For USC Dean, a Commitment to the Urban Landscape

When Robert Harris was offered the top job at the USC School of Architecture eight years ago, he was forced to choose between two very different ways of working and living.

As a professor and department head at the University of Oregon, Harris could either continue his pleasant, well-run life in sleepy Eugene--or he could assume a job at a school that had lost direction in a city that was energetic and changing.

“The options were radical but the choice was easy,” Harris recalls. “Eugene was a small town, and I wanted the challenge of a big city. Our three girls had grown up in Oregon and moved out of the house. My wife, Sandra, and I were ready for a less settled life.”

His yearning for change was answered by the challenge he faced at USC. In the wake of the campus upheavals of the 1960s, the School of Architecture went through a choppy period. In the years between Sam Hurst’s retirement in 1973 and Harris’ appointment in 1981, the school had four deans or interim deans.

Meanwhile, the experimentation of the 1960s, often idealistic and frequently chaotic, had given way to a conservative reaction in the 1970s. And architectural education at USC, as elsewhere, turned back to a focus on the realities of professional practice and how to earn a living as a designer in a rapidly changing work environment.

Oldest in the Southland

But as the oldest school of architecture in Southern California (founded in 1919), USC was also beginning to recognize that its South-Central location placed it at the heart of the city’s unsettled social landscape.

“I was fascinated by the opportunity to lead a school of architecture situated in the midst of the country’s most interesting metropolis,” Harris says. “Dealing with the urban issues designers now face in Los Angeles is as acrobatic as trying to hit a moving target while bouncing on a trampoline.”

Plump, balding, with gentle gray eyes, the 53-year-old Harris seems to be an unlikely academic acrobat. But his energy and determination are often underestimated by friends and opponents alike.

During the recent controversy over the redesign of the proposed expansion to the Central Library, for instance, Harris was one of the Cultural Affairs Commission’s staunchest and most articulate supporters in the face of much official pressure.

“Bob Harris was a rock,” commission president Merry Norris says. “His comments are so well considered and are delivered with such quiet persistence, they can’t easily be spurned. The commission owes Bob a big debt.”

Harris also led the 1986 fight to kill a proposed underground parking garage that involved digging up Exposition Park’s famous rose garden across the street from USC.

Committed to Urban Life

His commitment to urban life extends to living downtown, in the Promenade complex a block from the Music Center. His psychologist-wife Sandra commutes to her job at Cal State Northridge.

As a member of the newly formed Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel, and as vice president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, Harris is deeply involved in local design issues. He also helped found the Urban Design Advisory Coalition, a group of academics, architects and other planning professionals interested in defining the character of the vast and largely unplanned regional metropolis Los Angeles has become.

At the same time he has reorganized USC’s architecture course, pointing it toward a concern with the place of architecture in the city. A five-year undergraduate bachelor’s degree is now complemented by a master’s program called Architecture in the Urban Landscape.

Last year’s graduate students completed thesis projects on the redevelopment of Echo Park and Little Tokyo, exploring such crucial concerns as housing density, provisions for open space for parks and the integration of community services. The landscape architecture program, begun in 1985, is another segment of USC’s metropolitan focus.

Architect as Citizen

“If I wanted to encapsulate our uniqueness compared to other schools, I’d use the word integrative, “ Harris says. “That is, we see the training of a designer as an integral part of his training as a literate and sensitized citizen. Architecture, I feel strongly, cannot properly be taught as an isolated discipline. It is part of being a whole person in a society striving for wholeness.”

As a member of the national American Institute of Architects Task Force on Education, Harris is aware of the ongoing debate about the quality of professional training. A recent poll conducted by Progressive Architecture magazine found that more than 90% of respondents felt their education had been “less than satisfactory” and left them feeling “inadequately prepared for the work world.”

“There is a tension in architectural education between design and relevance,” said Alan Kreditor, dean of the USC School of Urban and Regional Planning. “Educators can’t seem to resolve the tug between considering architecture as an art or a social service. All too often the student is left hanging between these two poles of the profession.”

Of the school’s 400 students, 350 are undergraduates. USC freshmen plunge into designing the first week. But they are also exposed to a wider range of study including courses in architectural history, social sciences and literature.

“A capacity for an enlightened, informed and humane judgment is the core of being an architect in our complex urban environment,” Harris says. “Design as an aesthetic exercise divorced from the social context is, to me, sterile.”