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Interview with Bernard Zimmerman Page 3
BZ: That's great, because I just loved the Grand Central Market. That's how I got used to junk food, you can't get over it. (laughs) There was a guy selling shrimp in the front and it was the greatest shrimp. I used to sell avocados, three for a quarter. The Bradbury building is a wonderful place. When I was working there, I never knew about that building. It was right across the street; I never appreciated or knew what was going on.
You know you talk about determinants that have shaped LA, I guess because I'm an architect I know a lot about it. The determinants would be the important architects and important architecture. For a city that is so confused and so misdirected, they have had some wonderful pieces of architecture here and wonderful architects. We have been blessed. We are only a city of 200 years, I don't know who the architects were prior to the Nuetras and the Shindlers, but even Maybeck did some work here. These architects have made a direction for LA, I mean Frank Gehry is making Los Angeles known worldwide. Also Tom Mane and Eric Moss. We have a wonderful ocean and we misuse it, we can't swim in the bay. I guess the person who thought LA is such a great area was Ranier Banham, talking about the Four Ecologies. The residential areas are just great. I guess when I think of the determinants that make LA, I think of the pleasure I get from seeing the skyline from Mulholland Drive. That is really an incredible experience. Or I go to the Ray Kappe house and see that. I guess because LA is developing there are opportunities still here. Like who would have thought SCI-Arc would be so successful?
v5: When Sci-Arc broke away from Cal Poly, you were a part of it, you were there. What happened and what are your thoughts?
BZ: What were my thoughts?
v5: For Cal Poly to lose Ray Kappe.
BZ: It was stupid. But Ray feels the system is at fault. What happened there was stupidity. We were building up the school, we went on a search for a chair and Neutra said he would consider being a chair and everyone was excited about it, but it did not happen. Perhaps he was too old to take on that responsibility. So Ray Kappe became the chair, and he was doing a wonderful job. We had a spirit, Ray and I, we were on the same wavelength of education, he's not all design, he knows how to build. And we think that architects should know how to build as well as design. We had what you call a balanced school. The Dean, Bill Dale, was threatened by Ray, I think. It's funny, Deans get in the way when they get threatened, and they try to eliminate people, so they make up stories. So Dean Dale made up a story that Ray wasn't following the rules, that everyone was working for him and we were all working on the outside. All we wanted was a professional school. So the President removed him without due process. I'm a real stickler for that. I was hurt then but not as personally as Ray Kappe was because they actually removed him. So Ray was in the position of thinking that he didn't need Pomona if they didn't want him. He couldn't do anything with the administration. So Audi Laudi and I said, you know, we've got to show support to Ray and we did. We probably had the greatest demonstration in school history.
v5: We have a wonderful story now that is a time line of Sci-Arc.
BZ: I don't think the whole story has been completely told, and probably nobody knows for sure all the parts. Audi Laudi put together a demonstration that was wonderful, and we were going to build this new school, it was going to be called the new school. I told Ray that we should call it that because there was a new school of social behavior in New York that was an avant-garde school with avant-garde thinking. We were thinking of places like Reed College and Black Mountain, the kind of things they did. Ray took the ball and ran. Pomona became a wasteland.
v5: Well, it was dramatically changing, I think the “LA 12 Exhibit” was one of the things that Cal Poly did to try to sort of heal itself and come back into Los Angeles.
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BZ: That was done because of a very fine student, Chuck Slert.
v5: So, Audi Laudi had put together a demonstration?
BZ: Yes, he had this demonstration, and we had posters of Ray Kappe all over. We had a good group of professors at that time.
v5: So there was a clear set of ideas that Ray Kappe and yourself had wanted to implement?
BZ: There was a clear set of ideas and the other people coming in were adding the ideas. It was enrichment. Remember, look at the people we had there at that period of time, Glen Small, outstanding, Tom Mane, Jim Stanford, Michael Rotundi, who was a student.
What happened was Ray Kappe had decided to do the school. I think I was influential in that and so were the others in the group. We all decided to resign and start our own school. Or definitely resign on behalf of Ray Kappe. Then we started looking for places to do the school and how to put a school together. Bill Simonian was very helpful in that. We found a place that Ray liked, but they wanted thirty thousand dollars a year and none of us had any money. Ray was willing to take the risk and sign a lease for three years. That's amazing. So everybody was supposed to resign, but the union asked Ray to stay on until they won their case, about due process, and he decided to do it. By the end of the summer, he won his case. About eleven professors resigned. I was the only one who didn't resign. I had just bought a Shindler House; my marriage was in trouble. The bank said that if I didn't have a job, they wouldn't loan us the money. So I stayed. It was really like a betrayal, I had to go back to Pomona. It was just like going to your country and betraying them. I wanted to be at Sci-Arc in the worst way and I went back to Pomona because of economic reasons within the family and the marriage. I also think I was one of the few, besides Ray, that had children. I had three children at the time. I loved having a secure job. I guess the security, the wife, and the Shindler House got the best of me. I had a reasonably successful practice at that time. I stayed and it was really dark. Someone wrote a thing called "There's a great cloud over Pomona." I don't know if you ever read that article. Boy, they tried in the worst way to get rid of me, they did everything. They had mediocre people brought in to take over. We couldn't get that place straightened out.
So, in 1982, I had my second chance to rebuild Pomona and it was a wonderful thing. We did a wonderful thing in those eight years because it was in 1990 when they tore it apart again. In those eight years there was, Sigrid Pollin, Ed Picard, Bill Adams and Kip Dickson.
v5: It was a strong faculty.
BZ: It was a very strong faculty and projects. We were really going. By the time Bill Taylor came aboard, Michael Folonis was the coordinator. By the time that group got going, boy, I thought we were going to knock the pants off any school in the world. The people were good, their positions were good where they were, and their thinking was excellent. It was a wonderful school. You know, I'm of the belief, Ray and I talk about this all the time, you know, everybody works on the curriculum, and they work on this and they work on that, and all these administrators make a lot of fuss over those issues. The real issue is to find good people and let them perform. It seems that everyone that was on, that was good at that time knew what he or she had to teach, how it fitted in to the other and we wanted to do more of that.
Someone was asking me what was the worst thing that happened at Pomona. They said, "Is it the Dean?" I said " Well, the Dean for the school, because he changed, but for a long while he was doing well for me". I was his front runner, but then he was carrying through these other polices, that were from Barry Wassermann. That was perhaps the biggest mistake, Barry Wassermann. He just could not grasp great ideas and outstanding people.
v5: I remember Barry saying that he had always carried out the wishes of the tenure faculty at Cal Poly Pomona.
BZ: Well, the tenure faculty was schizophrenic. What you call creative thinking never got a hold of the tenure faculty. We never had the full votes of the tenure faculty. When we had those vital votes, they were seven to eight and eight to seven, it was a divided faculty. Look what it takes to make a great school, it takes good people and having a power base. There are very few schools that have that. The only one I can think of is Sci-Arc. I mean this is locally, there are some good schools in the East with a lot of tradition.
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