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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (May 29, 2008)
humanities and all of the options it has. Do you think you’re still feeling like a kid in a candy store? Oh yeah. That’s really good. Of course, it’s more like a kid in the health food section! Or an adult in the health food section. It’s amazing. Everything about the UO, when you walk onto that campus, says you’re on a liberal arts campus. There’s a sign: “You can think about your corner offi ce, but let’s think about other corners of the world.” That kind of stuff wouldn’t be up at RPI. There was a kind of engineering ethos, which is let’s look at the problem and solve it. But the idea that you question in a collaborative way, which crosses all people? I was thinking that it wasn’t an offi cial language at the time when you grew up. In the [1960s and] ’70s, there was the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. English had been the business language until that time, so the schools were split. So when I grew up, I took French an hour a day, but nobody was speaking it. I grew up in a completely English environment. The schools were completely split. People walked to school, and if you’re French, you walked here; if English, there. And never the twain shall meet. But my father, who is an immigrant from Poland, spoke nine languages. And because my parents were working class, about college, but at my high school, there were ambitious kids. My friends, most of us children of Holocaust survivors, grew up the same way, in accelerated classes, and so we knew education was a big deal. I had a lot of mixed messages. My father was telling me, take secretarial classes so that you’ll always have a job, a back-up, and never tell the guys that you’re smart because you’ll never get married. But I was good in art; I was good in science. I was one of the top 10 students in the province. I was driven; I saw myself as a kind of maverick. Whatever everybody else was doing, I was going to be different. Nobody was going into architecture. I imagine there weren’t very many women in architecture and engineering at McGill. Certainly not in engineering. Architecture had 25 percent. But in respect to that, I did some things that were crazy. I would put myself in unfamiliar terrain. I decided to do this student summer employment program in the army. I just wanted to see what it was like to be in a place which was totally unfamiliar and be not only the only girl, but the only girl who was raised in a city, and it was really … there is something about working out what it is to be a stranger in those environments. I think I like fi guring out how to engage arenas that I don’t really understand yet. Maybe it was about testing my social abilities and A COLLECTIVE DREAM. No. It’s not as if it didn’t exist; it just wouldn’t have been as overt or as encouraged. It wasn’t a fertile landscape for a kind of public intellectual in a broad-based sense, whereas here it is. You feel as if it’s encouraged, and if you put yourself out there, you’ll have support. This place feels like home. The deans here are very open to collaboration, to idea exchange, to faculty exchange. We all see that in a place like Oregon, where resources are tight, that the way to actually make them go much, much further is to work together. It’s been wonderful. No doors are closed. That’s been great. Let me change tack. Did you grow up bilingual in Montreal, or speaking French? they spoke French because everybody they worked with spoke French. I went to McGill, and it was all English at that time. There were very few French people, maybe two or three in my class. That changed. You go to McGill now, and it’s completely different. At least 50 percent of the students are French. You said in your April keynote speech at the Oregon Arts Commission summit that you grew up literally dancing in the streets with your friends. So why architecture? I think it’s complicated. My father has a second-grade education; my mother didn’t fi nish eighth grade. I grew up in a working- class environment. Nobody knew anything Even though I was a top student, I still had self-esteem issues and thought, “It’s possible that I’m going to fail when I get to college, so I’ll go into engineering, which is the hardest. And if I fail, I could go into hard sciences. And if I fail that, I could go into biological sciences. And if I fail that, I could go into arts.” So I had a lot of rungs I could collapse on. I knew I was not going to be happy in engineering although I loved the students — all collaborators, all straight-shooters, no guile. Both architecture and engineering were not an easy fi t. They were things I worked really, really hard at. What comes easily to me is engaging social communities. photo by todd cooper WE REALLY HAVE TO DEVELOP A COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION, constantly putting them into a place where they’re unfamiliar. The military – how do I maneuver; how do I lead in that group? I was the smart one, so they came to rely on me whether it was passing fi rst aid or fi guring out the physics of the rifl e. I would trade off: I’ll help you study; you clean my gun. I know these are unusual areas to discuss — I’m trying to ask you questions you don’t always get asked. And it does open up why the UO is like being a kid in a candy shop for me. Because it has multiple social environments and intellectual arenas I don’t know. I don’t know very much about art history at all, and I know Waterproof Nubuck Uppers Rugged outsole with toe protection Ready for Everyday HELP SANDALS SHOES CLOGS BOOTS BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM SUPPORT &#SPBEXBZt%PXOUPXO&VHFOFt FOOD SHARES 48.BEJTPO"WFt%PXOUPXO$PSWBMMJTt .PO4BU4VOtXXXGPPUXJTFDPN EUGENE WEEKLY MAY 29, 2008 13
