carter Manny gave me a grant to kind of lead me off down here, gave me a kind of a discretionary grant to do whatever I wanted. Among other things, I used it to promote this event as seed money and made a nice publication and sent it out to the alumni and brought them up to date as to what was going on in the school. We had a mailing of several thousand to the alumni. But I financed the whole thing out of my own pocket. I couldn't get a dime from the college or the dean. Father Theodore Hesburgh even came over. We must have had, I suppose, seventy-five alumni who came from all over the country. I arranged the football tickets for them and a couple of banquets. Larry Perkins came down to be a speaker, and we charged the minimum fee. I got them hotel rooms, which they had to pay on their own. It was a minimum fee, but they paid for it. I couldn't get any financing, so I had to finance it personally. Fortunately, as it came out, I just broke even.

Blum: That wasn't encouraging.

Richardson: The dean [Joe Hogan] had his hundredth anniversary the next year, too. He got astronauts, he got major speakers like Adm. Hyman George Rickover. He had all the money in the world. This guy operated with me that way for six years. I just had to go hat in hand for everything I was trying to get. They got

208 this brand-new building, completely furnished for every department over there except architecture, of course. We had our own building. When I wanted some conference room chairs, I got canvas director's chairs. They're sitting over there in leather. It was that kind of thing.

Blum: That isn't an equal situation.

Richardson: The whole time I was there for six years, the dean only came over to our building, I think, four times. Four times, and two of them were to bawl me and the faculty out. It was really a terrible strain on me personally.

Blum: How were you able to maintain the morale within your staff?

Richardson: By smiling.

Blum: Is that how you lasted in that job.

Richardson: Pretending that everything was going along okay. The dean, in fairness, did congratulate me on smoothing things out. He said, "You've done a great job to smooth things out." I made some tough mistakes right at the beginning, which he didn't like, which rubbed him raw. They were budgetary mistakes. I really didn't understand the extent of my authority, and I overstretched my authority budget-wise. With a man like that you just didn't do that. He thought I was awfully naive about that.

Blum: You came in 1972 and in 1978 terminated your chairmanship.

Richardson: They were three-year terms, and you were evaluated by your faculty and by the administration every three years. I knew my evaluation was coming up, and I was assured by the dean. It was a friendly thing, but it was just difficult. Outside he was just as charming and as nice as he could be, but internally he was very difficult. The faculty, I think, saw the strain on me as well. He was just horrible with Patrick Horsbrugh and vice versa. Of course, that didn't help any. Patrick was writing these horrible letters to the dean

209 with a copy to me. I said, "Patrick, why did you write this thing? It will serve absolutely no purpose." He said, "Oh, yes, it will. It'll irritate him, and that's what I'm after." Of course, it irritated him, but then he, in turn, would call me up and say, "Well you tell that son of a bitch to quit writing these letters." I'd go up and tell Patrick, "Now you've done it again, and in the process you get me in the soup when you do it."

Blum: Amid of all these problems, you did the Snite Museum of Art.

Richardson: In the meantime, I was also teaching. I decided we really needed faculty. We were growing. All of a sudden we began to grow. I don't think because of me. It was just the times. Times were getting better, and the architectural kids were beginning to come in. The school had had around 275 or 250 students, and we were up to 350. I obviously had to do something about faculty. We were overstretched. No question about it. I never worried about faculty being overworked, but in fairness to the students, they were paying a hell of a tuition here, and they deserved more than just having an upperclassman tell them what to do. I needed to bolster my staff, and I asked for it. Joe Hogan just said, "There are no openings and that's all there is to it." As a consequence, I decided—I even taught that first summer—I could teach and I loved to teach. I could supplement and do the things. I was chairman, and I not only taught the professional practice class, but I took over the freshman class figuring that the freshmen need the most experienced of all. I usually shared that with another teacher, but I loved that. It was really fun. Finally I took over a design studio. That was difficult for the students and me, too, because, in fairness, I really didn't have the time to give them. So, I did it on a personal interview basis. They would come to the office, and I would give them their crits there. I think they liked me a lot, and I was fine. But I also served on all of the committees, plus making the dean's meetings and all the rest of it—the budgets and annual reports. I had an open-door policy, so the students and faculty could come in and see me any time. My successor, Bob Amico, had an absolutely closed-door policy. That changed completely. In any case, I enjoyed the work except for my difficulties with the dean. It wasn't as bad as SOM by any means. I was happy, but I said, "Well, why not?

210 I'd like to teach design, I'd still like to teach professional practice, I'd still like to teach the freshmen. I've got three strings in my bow that I can teach." By this time I had my tenure, by the way. So I thought I could just resign, and they could get a replacement for me. As it happened, I resigned. Joe didn't say he was sorry or anything else. It was fine. He just said he had a problem with having to find a new person. He formed a committee right away to look for a new person. We increased the budget that way. They didn't drop somebody. They just added this other guy. He not only came here at a whopping big salary compared to mine—a much younger fellow, a man who had worked for me in my office in Champaign years ago—but also came with tenure. He didn't teach a single class. He got away with everything. He's still here on a leave of absence this year because he's starting a "graduate program" up in Chicago. I don't know much about it. So they have a brand- new man again. He just came last fall. A man from the University of Illinois at Chicago. I guess things are going along pretty well. Of course, I'm not up to date, now that I'm retired. Going back to what you were saying, yes, in the process I was very busy with that, but I was also able to keep current at least—my tenure in NAAB, the accrediting board, finished at the same time I came to Notre Dame. My last trip for it was last summer just before I came here.

Blum: Out of that networking, you did develop enough connections to move on to something that appealed to you in 1972?

Richardson: It was an extremely happy experience. The only thing that I possibly missed, Betty, is maybe a little more practice. I'd been able to keep my hand in there, but not while I was chairman because I simply didn't have the time. I didn't have any outside practice then except the Snite Museum, which, of course, in itself was a marvelous experience for me in every way. But other than that, I did two or three competitions—I must say, not very successfully—just to kind of keep my hand in. That was the fun of it. I did a couple of them with Patrick as collaborator or vice versa, and we aren't the best of collaborators. You get two "designers" on a competition or anything—I learned that way back in the Skidmore days—you don't have two designers on a project. It

211 doesn't work. Bill Priestley and I tried to collaborate once, and we finally agreed. He said, "Rich, we're great friends. If you're going to be the designer, I'll work for you. If I'm going to be the designer, you work for me. But we're not going to both be designers." He was absolutely right. My collaborations with Patrick in competitions were fun, as you might guess. I could almost tell we were not going to have a chance. There wasn't enough of a theme going through here. There was this theme and that theme.

Blum: You've had a career as a practitioner, you've had a career as an educator. In your opinion, where do you think you've made your greatest contribution?

Richardson: I think as an educator. I was somewhat disappointed, to be honest with you, when I got the fellowship in the American Institute of Architects in 1966. At that time they were giving them in categories, and I got it in design and service to the profession. Most all of us felt getting it in design is the whole thing. Service to the profession just means that you've been a loyal good old boy and come to the meetings. I mean being on the board of directors and so on was certainly service. But except for when I tried to get the headquarters moved to Chicago, it was a pretty successful tenure. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get it in education at that time. Well, first of all, I'd considered myself, which is probably selfish, an educator at Skidmore. I felt that Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch and Gyo Obata and George Anselevicius and John Macsai and Bob Diamant and Joe Passonneau, all these young men, had been my students in a way, and they were all tremendously successful. You didn't know Dean Passonneau, but he went on to be dean of Washington University. He came back and was later on, I think, was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Skidmore. I'm not really sure. He has his own firm in Washington now. A very, very fine man. Gyo, of course, and almost all those that I mentioned and some, I'm sure, I've forgotten—Johnny Weese—have done extremely well. Wiley I've lost track of. He was in the San Francisco office for a while, but he changed offices, and so I don't know what's happened to him now. But, basically, with those fellows, I thought some of my skills or experience had brushed off on them. Then when I went to Illinois, I gave over thirty-five degrees. Twenty-eight

212 have become principals, won foreign scholarships, won national scholarships, become deans or full professors.

Blum: And they've stayed in the field of architectural education.

Richardson: Architectural education or practice. I think that's a pretty good record. Now, on the other hand, how many years have I been in education? I’ve had five years in the 1950s and then from 1972 to 1985. What's that? Eighteen years in formal education. And I probably have lectured to or had more close contact with over 2,000 students—not just being head of a school of 350. I mean, actually having them in the class. Almost wherever I've gone, somewhere along the line somebody says, "Oh, yes, I had you in class." As I say, my professional practice thing was my main thrust—this gap. I think I made a bigger contribution there to the profession in that area of education. That's my personal feeling. They never recommended me for the teacher award for the ACSA [American Collegiate Schools of Architecture] like they have for Ralph Rapson and Joe Esherick and these other people. I just kind of feel that no one has really pushed it nor have I pushed it, but I feel personally I've had more influence there. I always said as a teacher I'd rather build men—of course, I changed it to men and women—than buildings. I really would rather influence their lives in a positive way. I don't think a building has much influence. Of course, it influences people, just like Churchill says. I never had the kind of conceit about my buildings that Walter Netsch or Bruce Graham did. I don't see myself as a creative artist—nor am I. Even my wonderful fun of doing watercolors and drawings and so on now, I'm not conceited enough to think of that as art. I really don't think nor have I ever thought of my buildings as that. I think the most significant building I did was the underground library at the University of Illinois. We didn't mention that earlier, but that won a national award. It was a real breakthrough. Although there had been other underground structures, ideas and so on, it really kind of set a pattern for some of the academic—there are many of them now—underground buildings throughout the country. So, I really think that may have had influence as a building. I call it non-architecture architecture. All they had were little pavilions, and that was perfect for that site because it

213 didn't conflict in any way with the eclectic Georgian architecture. It saved the site as an open space, hopefully, for a long time to come. So, it was a very good selection. It's been a very successful building. Probably the most successful design that I've ever done. I don't know whether it has any influence other than letting people know you can build an underground building that people can use and enjoy without feeling that they're underground. And you don't. There's an open court, and you don't feel you're underground at all.

Blum: As you look back at your fifty-plus years in the field, what do you think has been your greatest opportunity?

Richardson: Well, if you're referring to greatest opportunity for professional achievement, I would say probably Skidmore, but had I stayed on, I would have paid a price probably in a lot of other ways. My home might have changed. The whole thing would have been a complete dedication to a career in a very large firm. Now, whether I could have survived it, I don't know.

Blum: But you made a choice at some point, and you left that.

Richardson: But I made a choice. I think it was a very good choice to go into the academic deal, for which I think I'm very well suited. I like the students, and I like my faculty peers as a rule. You have difficulty with people as you do in every other walk of life. But I enjoy passing on my experience to others, to younger people. I really have enjoyed that spiritually much more than designing a building.

Blum: Would you, perhaps, rephrase my question and say that your greatest—not opportunity—but perhaps your most meaningful choice was to leave Skidmore and come to the University of Illinois?

Richardson: Maybe that was my greatest opportunity, looking back at it now that you mention it. Sure. I didn't think of it as anything. As I said, I went down there not thinking of it as a lifetime career. I really didn't. When they gave me

214 tenure right away, of course, it gave me a little different slant. I knew that I couldn't be fired unless I'd done something reprehensible. My family loved it. Obviously my wife was much happier in that environment, and so I decided pretty quickly that's what I wanted to do.

Blum: At times when you were looking around to redirect your career, did you ever regret leaving Skidmore?

Richardson: No. A lot of people have asked me if I ever regretted it. Very honestly I haven't because I think I was cognizant of the consequences of staying. In the first place, I don't know in all honesty whether I was really competent enough—I mean seriously competent enough—to carry on that momentum that was beginning to come in terms of the bigger buildings and more responsibility. I may have been able to. The pressures were so great when I was there, that I just didn't think that I would probably be able to cope with that. Of course, I had no idea of the mushroom-growth that they would have, and the huge buildings and the huge responsibilities and so forth that they would eventually have. I think probably had I stayed on, let's say, through the Air Force Academy phase, and had I been involved in the Air Force Academy—this is just a speculation—I think I could have handled that. I don't know whether I could have handled the politics and the pressures of these large buildings in Chicago, which Hartmann and Walter and Bruce and these others have done. It's a different type of thing. In other words, as I said earlier, my kind of design is more related to the environmental thing, which I think of as the Air Force Academy. It's not an urban thing. If it were an urban thing, I don't know whether I could really have coped with it. But be that as it may, I had made my decision, and I haven't had any regrets about that at all. Had I made a decision, for example, to go from Nat Owings's firm over to Larry Perkins's firm, I think I would have made a very poor decision because I think I would have just jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Jack Train made that decision, and, as you probably know in his history, he went over there, and they told him that he was going to have certain authority and certain responsibility, but they didn't tell anybody else that. That puts you in a terrible position. I haven't talked with Jack at any length about it at all

215 because he's a pretty hard nut. He can handle an urban situation. He's a different personality than I am and much more forceful in some ways and much thicker-skinned in some ways. He couldn't cope with that. I guess you know he went out and started his own firm or became Carl Metz's partner and so on. That's a different story and a very interesting one, too. I have no regrets along the line anywhere to tell you the truth. I've made plenty of mistakes that I regret, but everybody has those, I suppose. For the most part, I've been extremely fortunate in my professional life. I've been at the right place at the right time. I got to know—at the time—some of the most prominent men in the profession across the country, not only through Skidmore, Owings and Merrill but through the AIA activities. I got to know some of the great people, not too well, but enough—Saarinen and, of course, Mies. I had an opportunity to meet Mr. Wright—and I call him Mr. Wright—on two or three occasions. I've been friends with Bruce Goff. I saw him, by the way, when I was third in that Cowboy Hall of Fame competition. I went down to see the site. This goes back to 1958, a long time ago. He was then in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and living in the Price Tower, and I went up to see him. He remembered me very well. I was with these two young men who had been on my team, and they were in Florida. I said, "Let's go ahead and see Bruce Goff." They said, "What do you mean?" Sure enough, I rang the doorbell and up we went and he was just delightful. So I've known him. I've had the opportunity along the line to be reasonably close friends with Bucky Fuller. As you know, I've known all the people in Chicago. I've known Ralph Rapson, Harry Weese, and some of the younger stars as well. I had some wonderful results from students such as Cesar Pelli. In the process of my academic career, I've met people. I've met Werner von Braun. I've met three or four astronauts. I've had lunch with the man who walked on the moon. I've met Rickover. I've met Lear of the Learjet. I've had many occasions to see Father Hesburgh. I had this wonderful experience with Sinclair Lewis. I feel that throughout my life, it was really a delight, just knowing these people, listening to them and learning and enjoying them.

Blum: I don't want to end this interview without talking just a little bit about the fact that as far back as 1941, you had a very inventive thrust and that you

216 developed certain devices and certain things that sometimes got patented and sometimes didn't. Perhaps this goes back to your grandfather's influence. In 1941 there was a push-button telephone, which you said someone said would never be useful. What was that all about?

Richardson: Most of these ideas, very honestly, like any invention, came out of a need. As an architectural designer, I can't say how other designers work or what goes on today because some of it is too—I shouldn't say too abstract for me—but it isn't my type of creativity. It's creative, but it's not my type. My type of creativity has been inventive creativity in solving a problem. My inventive things such as they are—and I laugh, because it's very difficult to get a patent, number one, and it's extremely difficult to do anything with it after you've gotten it. I've found that out, and my grandfather did, too. He was an inventor but he invented machinery.

[Tape 7: Side 2]

Richardson: The inventive aspects of my interests have come out of my design process of solving a problem. I mean, there's your problem, how do you deal with it? My mother, as a matter of fact, with all of her many interesting attributes, was also very inventive in her way. She was always thinking up new ideas for doing things. I think she was the one who invented that famous recipe using Nabisco chocolate wafers with whipped cream layered in between.

Blum: You mean the recipe?

Richardson: The recipe. Well, I'm not sure about that. The Richardson family had Nabisco. My father's oldest brother, who was much older, was one of the originators of Nabisco Biscuit, and for years the family was involved. But that didn't have anything to do with my mother's invention. It was just that she was inventive. That's a minor thing. So, I think inventiveness came to all of us. Don't forget, in my generation—and you're quite a bit younger—we invented our own games, and we didn't have the radio at first. When I was a young child, we had no radio. We read a lot. Even our childhood books, The

217 American Boy and Boy's Life and the old books that I inherited from my father and mother, always had a chapter or two on inventing a trap or inventing something. That's the old Yankee know-how. We've always been an inventive group, and I was just one of the ones that carried this thing on. So it's been very natural for me to say, "Can you do it better?" I've played a game with myself for years in saying from the time I get up in the morning, what could I do to improve what we do? Everything—and I told my students this—everything, maybe except the needle, is going to be improved by the next generation. And maybe even the needle will. Of course, the needle has been improved with the sewing machine. I said, "What about the straight pin?" One of my students said, "I think I can improve that as well." I said, "How you going to do it?" He said, "Put a little crimp in it and when you stick it in, it will stay in." I trained my graduate students to begin thinking this way, too. It was a lot of fun. One of my little graduate exercises for an afternoon was to design a machine that would make toothpicks. Obviously there are machines that make toothpicks, but these guys had never seen a machine or knew how they would do it. I've always thought this way. When we talk about that—going back to that telephone—it was kind of funny. As I told you when I first went over to Skidmore and Owings, I ran the switchboard at noon. That darn dial really slowed me down. I said, "You know, someday we're going to have push-button phones." It was merely a question of speeding it up. I'd thought about it. My sister, at that time, was working as a patent attorney's secretary, and she was a very fine expert and, of course, she had access to these patent attorneys. I knew it would be expensive, so I went over to talk to him, just as a youngster, of course. I was out of school. I went and he said to forget it. He said, "There'll never be a push-button phone."

Blum: This was a patent attorney who discouraged you?

Richardson: This was a patent attorney who said there will never be a push-button phone. So I said, "Okay." He said, "Even if something like that should come way in the future, Westinghouse or Bell Telephone would have control of it, so you're wasting your time." Later on, when I got back from overseas—I regret

218 that along with many other things I've mislaid, a lot of things I'd done overseas. Sketches of ideas. One of them was a flying wing, which incidentally, looks very much like the B-52 Stealth bomber, the one that they're so hush-hush about, that big thing. I did all sorts of furniture designs, and I don't know just what all.

Blum: You patented some of your furniture designs. What ever came of that?

Richardson: I patented some of it. When I came back, I was concerned with the apartments. This is when I got into apartment designs and everything, and I thought it would be a great market. People couldn't afford these big, overstuffed things—nor could the space nor the money. There were a lot of furniture modules in terms of cases and bookshelves and that kind of thing, but if I could develop a seating unit that was convertible, a basic footstool that could convert into a chair, a young couple could buy this. All it would be was a package with a cushion and just these legs and so forth. By getting two of these, they could get a chair, by getting three of them, they could make a lounge. You could also get attachments for arms and so on. I had first a patent, it was a very crude one indeed, on that. I had Barney Lieberman, the famous furniture man, make a model for me, so I knew it would work. At that time, I knew it was awfully crude and I admitted it, but I took it—I'll never forget my experience—to a man at Sears Roebuck who was the buyer for furniture. It was a pretty high position. He was a very nice man, too. But they wouldn't touch me until I had a patent. He said, "I'm not going to talk to you unless you have a patent." They had to be very careful about that. He thought it was an interesting idea, but he said, "It obviously needs a lot of refinement, " which I knew, too. It was very crude, indeed. But he said, "The market's there. Stick with it. See that piece of furniture out there?", which happened to be a little breakfast nook table with three or four small chairs. He said, "Now that's an item." This must have been 1946 or something like that. I was with SOM, but I was doing this. Not moonlighting really. I don't even know whether Nat knew I was doing it, but anyway I was doing it. He said, "How many of those things do you think we sell in a year?" I guessed fifty or a hundred. I said, "I haven't the slightest idea." He said, "Sixty-eight

219 thousand of those sets of that one thing in a year!" Then I decided that I would take this to Herman Miller. I went over there and talked to the people who were responsible, the key people at Herman Miller. They, of course, were the ones that dealt with George Nelson and Eames and so on. This man was up in Zeeland, Michigan. I don't know how I got the appointment, but I drove over. I can't remember the details. I must have gotten a few days off or I did it on vacation time. I had this interview with him, and he was very pleasant, indeed. Again, the same piece of furniture, and I said, "I think this has got potential, " and I told him the advantages of it. Again, he said, "I think it's a very interesting idea, but it needs a lot of refinement. I don't know. Everything that we do, design-wise, has to go through George Nelson or Charles Eames. But I'd stick with it. For example, there's Barnes's chair." At that time it was a wonderful little molded plywood chair. You forget prices because everything has changed so very much, but I believe at that time, it wholesaled for fourteen dollars and it retailed for twenty-eight or something like that. It had just come on the market two or three years before. He said, "How many do you think we sell a year?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea." He said, "Upwards of 80,000." I said, "Well, what's the royalty on that sort of thing?" "Oh, " he said, "Charles and Ray Eames get a dollar a chair." Or a little more than that, I think. They were making 10 percent or a $1.40.

Blum: Well, it must have encouraged you.

Richardson: They were making $100,000 a year just in royalties on that chair alone. That was before Saarinen's womb chair. That was just the first one. It did encourage me. You. know, you get sidetracked. These things are little diversions from my main track. We were talking yesterday about the new glass buildings and the use of glass on the outside and how to wash them. That's when I developed this idea of a magnetic window washer. The magnet will go through the glass, you see, and you have the magnet inside of the glass. You have an opening and you put the sponge and the squeegee on the outside and you move the magnet around inside, you see, and it moves the squeegee and sponge around.

220 Blum: Did you patent that?

Richardson: I didn't patent it. Like so many of these things, it was patented later by somebody else, a very similar thing. It's hard to get moving because a patent would cost you about four years and about $4,000 or $5,000, you know.

Blum: What happened with the furniture design? You did patent any of them.

Richardson: I didn't finish that story. There was this hiatus while I was doing other things, and finally I came back—and this is kind of a funny story. I really didn't think about this thing until later. I submitted drawings for the patent. Sure enough, this thing went along, and eventually I got a patent on it. But again, I was in the process with Skidmore and all the pressures and so on, so when I finally got the patent, I didn't pay much attention to it. I almost forgot it, as a matter of fact. I didn't do any promoting on it at all, but it was a more sophisticated design. It was a different system entirely but, it was based on the same idea of a stool module with removable legs that you could put together and make a chair out of it. It was the first year that I was done here. I was teaching summer school and I, for some reason, got this urge to do something about these patents. While I was teaching, in between classes, I was working in the studio here at Notre Dame, and I built this little model and I made the cushions out of balsa wood and sanded them down and sprayed them. I got some tiny tubes and I soldered them and I put them together. By then I had a house and a little studio, and I made a little set-up with these tiny chairs and I photographed them, and they looked like the real thing. A big model. I had so much fun with this thing. I even made a chair where you could make a coffee table out of it by converting the legs. You could make the table bigger or higher or a lounge thing—arm attachments and all that sort of thing. I got so interested in it, I decided I would apply for a patent. I forgot all about this other thing. By this time, I had another patent attorney who had worked with me on a pneumatic structure when I was in Champaign. I went to him. He was a wonderful man, Patrick Henry Hume, with Wilkinson, Huxley, Byron and Hume out of Chicago, a big firm. I knew him well, and he was a delightful person. I took this little model up to him

221 and the pictures. I said, "I'd like to see about this." He said, "It looks interesting. I'll look into it." About ten days went by, and he called me up and he said, "Ambrose, I've got some news for you." I said, "What's that?" He says, "I've made a search on that chair, that convertible furniture unit of yours. I found out something very interesting." I said, "What?" He said, "It's already been patented." I said, "No kidding!" He said, "Yes, a fellow named Ambrose Richardson got a patent on that fifteen years ago or something like that, and it's going to run out next year." I thought it was awfully funny. I'd gone through all the trouble of making these little models and everything else, and I already had it patented. I'd refined it a little bit, but not very much.

Blum: You obviously never marketed it?

Richardson: I never did. Again, that's the trouble. To do any of these things, you've really got to work at it. I suppose I still could. I got the last furniture patent in 1957. It ran out by 1977. That's about right. The first year I was here was 1973, and it was patented already. I don't know why I didn't take it up to Miller then. I was kind of discouraged. I shouldn't have been. You get kind of tired of peddling these things when you don't have to. I admire Bucky Fuller more for his persistence than anything else.

Blum: Did you think that maybe in the 1950s—the time for metal tubular furniture—the edge was off?

Richardson: No, because I think the Miller stuff was still metal. The plywood chair was metal. It was round. Actually mine could have been done with a round tube as well, really.

Blum: Except there was a time when these, convertible, multifunctional furniture and cabinets and whatever were more popular than in the late 1950s.

Richardson: They were very nice about it, but I think they thought it was gimmicky. Also, if anybody's going to go into these things as a manufacturer, it's a tremendous investment. I went to one place after another with this

222 pneumatic structure. We came close because I had talked to Goodyear. We talked to the plastic people. They even came out to Illinois to meet me—Dow Chemical and Monsanto. I mean, I really saw some big people. We had this wonderful research grant from the air force, which the Armour Research Foundation did for me, and this was a much bigger scale thing. So I took it to this one place, Union Tank, which was a connection through the same patent lawyer and talked to the president. Two or three things happened. First of all, if it's a really good idea, the chances are the top brass, the president, says, "Ah, that looks good. Now we'll give it to the research department to investigate it and see how feasible it is." The research department, if it's really good, doesn't want to say it's good because the president will come back and say, "Well, if it's so good, why didn't you think of it? What do you think we're paying you for?" So they're anxious to knock it down. I have hit against this thing time and again.

Blum: With?

Richardson: The pneumatic dome—at Goodyear and at Union Tank. So, it was the kind of a thing where had I had proper marketing and the proper person to do it… It wasn't just for cities, of course, because that's really dreaming. You're not going to go out and build a dome over a city tomorrow. I knew that. But in the military, soldiers could carry one of these structures on their back, and it only weighs about three times the weight of a fountain pen, and with a can of air, you've got a tent in a matter of seconds almost. It's the same principle as the life raft, except that you've got a self-supporting shelter. To me, the application was for tents for the military, for covering a life raft, for grain bins of different sizes, for greenhouses. I mean, you name it. There was every kind of application. I think everybody had in their mind that this guy's trying to build these dome cities. Of course, I had shown this domed stadium, domed cities, and all of that stuff, which was possible to do—in the course of time. For example, the Union Tank man, after the feasibility study, said, "Well, my research people tell me it will cost a quarter of a million dollars just to make a tool to do a sample of this thing. Once it's going, it's fine. You have standardized tools. But just the development costs are tremendous. The

223 plastic people weren't particularly interested because they sell more plastic in garbage bags in South Bend in one day than it would take to build a dome over a city, which, you know, they couldn't sell again for another thirty years, if it lasted. It's that kind of thing. Again, there are always these roadblocks. My feasibility study for the air force for the D.E.W. line [Detached Early Warning] they liked very much, except they couldn't fold it up and put it in a flying boxcar. Even though they didn't fold up Bucky Fuller's, why, they still took his. That's what really got him going finally on those D.E.W. line structures, the geodesic domes. But he and I reviewed my patent together. He said he would make a deal with us that we could use his patents and then use ours. In other words, we could convert the geodesic dome into the pneumatic dome. My partner, George McCauley, who, again, had been one of my graduate students, developed it with me. In fairness, a lot of it was his idea. I don't claim complete credit at all, so it was a joint authorship. But he just wouldn't have any part of tying anybody else in, which was extremely unwise on his part and so forth. Then we handled our research grant very badly with the air force. My lawyer, who has long since died, wasn't a patent lawyer, although he was involved in it, and he went out to meet these people. He antagonized them. Then I went out with the research people from Armour Research, and I saw the handwriting on the wall. I could see these people were not going to extend our contract, so I backed off of it figuring we'd come back later when the mood is better. They didn't renew our contract, and I think the man from Armour Research, of course, was infuriated with me because I didn't fight harder to get it.

Blum: Who were you under contract to?

Richardson: The air force.

Blum: To develop the pneumatic structure?

Richardson: Well, to do the feasibility studies. They gave us $30,000 to do the feasibility study. I was only a consultant. We got the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago to do the research. They built a machine to test it, just testing the

224 cushions and so on. The tests were very favorable, except that the air force claims it didn't answer all their specific requirements about being portable. This was a 200-foot-diameter dome, mind you, we were talking about. This was not just a small thing. We wanted them to go ahead and build at least a thirty- or forty-foot prototype to see what it would really do. That's where we were turned down. That's where I made one of the major mistakes of my career because I think we should have said, "Well, look, let's just try it for a thirty-foot dome," because the man from Armour Research was very positive about the potential of it. Of course, it was a big grant for them at that time, and he wanted to carry on this grant. But I could see it was very abrasive and, being .a diplomat, I thought we'll come back and hit him when the mood is better. But, of course, we didn't go back. They turned us down and that was it. So, as a consequence, I did talk to the other people and it carried on. We had this printed report, this feasibility study, and with that ammunition I thought we could go to these other big companies and so on. Then I turned it over to the University of Illinois. Bob Merriam had run for mayor before and was an old acquaintance of mine from college days. He was running an organization that worked for the University of Illinois to promote patents. In other words, so they would get the patent on this and it go into the University of Illinois Foundation. So, they were very interested in this thing. They wrote and talked to people. They had connections. That's how I got the entree to Goodyear. So I worked at it, but, again, how do you do it? Here I'm teaching and in practice down in Champaign, and there's no one except me to go around with my patent in hand.

Blum: But what's interesting is that these new and exciting ideas kept popping out of you. Now, if they got marketed or if they got patented is a whole other field. That's where you seemed to have difficulty, but you didn't seem to have difficulty getting those ideas.

Richardson: I was talking to my sister yesterday. My former brother-in-law had called and wants me to come to Virginia. Well, I'm taking down one of these pneumatic ideas to him and a new housing idea that I have and which I've got sketched out.

225 Blum: You're still thinking. The ideas are still popping out.

Richardson: Well, I hope so. I don't have any dreams of being a multimillionaire.

Blum: Do you have a dream project?

Richardson: Yes. It's terrible. I don't want to talk about it in front of you. I've thought for a long time that if you could have a decent moistener for toilet paper, which is standard for every household in the country and in the world and in every public toilet facility, it would solve a lot of problems. Don't laugh at me too much. The first thing you've got to do is copyright and register a name. The name of it is "Moistenet." This is on record in case anybody tries to steal it. I've copyrighted "Moistenet" and its alternative name is "Dampenet." My first idea, and I have many sketches of it, is simply a moist roller, you know, like the old paper rollers. That's easy enough to package and hang on a bathroom wall. I thought about it. It would have to be so sanitized, I don't think anybody in a public facility would ever use it. Even at home, you look at it and think, who else has been here? So, this dawned on me, and I designed a little bracket and so forth. You hang it in your bathroom on a bracket and you simply use a water spray bottle and it's again called "Moistenet." It could have medication incorporated in it, so I was thinking of going to the Preparation H people or the Tucks people. It could be marketed very easily by any of the toilet paper people and it would take them to do it. But every time I see one of these toilet paper ads I think, I'm going to write them a letter and say, "I have an idea for you." The thing is, if I could ever get the Moistenet idea off the ground, then Prue and I could travel at leisure.

Blum: Well, that is hardly what I expected you to say when I asked you about your dream project, but I think that's very interesting.

Richardson: The reason that's a dream project is because I think it is marketable under proper conditions. I do think it's profitable as a project. My great dreams of covering a neighborhood or covering a house or covering a—those are dream

226 projects. But that's what I mean. This other one, I think, has a lot more opportunity to fly.

Blum: It has practical application.

Richardson: I invented an electric toothbrush way, way back when I was at Skidmore.

Blum: Did you patent it?

Richardson: Didn't patent it because everyone said, "No one's going to stick electricity in their mouth."

Blum: You have had some poor advice.

Richardson: That's why I say, people just laugh at you. Everybody laughs. That's the trouble. It's like the old song, they laughed when Edison recorded sound. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. I haven't mentioned this idea for a long time because I'm keeping it tight to my chest, having seen all these other things go the way they go. I haven't mentioned anything about "Moistenet" even to Prue.

Blum: But you're on record now.

Richardson: I'm on record now, and I'm on record in my diary as having it done, too.

Blum: One last question. If anyone reading this oral history, your comments, wants to know more about your career than they could find in the literature, and they wanted to go to some original source material, such as your writings, your drawings, your material, where would they find them?

Richardson: I've got a file—it's not very comprehensive—of my writings, lectures, and so on. It's not that organized. I've kept my own personal journal. It's just a day- by-day journal. It's no great idea or anything. It's just more or less what happened today. You know, who did you see today, what did Prue do today

227 kind of thing. I've kept that pretty religiously for many years, and it's helped out on a lot of things. For example, at the University of Illinois when I was doing consulting there and they couldn't find something in the files from maybe four or five years back, they'd call me up and ask, "Do you have such and such a meeting on such and such a day?" I didn't have the minutes or anything but I at least had "meeting at the university" and put initials or names or whoever was there. You know, that helped them out. One year, we were having a little trouble with the income tax people in proving something, and Prue and I went down. Prue had the idea. We took down my journal. I can't remember exactly what it was. We took my journal, and I had it in my journal.

Blum: What about your visuals, your drawings? The drawings that you did at Skidmore? Are they still at Skidmore or do you have any yourself?

Richardson: When I did that exhibit that Patrick arranged for me at the Snite, he wrote to Skidmore to try to get some. They're probably in existence, but what they did and I suppose still do, is they have a warehouse somewhere. They ship all that stuff over there.

Blum: You didn't keep any?

Richardson: No, I didn't keep any. It's just too difficult to do that.

Blum: What about your own firm, the drawings for commissions you had?

Richardson: They sent some of them up to me, but I think they're still down there. Before I came up here, long before, they decided to clean house. I went down there, and one of our associates was throwing out all of my old drawings.

Blum: Did you take them?

Richardson: I was infuriated. Oh, yes.

228 Blum: Do you have any?

Richardson: One box. I've got one drawing from the Carson, Pirie, Scott competition, an original of that, but I don't have very much. Most of the drawings that I have are like my pen and ink things and so on, which are more recent.

Blum: I meant for buildings that were either built or just projects.

Richardson: Some of them I have in that famous lost file, but those are just photographs of some drawings.

Blum: Ambrose, thank you very much.

Richardson: Well, thank you. It's been a great pleasure, I can assure you.

229 SELECTED REFERENCES

Ambrose Madison Richardson FAIA. The Snite Museum of Art, University of Norte Dame, April 18-June 13, 1982 (exhibition catalog). "Architecture Salutes the American Cowboy." Architectural Record 122 (December 1957):10- 11.. "Atom City." Architectural Forum 83 (October 1945):102-116. Cavinder, Fred D. "After the Agony, the Ecstasy—Indianapolis Opens a New Show Place for Art." Indianapolis Star Magazine 18 October 1970. Danz, Ernest. Architecture of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 1950-1962. Introduction by H.R. Hitchcock. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963. Geer, David S. "Oak Ridge: A World War II New Town." Journal of the American Institute of Architects 15-16, n.s. (January 1951):16-20. Louchheim, Aline. "Architecture Of and For Our Day." New York Times, 24 September 1950. "Ohio State Health Center." Architectural Record 111 (May 1952):173-183. Owings, Nathaniel Alexander. The Spaces In Between. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973. Patrick, Corbin. "Clowes Pavilion Thing of Beauty." Indianapolis Star, 10 April 1972. "Pickaback Office Building." Architectural Forum 91 (August 1949):70-71, 75. Richardson, Ambrose. "Skidmore and Owings: The Early Days." Threshhold 2 (Autumn 1983):66-71. Richardson, Severns, Scheeler & Associates, Inc. (promotional brochure) 1970. Sanderson, George A. "America's No. 1 Defense Community: Oak Ridge, Tennessee." Progressive Architecture 32 (June 1951):63-84. Scrapbook, newspaper clippings, and exhibition panels. Lent by Ambrose Richardson. "Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Architects, U.S.A." Museum of Modern Art Bulletin XVIII (Fall 1950). "TWA Ticket Office." Architectural Forum 86 (March 1947):90-93. Woodward, Christopher. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

230 AMBROSE MADISON RICHARDSON

Born: 1 February1917, Helena, Arkansas Died: 11 December 1995, St. Joseph, Indiana

Education: University of Chicago, 1934-1935 Armour Institute of Technology, 1939 Executive Training Program, University of Chicago, 1948

Professional Experience: Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 1937-1942, 1945-1951 Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Associates, Champaign, Illinois, 1956- 1972 Consultant, 1972+

Teaching Experience: Professor, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 1951-1956 Chairman, Department of Architecture, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, 1972-1978 Visiting Critic, Lecturer, 1972-1978

Military Service: United States Air Force, 1942-1945

Civic Service: President, Central Illinois Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1959- 1962 Director of National American Institute of Architects, Illinois Region, 1963- 1966 President, Illinois Council, American Institute of Architects, Illinois Region, 1965-1966 National Architecture Accreditation Board, 1966-1972 President, Indiana Society of Architects, 1977-1978

Awards and Honors: American Institute of Architects, Fellow, 1966 Spiering Prize, 1937 Ryerson, First Mention, 1939 Tau Beta Pi, 1939 Crane Competition, First Award, 1952 Cowboy Hall of Fame Competition, Third National Award, 1956 University of Notre Dame, Outstanding Teacher Award, 1981

231 Exhibitions: "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects, U.S.A.," Museum of Modern Art, 1950 "Ambrose Madison Richardson FAIA," Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, 1982

232 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

5 East 57th Building, New York City, New 110-111, 126-129, 135, 140, 142-144, 149, York 110 154, 155 100 West Monroe Building, Chicago, Illinois 95 Capital University, Columbus, Indiana 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 184 100, 102, 127 Carp, Joseph 67 Century of Progress International A.M. Richardson and Associates 176, 178 Exposition, 1933-1934, Chicago, Illinois Aalto, Alvar 29, 30, 38, 80 11, 18, 20, 64 Adams, Brewster (Bruce) 71, 73, 76, 77, Century of Progress International 90, 156 Exposition, 1933-1934, Belgian Village, Adler Planetarium, Chicago, Illinois 18 Chicago, Illinois 14 Adler, David 67 Century of Progress International Alschuler, Alfred S. 37 Exposition, 1933-1934, Crystal House, Amico, Robert (Bob) 210 Chicago, Illinois 19 Anderson, Hjorth 115 Century of Progress International Anderson, K.C. (Carl) 61, 63, 67, 73, 76 Exposition, 1933-1934, Ford Pavilion, Anselevicius, George 212 Chicago, Illinois 19 Armstrong, Louis 56 Century of Progress International Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Exposition, 1933-1934, General Motors 4, 5, 23, 35, 52 Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois 19 Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Century of Progress International Burnham Libraries, Chicago, Illinois 23, Exposition, 1933-1934, House of 29 Tomorrow, Chicago, Illinois 19 Asplund, Gunnar 80 Century of Progress International Auditorium Building, Chicago, Illinois 53 Exposition, 1933-1934, Skyride, Chicago, Ayres, L.S., Department Store, Illinois 65 Indianapolis, Indiana 88, 155 Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933-1934, Travel and Bachman, William 197 Transport Building, Chicago, Illinois 17 Bannister, Turpin 149, 150, 152-155, 165, Chamberlain, Samuel 65 167, 171 Chapman, David 23 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 38 Chermayeff, Serge 57 Bauer, Catherine 122 Chicago Academy of Fine Arts 53, 58 Bauhaus, Germany 39 Chicago Sun-Times Building 173, 174 Beckman, Morris 30 Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, Illinois 31 Berger, Kelly and Unteed 180, 203-204 Concordia College, Ft. Wayne, Indiana Bieg, Harry 23, 46 182 Black, Gilmer Vardiman 32 Conterato, Bruno 47 Blair, Dennis 141 Coulter, John 21 Blessing, Charles 161, 163 Coulter, Merle C. 21 Bojeson, Kay 115 Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, Boone, Daniel 205 Michigan 81, 135 Breuer, Marcel 38, 101 Crow Island School, Winnetka, Illinois Buehr, George 4, 5 180 Bunshaft, Gordon 25, 31, 47, 62, 67-69, 71, Crumlish and Sporleder 159 74-80, 82, 88, 90, 96, 99, 100, 101, 105-106, Cuneo, Lawrence (Larry) 34

233 Curtis Lighting 15, 60-61 Groves, Leslie 130 Cutler, Robert 67, 74, 80, 142 Gruen, Victor 156 Guggenheim Museum, New York City, Daley, Richard J. 110 New York 95 Danforth, George E. 46, 49, 50, 98 Gurney, Jack 27, 110-114, 119, 121 Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall 160 Halliburton, Richard 64 Deskey, Donald 150 Hammond, James Wright (Jim) 46 Diamant, Robert 149, 212 Harno, Dean 167 Dinkeloo, John 76, 89, 176 Harper, William Rainey 21 Doolittle, James Harold 91 Hartmann, William 142, 196, 215 Dornbusch, Charles (Charlie) 23, 35, 37, Hartray, John F., Jr. 79 43, 46, 63, 87 Hasskarl, William 128 Drake Hotel, Chicago, Illinois 55-56 Havens, Charles 169, 171, 182, 203 Draper and Kramer 112 Heald, Henry 22, 60 Dudok, William M. 117-119 Hejduk, John 201, 205 Dymaxion Car 19 Herron Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana 185 Eames, Charles 158, 202 Hesburgh, Theodore 208, 216 Eiseman, Al 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69, 73 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 42, 44, 104 Esherick, Joseph 213 Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. 72 Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois 183-184 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 81 Hoffmeister, Theodore (Ted) 31 Featherstone, Kenneth 205 Hogan, Joseph 208, 210 Field, Marshall 173 Holabird and Root 46, 56, 86, 96, 196 Field Museum of Natural History, Holabird, John A. 31, 37, 85 Chicago, Illinois 12, 52 Hood, Raymond 65 Flint, Noel 177 Horsbrugh, Patrick 161, 205, 209-212, 228 Ford Motor Company Building, Dearborn, Humphrey, C.E. (Buck) 123, 134, 140, 141 Michigan 113 Hunter, Howard 193 Fox and Fox 23 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 20 Franzen, Ulrich 156 Fugard, John 180 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Fujikawa, Joseph 47 Illinois 58 Fuller, R. Buckminster (Bucky) 19, 58, 137, Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown 216, 222 Hall, Chicago, Illinois 101 Indianapolis Museum of Art, Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Indianapolis, Indiana 99, 181, 194 Illinois 52 Ingerbretzen, Sheldon 149 Garland Furniture Company 70 Inness, George 2 Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri 89 Institute of Design, Chicago, Illinois 56, Geer, David 135, 139 58 Goff, Bruce 6-7, 11, 15, 34, 216 Goldsmith, Myron 46, 98 Jackson, Leroy 132, 134, 136, 139 Graham, Bruce 79-80, 212, 213, 215 Jahn, Helmut 102 Greber, Jacques 15 Johnson, Harold 63 Greene, Phillip 179 Johnson, Philip 78, 81, 188 Greyhound Bus Terminal, Chicago, Illinois 124-128, 141 Kahn, Louis 164 Gropius, Walter 29, 38, 47, 81, 164 Keck, George Fred 18-19, 59, 71, 81

234 Keck, William F. (Bill) 59, 71 McGrath, Paul 64 Kennelly, Martin J. 109 Macsai, John 149, 212 Kepes, Gyorgy 59 Maher, Philip B. 111 Kerbis, Gertrude Lempp 121 Malcolmson, Reginald 102 Kimberly, Jack 66 Manchester Store, Madison, Wisconsin Kimberly-Clark, Neenah, Wisconsin 66, 168 95, 97 Manny, Carter H. 174, 208 King, John 57, 96, 108 Marshall Field's, Chicago, Illinois 155, 157 Knoll International 71 Marx, Samuel 177 Kraft, Frederick (Fred) 139-140 Maule, Tallie 135, 136, 142, 148 Kramer, Ferd 112, 124 Meigs Field, Chicago, Illinois 18 Krannert, Herman 184-186 Mell, Al 23, 29, 38, 43 Krehbiel, Albert 23 Merriam, Robert (Bob) 225 Kump, Ernest 203, 204 Merrill, John (Jack) 68, 131-133, 139-140 Metz, Carl 216 Lacey, William 201 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 1, 23, 28-29, Lake Meadows, Chicago, Illinois 27, 104- 31, 34, 37-43, 45, 46, 48-49, 51, 55, 58, 80- 112, 122, 124, 144 88, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 119, 127, Lake Point Tower, Chicago, Illinois 120 154, 155, 169, 171, 180, 188, 199, 216 Lammers, L J. 30 Miller, Herman 220, 222 Lapota, Matthew (Matt) 67, 74, 77 Mittlebusher and Tourtelot 180-181 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Moholy-Nagy, László 55-57, 72 28, 31-33, 38, 77, 81, 97, 100, 101, 104, 144 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 57 Lever House, New York City, New York Montana, Frank 205-206 126-129, 173 Murphy, Charles Francis 172, 173 Lewis, Samuel (Sam) 95 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New Lewis, Sinclair 116-117, 216 York, New York 78-79, 113, 121, 143, Libbey-Owens-Ford 7 158 Lieberman, Barney 70, 219 Museum of Science and Industry, Lincoln Park, Conservatory, Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 17, 19 Illinois 53 Myers, Howard 113 Little Traverse Hospital, Petoskey, Myhrum, Arthur 148, 149, 156-158, 196 Michigan 74 Little, Robert 76, 80, 81, 84, 90, 96, 100, Nacht, Daniel 135, 136 134, 141 Naess and Murphy 172, 174, 175, 177 Livingston, Park 169, 170, 182 Naess, Sigurd 172-174 Loebl, Jerrold (Jerry) 31, 34, 37, 60, 157 National Institute of Baking Building, Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett 128, 157 Chicago, Illinois 191-193 Loewy, Raymond 71 Nelson, Donald 64-65 Louchheim, Aline (later wife of Eero Nelson, George 220 Saarinen) 143 Nelson, Otto (General) 27, 110-112 Lunt, Alfred/Lynn Fontanne (house, aka Netsch, Walter 10, 26, 79, 80, 135, 136, Ten Chimneys), Genessee Depot, 142, 148, 149, 203, 212, 213, 215 Wisconsin 35 Newcomb, Rexford 167 Lustron House 137 Niles East High School, Niles, Illinois 178 Niles North High School, Niles, Illinois McBain, Hughston 155 178, 180 McCaughey, William 41, 46 Niles South High School, Niles, Illinois McCauley, George 224 178 McCurry, Paul 199

235 Niles West High School, Niles, Illinois Richardson, Irving (brother of Ambrose) 178 3, 59, 145 Richardson, Louise (mother of Ambrose) 2, 4, 9, 12, 14, 32, 217 Oak Ridge, Tennessee 75, 90, 95, 96, 98, Richardson, Louise (sister of Ambrose) 123-124, 128-130, 132, 134, 136-138, 141, 218 143, 144, 148, 168 Richardson, Prudence Coulter (Pru) 21, Obata, Gyo 81, 212 79, 95, 97, 136, 138, 150-152, 159, 198, Olivet Nazarene College, Kankakee, 202, 207, 228 Illinois 183 Richardson, Severns, Scheeler and Orput and Orput 178, 180 Associates 1, 176, 178, 182, 185 Orput, Raymond 179 Robie, Frederick, (house), Chicago, Illinois Oud, Jacobus J.P. 118-119 6, 53 Owings, Emily Otis 66, 80, 95 Robinson, Alan 90, 156 Owings, Nathaniel 18, 26-27, 35, 55, 56, Rodgers, John Barney 37, 39, 43, 55, 86, 60-66, 68, 69, 74, 75, 78-80, 95-97, 105- 108 107, 109, 111-113, 118, 125, 128, 130, 132- Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 18, 91 134, 139-141, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 155- Root, John Welborn 56 160, 167, 192, 195, 219 Rummel, Charles Garman (Charlie) 172, 203, 204 Passonneau, Joseph 148, 212 Russell, Carl 135, 136, 148 Peat, Wilbur 185 Pelli, Cesar 102-103, 160, 167, 174, 176, Saarinen, Eero 25, 81, 89, 98, 158, 182, 216 177, 180, 216 Saarinen, Eliel 81, 118, 180 Pennell, Joseph 4 Saddle and Cycle Club, Chicago, Illinois Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. 85 (project) 109 Scheeler, James (Jim) 47, 121, 154, 162, Perkins and Will 157, 176, 180, 203, 204, 176, 179, 195, 202, 204 215 Schulze, Franz 37, 38, 58 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 16, 175, 208 Schweikher, R. Paul 83, 158 Peterhans, Walter 42, 43, 46 Selz, Jack 96, 113, 134, 135, 141 Porter, Dean 188, 190 Severinghaus, Walter 67, 74, 80, 142 Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma 216 Severns, John 10, 47, 154, 176, 178, 179, Priestley, William 37, 42, 47, 48, 54, 55, 96, 182-184, 195, 202 99, 134, 141, 143, 144, 149, 170, 212 Shaw, Alfred (Al) 18, 26, 27, 96, 123, 156, Promontory Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 157, 172, 173 101 Shaw, Howard Van Doren 96 Prudential Building, Chicago, Illinois 173 Shedd (John G.) Aquarium, Chicago, Illinois 12, 18 Rapson, Ralph 120, 213, 216 Sherwood, Red 157 Rebori, Andrew N. 14, 172 Skidmore, Eloise 80, 113 Reed, Earl 23, 34, 36 Skidmore, Louis 18, 35, 60, 63-66, 68, 69, Reid, Lyle 184 74-76, 78, 112, 113, 129, 130, 145 Remington, Frederic 2 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) 16, Resor, Stanley (house, project) Jackson 28, 32, 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 48, 57-60, 62, 64, Hole, Wyoming 37, 39, 67, 71, 76, 78-80, 91, 95, 99-101, 103, 106, Rettaliata, John 175 107, 116, 121-124, 129-131, 140, 142-143, Richardson, Ambrose, Sr. (father of 145, 148-150, 153-155, 158, 160, 163, 166, Ambrose) 1, 3, 8, 59, 218 174, 191-193, 195, 196, 203, 212, 214-216, 218

236 Smith, L. Lattin (Larry) 25, 95, 129, 132, University of Illinois, College of Law, 179, 181 Champaign, Illinois 166-168, 172, 177 Snite Museum, South Bend, Indiana 94, University of Illinois, Krannert Art 188, 210, 211, 228 Museum, Champaign, Illinois 184 Speyer, A. James (Jim) 40, 46 University of Illinois Residence Halls, Spink, Bertha 10 Champaign-Urbana, Illinois 177, 180 Sporleder, Donald 205 Urban, Joseph 20 Steelhammer, Mildred 151 Stevens, Charles A. 155 Veterans Hospital, Toledo, Ohio 127 Stevens Hotel Suite, (now Chicago Hilton Via, Thomas 135 and Tower), Chicago, Illinois 67-70 Stoddard, James 168 Wagner, William 85 Stouffer, Ernest L. 166 Ward, Robert 133, 135, 142 Stubbins, Hugh 25 158 Waring, Frederick 54 Stuermer, Raymond 205 Watson, Dudley Crafts 4-6 Sullivan, Louis 5, 64 Weese, Harry 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 89, 123, Sullivan, Russell 166, 203 158, 161, 162, 178, 216 Summers, Gene 102, 173 Weese, John 46, 148, 212 Weinhardt, Carl 185, 186 Taft, Lorado 10, 11 Wende, Ernest 136 Taft, William Howard 6 Wiley, Charles 105, 128, 141, 160, 163, 212 Tague, Robert Bruce (Bob) 59 Wood, Elizabeth 123 Taliesin, Spring Green. Wisconsin 34 Woodward, Christopher 122 Tavern Club, Chicago, Illinois 27, 57, 149, Woollen, Evans 185 192 World's Columbian Exposition, 1893, Terrace Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati, Ohio 125, Chicago, Illinois 6, 31 134 World's Columbian Exposition, 1893, The Architects Collaborative (TAC) 47, Palace of Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois 18 164 Wright, Frank Lloyd 6, 18, 31, 32, 77, 82, Theobald, Paul 100 95, 118, 216 Tigerman, Stanley 26 Wurster, William W. (Bill) 57 Train, Jack 138, 140, 215-216 Trans World Airlines, Ticket Office, Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Chicago, Illinois 97 Haven, Connecticut 72 Trianon Ballroom, Chicago, Illinois 56 Yost, L. Morgan 135 Tribune Tower 65 Tugendhat, Fritz (house), Brno, Czechoslovakia 38

Unitarian Church, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin 118 United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia 103 United States Gypsum Company 131 United States Navy, Interceptor Stations 130 University of Chicago, Hilton Chapel, Chicago, Illinois 14 University of Illinois, Circle Campus, Chicago, Illinois 109, 162, 203

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