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comment Power Player: The Many Lives of Bill Lacy
AR: This is the early ’70s?
BL: No, it was ’65 through ’69, during the Vietnam War. There was a lot of turmoil on campuses. But my classes had good morale; the kids felt they were moving in the right direction and that we were all in something together. We took on the old steam plant and converted it into the architecture school, and I got Herman Miller and Knoll to furnish it. We became guinea pigs for the new open-office landscaping.
In Knoxville, I formed Design Collective. There were five of us: two architects, a graphic designer, an industrial designer, and an engineer. I thought that’s where practice might go, toward incorporating different disciplines. We worked with Victor Gruen on a downtown plan. We did a department store in town, put on a big show called Stores of the ’70s predicting all these things that didn’t happen.
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When I thought I’d finished what I wanted to do in Tennessee, I went to Dallas and worked with Omniplan for a year. They did on a big scale what I had done on a small scale in Tennessee.
Very soon, Nancy Hanks, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, came to Dallas and persuaded me that I belonged in Washington, D.C. She told me I’d have lots of money to give away to good causes and good people. And so, in 1971, I went to Washington and had a fantastic six years as director of the NEA’s architecture and environmental arts program—during the most interesting of times, Nixon and Watergate.
AR: Before this, NEA didn’t have money for the arts, did it?
BL: It did, but the Endowment didn’t really take off until Nancy arrived in 1969. Under her leadership, our budget doubled every year until it was up to $200 or $300 million; there was a real rebirth, a burgeoning of the arts in the U.S. It’s a shame that it ran into politics.
But it was fantastic for me because the Council for the Arts [NEA’s board of directors] had on it Duke Ellington, James Earl Jones, Helen Hayes, Marian Anderson, Charles Eames, Lawrence Halperin, O’Neill Ford, Beverly Sills, Mikhail Baryshnikov. It had major figures in every field—Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston. When they went to Congress, we could have asked for a billion dollars and gotten it. Nancy was one of the shrewdest operators ever.
We saved the old Post Office Building [in Washington], and then we saved the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum. And we did this in any way we could. We were wheeling and dealing.
So, anyway, politics, politics. One day, Senator Howard Baker said to me, “You know, we’re doing the Dirkson Senate Office Building. It’s got to be right, because I feel a special obligation to my father-in-law, Everett Dirkson [who had been a powerful senator from Illinois]. We’ve got designs, but I don’t know anything about architecture.” I said, “You have hearings on everything else, you might as well have one on the Dirkson’s preliminary design.” So we had a hearing and people testified. It was a first for design.
But also we had this program on federal design. Now, I don’t like to pat myself on the back unnecessarily—too hard—but I think that the improvement in federal design of all sorts, and even the GSA Design Excellence Program, is attributable to that time. I brought all sorts of artists to Washington, including Massimo Vignelli to redesign the Congressional Record. Anyway, I left Washington. Nancy got sick and died of cancer.
AR: The NEA has gone through some difficult years since then, especially after the controversy over funding for the Robert Mapplethorpe show [in 1989].
BL: Yes. They’re afraid of the arts now.
AR: Whom do you mean by “they”?
BL: The American public and their leaders.
AR: Wherever you’ve been, you’ve been trying new things, innovating, taking risks. Is that the way you see yourself?
BL: I just think of things that need doing and do them. At Cooper, I decided they needed higher visibility. So I started the American Jazz Orchestra before Lincoln Center jumped on it. I got the poet W.S. Mervin to come to Cooper, and hired the country’s first woman dean of engineering.
AR: How many architects have been university presidents?
BL: Thomas Jefferson is the only one I can think of.
AR: Well, not a bad role model!
BL: Then one day the White House called. They were beginning work on the President’s library and wanted advice. Clinton and I had a lot of “good old boy” stories because Broken Bow and Hope are a lot the same. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was all over the news at the time. When I got the call from the White House inviting me to lunch, I asked who else would be there and was told, “Just the President’s lawyers.” So I replied, “Should I bring mine?” I gave the President a crash course in architecture and a few books. He’s a quick study.
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