Geraldine Forbes June 9 1997
Chair of the Department of Architecture
Woodbury University

 

An Interview with Geraldine Forbes Chair of the Architecture Program

Congratulations to the Graduating Woodbury class of 1997 on Woodbury University's Architectural Accreditation Review


v5; Walking up to the review Louis Naidorf said the accrediting visit went well.

Geraldine Forbes; Oh ..it went better than well . It went better than we could have even expected. It was great.

Yes we struggled for so long. We were accredited the last time they were out , but since that was the first time we were still nervous about the visit and spent countless hours preparing.

We should predicate this on the fact that when the school first moved out to Burbank the Architecture Department applied for accreditation too early. Which is not always the best strategy. Because then the accreditors come out and look at your work and say "ugh these guys will never get accredited" and then you have to climb up hill and jump through a lot of hoops.
So the first visit went "WELL" but they only gave us three years. That meant that we did not have a lot of turn around time. This visit went extremely well and I hope that they are off our backs for five years. That was my goal. (Laughs)

v5; The University seems to really be behind the department. I was here three weeks ago and the place was full of students working late. A real work-studio atmosphere. Today it is a show case of great projects.

GF; Yes everyone gets into these big gallery displays but we really need more space so the work can be put up , and kept up. Everyone is working in their own little cubby and you do not see "the work" until it unfolds itself like this in one great presentation.

v5; Through the presentations today, I was struck that every student had a clear idea of how their project would be realized. There were strong ideas and the discussion of how to materialize the ideas. There seems to be a strong level of the pragmatics of architecture as well as the conceptual development.

How does that balance out in the program?

GF; I think that speaks to the essence of this program in a lot of ways. It began , I would not go as far as to say vocationally, but certainly one may look at it that way. I think that this department started as a department that was involved with the users, but also that fed the profession. The projects were extremely resolved and to this day that has been carried forward. It is one of our great strengths that by the time students become seniors they have to demonstrate that they can make a building. Now we have to continually come back and reinforce the theory, the concept and the poetics of building.

If anything was weak it was that the students would think of themselves as leaving here and immediately going out into practice. Now we say that yes you can do that or you may go to graduate school or work in the film industry or study art and then come back and be an Architect. There was a more rigid point of view in the past and now we are moving from that.

v5; Today we saw such a broad range of approaches to projects...

GF; Oh yes extremely broad, the joke around here is that at Woodbury we have no style and we say that proudly you know! We hope we can allow students to develop a language of Architecture. A vision of what architecture can be rather than applying our individual vision or as a faculty our collective vision.

v5; There was a Day Care project we saw where the student had clearly mastered the program and gotten past the dogma of best intentions of "I mean well so it must be good" and was in full design stride.

GF; Yes, ideally that is what we want from all of our students. One thing that we try to remember, although we keep trying to push the envelope, is that we are an undergraduate program. In fact we need to give them the tools so they can go on to a graduate program. We always think of this as the senior thesis project but in fact it is just their senior project and we tell them that they will have the opportunity to go to graduate school and do a true thesis project where they can explore a more abstract goal with more that just two quarters worth of time.

v5; Who are the faculty at this level?

GF; There were four faculty the first quarter; Stan Bertheaud, Dennis Hollingsworth, Lucas Rios and myself. The second quarter; Stan, Lucas and Dennis. Stan and I have taught senior thesis for five years and next year we are going to hand over the gauntlet to Peter Di Sabatino who will take it on.

v5; That will be exciting.

GF; Yes ...I think so. As a studio instructor or a school you have to reinvent yourself all the time, otherwise things become stale.

v5; Yes... As a profession I think we are at a point where we are reinventing. Teaching at Art Center we see our students being offered hundred thousand dollar starting salaries by film and new media for students to do the same type of thinking and modeling that we see needed in the Architectural profession who are talking about 30k starting salaries.

GF; Oh absolutely

v5: So there is this large disparity in the market for people with the same tool box.
You see an industry like film that has a way of creating value for the people involved on the creative side. Where Architecture, done for the same client, is not rewarded in the same way. A "City Walk" like set at Universal Studio is of more value to the designer when it is blown up in a film than it is designed as a work of Architecture.
We see students veer off into many other fields and hopefully they will return out of a love of building and Architecture.

GF; We are seeing the same thing. Noe Felix, the fellow now presenting, is one of our best students. He is one of the best craftspeople and thinkers. Anyone would want to be as talented as he is. With that talent he has a choice of going into any office in town but the film industry has nabbed him already. How can you turn that down ?

v5; You have to grab them by the ankles and not let them out the door.

GH; Yes...I had an employer of a student call me yesterday and he was very upset because I had said to the student that he probably was not being paid enough. So I told the employer that when this student graduated he could get a job in film paying for five times what he was paying him. For a person as talented as this student he should pay more to keep him.
Generic Architectural practice is changing and the market has changed.

v5; We just finished an interview with Frank Gehry and he talked about the role the computer has as a way to identify every piece of steel and every piece of stone, every bolt and hole, throughout the Bilbao project. He said we put that on the table for the contractors and we got six different competitive bids within 1 % of each other for the steel for that project. The whole project was 18% under budget.
This is a man that the City of LA said could not meet a bid price. He has the tools there but he does not have the legal framework to employ them. There is a tremendous responsibility that goes with what he is doing. The AIA has tried to get Architects power without legal responsibility and it just does not work.

There are computer models on the wall that your students have done, 3d rendered, very complex images, very sophisticated. Yet when we think about the building process we take that and dumb it down to 2d drawings and slide it across a table to a contractor and then get mad when they can not "re-build" it. We are not giving them our best information.

GF; Yes . The role of the architect, the way we do working drawings, all of these thing are changing very quickly. My fear is that we in education will slow down and not keep up with the speed at which things are changing. We are going to have to be light on our feet and move quickly.
If we can continue at this pace even over the next five years it really should be significant.
We have had our heads so stuck in accreditation, up until just a few months ago, that we have been stuck in a box.

v5; I saw that at the Sci-Arch accreditation. I think it is like our Architectural Exam, once you have it you say "OK, I did that" and you put it aside and get on with really working in Architecture. It is only a reaffirmation of where you are. And you can explore and read the types of books you want instead of all these technical manuals that you think for some reason you should be reading.

GF; I promised the faculty that next year instead of talking about "what does NABB mean" and how are we going to meet this criteria we could talk about how to really build our lecture series. I mean they would see me and they would turn around and run. Now we can get to the level above accreditation criteria.
Also we have to strengthen our role in Los Angeles. We have not involved ourselves enough in the city of Los Angeles. This is something that we absolutely have to do. I mean look at Cal Poly . As an alumni I know what it is like to see a school that is really removed from Los Angeles.

v5; Yes , but they like that . It is their security. Los Angeles is rough and tumble. They have their students drawing ionic columns on CADD.

GF; Yes, I know but as architects we have to embrace the city a lot more. Woodbury will grow from it.
 

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