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comment Power Player: The Many Lives of Bill Lacy
During a singularly varied career, Bill Lacy, FAIA, has comfortably bridged the worlds of practice, academia, philanthropy, government, and art. He served as founding dean of the University of Tennessee’s architecture school (1965–69), director of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Architecture and Environmental Design Program (1971–77), and president of the American Academy in Rome (1977–79) and of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City (1980–88). During the 1980s, he was chairman of the board of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and organized and chaired two of its most successful conferences on Italian architecture, film, and design. Lacy was also executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury (1988–2005) and the president of Purchase College, State University of New York (1992–2002).
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In addition, Lacy has been the principal of three design firms, and in 1988 launched a consultancy to advise corporations and institutions on architect selections and design issues. His clients have included Harvard University, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the City of San Francisco, and the U.S. State Department. Among his current clients are the Kimbell Art Museum, the Greentree Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley, and the pharmaceutical company Novartis.
Lacy is the author of 100 Contemporary Architects: Drawings & Sketches (1991) and Angels & Franciscans: Innovative Architecture from Los Angeles and San Francisco (1992). He was one of the authors of The Pritzker Architecture Prize, the First Twenty Years (1999).
Last summer, record editor in chief Robert Ivy talked with Lacy in San Antonio, where he now resides. (Andrea Oppenheimer Dean and Clifford A. Pearson conducted follow-up telephone interviews and edited the text.)
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD: You’ve advised a lot of corporations on design issues. How has corporate architecture changed during your time?
Bill Lacy: It’s changed dramatically. Way back when, we were voices in the wilderness. Now a lot of corporate leaders understand that good architecture can give them a competitive edge. There’s a keener interest in architecture today.
AR: But wasn’t the immediate post–WorldWar II era a golden age for corporate patronage, with companies like IBM, General Motors, and John Deere commissioning wonderful architecture? And aren’t corporations today more concerned about cutting costs than creating inspired buildings?
BL: Back in the 1950s, it was a rather short list of architects that got the great commissions. My friend Charles Eames and a couple of other figures like Eero Saarinen and Gordon Bunshaft basically were the list. Today, there’s a proliferation of architects considered for important jobs. And I don’t buy the argument that corporations today are afraid of spending money on good architecture. It never hurts to go with the best—in any field.
AR: You also advised the State Department on its embassy-building program.
BL: It’s sad what’s happened there. We shouldn’t make our embassies look like prisons. And the same is true for the White House. By putting bollards all around it, we’ve just about ruined its sense of democracy. It hurts both its purpose and its architecture.
AR: You’re really unusual. I don’t know anybody who has had as broad a range of experiences as you.
BL: I wandered into much of it.
AR: How did you end up trying so many wonderful things, and what took you in these directions?
BL: I don’t think you choose. At least, I didn’t choose very much. It’s like it all happened to me. My father was a builder, a contractor, and we lived in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a little town of about 2,600 people with a Last Picture Show kind of Main Street. I always wanted to play basketball more than anything else, so I went to Oklahoma State, where the great Henry Iba was coach. I made the cut for the freshman squad but realized that I couldn’t play basketball and still perform for the dean of the school of architecture. We had the best of both the Beaux-Arts and the Bauhaus at the school, with two Beaux-Arts teachers who didn’t hesitate to tear into our drawings and an IIT—or Harvard—trained professor who would lead us cerebrally to a solution that was our own.
To pay for my college education, I did ROTC and then had to go into the army. When they said Europe, rather than Korea, I did cartwheels. Because I had studied French and Italian, the army wisely chose to send me to Germany. When I came back, I taught at Oklahoma State and got my master’s and won the LeBrun Traveling Grant in a design competition for a library and park. I got the handsome sum of $5,000 to travel for six months and make the grand tour: Provence, Italy, Scandinavia.
I didn’t know what to do next and ended up with Bill Caudill [a founder of Caudill Rowlett Scott] in Houston. Then Bill was offered the job of dean at Rice, and he said, “Why don’t you come over with me and be the associate dean, and you could teach, too.” He was very persuasive.
Maybe that’s what happened: I ran into a lot of people who were really good salespeople, and I wasn’t very resistant.
I think Rice is where my multicareer began. We got lots of new programs going: We sent students to offices, which was a new direction at the time; we started summer programs; and we got grants for research and brought in top students from various schools. We designed community psychiatric centers and community colleges, also new at the time. One year, we designed bomb shelters to make them lovable and livable. And I started a firm with Anderson Todd, a professor type, and Gerald Tackett, a building technology wiz.
Then I was recruited by Tennessee. I went there and started an architecture school and became the founding dean.
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