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
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EUGENE WEEKLY MAY 29, 2008 13