USC Architecture Celebrates the Life of Dean Robert S. Harris, FAIA

Brett Steele: I'm Brett Steele, the Dean of the School of Architecture at USC. It is an absolute honor for me and the school to host this event to commemorate and show our respect for a former Dean and a beloved colleague, and for his amazing and important contribution to the school, our students, and the lives of our whole community.

I’m here briefly to thank you for coming in for this, and to welcome everybody to this occasion. Thank you also to those exceptional people who are part of organizing this wonderful event. It's been a committee of dedicated faculty, alumni and staff, who have worked tirelessly to bring us all together here this morning. Most importantly, I want to thank our distinguished faculty member, Victor Regnier. As the Committee Chairman, he is a ringleader, a promoter, an urgency maker of bringing us all here to remember the impact of both an individual life and a set of beliefs that have brought us all here. Thank you so much. I'd like to also thank three others who were a part of the effort in bringing us all together: Dottie O'Carroll, Lauren Matchison and .... Thank you for bringing us together and making sure that this is the celebration I know it will absolutely be. We also have to thank our incredible staff on the Events and Communications teams here at the school for helping support all of these individuals and bringing us together.

These amazing individuals reached out to all of you who know and loved Robert Harris. His colleagues, former students, friends, fellow faculty and family who are here with us today. They wanted to make sure you were all included in this celebration of Bob's life and legacy. Thank you all for helping with that.

Many of you have responded with an outpour of support. Everyone here today, and many who couldn't be here this morning, have contributed to supporting our students in the name of Robert Harris. Bob will be remembered for a legacy of what he did every day in this building: Look at, care for, elevate, and support the life of our students, their education, their experience, and their eventual success. This all mattered hugely to Bob, and he sought to provide support in every way possible.

On behalf of everybody at USC Architecture, we are deeply grateful for your contributions and support. Before I pass it over Victor who will lead the program, I just wanted to point out and acknowledge this beautiful sketch on the screen, drawn by our long standing faculty member Graeme Morland, who made that sketch a year before Bob's passing. It’s so fitting that this sketch of Bob Harris is in this very courtyard where we are gathered. The title is down in the lower corner, and the image pretty much says it all. Its title is “The Heart and Spirit of the School,” which precisely captures the reasons we're all here today.

Thank you, everybody, for coming. 

Victor Regnier: Bob was Dean of the School for 11 years, and following that, for another 20 years, he was either the head of the Masters of Architecture Program or the head of the Masters in Landscape Architecture Program. He didn't go lightly into the background. He worked very hard to build both of those programs.

We recruited Bob from the University of Oregon in 1981, where he had served as Dean for 10 years. So, we got somebody who was really accomplished and experienced. Bob was gregarious, he was funny, he was socially skilled, and he was a charming human being. People saw him as both an institution builder and a community leader. He had great judgment, great timing, and was a skilled and convincing fundraiser.

When he first arrived at USC, he built bridges with USC colleagues that led to his election as Chair of the Council of Deans. That meant the Architectural Dean was elected by all of the other deans at USC, and there are plenty of them. But Bob knew what he was doing and so did everybody else. In 1985 he was among the first five faculty in North America to be named an ACSA, a distinguished professor. Following the FAIA, it's probably the highest honor we can provide an academic. Now in its 40th year, there are 175 distinguished faculty. Bob was in that first cohort and was selected out from the thousands of people who were teaching architecture in North America.

He later was elected as the Chair of the Downtown Strategic Planning Task Force, where he focused on transforming Downtown into a powerful center in the region. Any of you who remember Downtown in the mid-80s remember something very different than what we see today. Bob had a lot of impact on that. His academic focus was on urbanism. In fact, he used the words “density with amenity” to describe what we should be thinking about now.

Bob also came at a very important time in the School of Architecture's history. In the 1970s and 1980s, we were transitioning from a regional university to a world class institution. This was a gigantic bolster for the University and for the School of Architecture. He literally rebuilt the program, ushering in historic preservation and grew our landscape program. He built strength mostly through recruiting faculty in History, Theory, Building Science and Computer Applications. He also started the Exploration of Architecture Summer Program to provide high school students a way to sample the discipline of Architecture. Bob built this guild into a powerhouse, and it is admired by schools throughout North America. He initiated the guild and distinguished alumni program, which went on to honor Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Pierre Koenig, Jon Jerde and about 30 others.

He also fundraised for Chairs, visiting professorships, and for significant expansions, like the school center and remodeling of the library.

I knew a lot about Bob, being around him for 50 years. However, I learned so much more about him when received 100 email responses wanting to contribute to the scholarship. Almost everybody who responded had a Bob Harris story, and I collected some of the themes. Here are some of the big hitters:

Probably the most common response was that he was a true gentleman. Most pointed out that Bob was empathetic, hopeful and compassionate. A few reminded us that he always had that twinkle in his eye. When he said something he really wanted you to pay attention to, that's when the twinkle came out.

Bob would rub his hands when a new or promising idea was mentioned, because he wanted people to know that he approved and that he thought it had great promise. 

Something perhaps only family members know is that Bob Harris loved chocolate. Those who learned this secret were always very special to them. So, if you didn't know that, sorry you never really got through to the true Bob Harris.

He was a great leader and a great program builder, and his leadership style, which I adored, was open, inclusive and fair. He always had a very positive attitude for people in situations. He was always an optimist, and he had respect for others. Something that I appreciated was that he was incredibly honest, especially in complicated situations where the truth mattered most. And finally, he had a vision of what the school could offer to the community, to the city, to the faculty, to the university and to the students.

With Bob Harris, we have much to be thankful for.

…

Michael Woo: I first met Bob Harris, it must have been in the late ‘80s or early 90s in his role as co-chair of the Downtown Strategic Plan Advisory Committee. I can still visualize being in a well-lit conference room in the office of Moule & Polyzoides somewhere around Pershing Square.

 Those of you who only know Downtown LA of the last 20 years will not be surprised that downtown a few decades earlier was a very different place. There were a lot of, what I would call, downtown doubters or downtown deniers—anti-urbanists who thought that Los Angeles could thrive as a city without a downtown at its core. These were people who questioned whether there needed to be a central library, or who questioned whether the city would support a center for the performing arts, or who laughed at the notion that there would be people who would voluntarily want to live in Downtown Los Angeles. But Bob Harris persisted.

He stood up for the pedestrian. Working with the consulting team led by Liz Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, Bob questioned what was then the dominant downtown development pattern. The architects here will know what I'm referring to. I sort of mean Corbusier let loose in the city of Los Angeles, with new high-rise towers surrounded by poorly designed public open space that was unwelcoming to pedestrians, and it wasted precious opportunities to bring trees and plants into a hard urban environment.

 But with allies like Ira Yellen, Bob challenged the abandonment of the urban core and suggested that the older industrial districts in downtown, such as the Flower Market, the Produce Market, the Fashion District had buildings that still had a lot of life in them. These were buildings that urban amateurs sometimes referred to as buildings with character.

Bob lived long enough to see that his vision of downtown became a reality.

I would say, I want to remind you, you probably heard of the saying that it, ‘takes a village to raise a child.’ Bob Harris's life and career demonstrated that it can take a village to create a city. When I say that it takes a village to create a city, I mean that it doesn't take a lot of people to change the way people think about a city. You can start your village with just a few, as long as the few include someone with the strength, the perseverance, the vision, and the genial persuasiveness of a Bob Harris, thank you.