Now and Then

David Lewis, Monday, January 25, 2010

4:30pm, Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)

We all have inside ourselves a personality that distinguishes us from other people. Call it our character - call it what you will - but this inner self is the mainspring of our individuality, our mioral values, our goals in life, our drive to achieve, and our interrelation with the everyday world all around us.

Coming to Pittsburgh and Carnegie Tech in the early sixties confronted my own inner self and values in ways that had far-reaching consequences. Here was one of the world’s most powerful heavy-industry cities undergoing a fundamental challenge. Its crisis was the obsolescence and pollution of its steel and glass industries -which in turn raised huge physical, economic, political and social issues. And here was I, a foreign architect, a South African with zero American experience, asked to develop a professional program in a new skill called urban design, in a city and a university I knew nothing about.

Born in 1922, David Lewis served in the navy in World War II. An architect and urban designer, Professor Lewis came to Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1963 as the Andrew Mellon Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, where he started one of the first educational programs in urban design in which students worked hands-on with elected officials, agency representatives and citizens in communities in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. From 1968 to 1974 he taught at Yale where he was the William Henry Bishop Professor of Urban Design and formed the urban design workshop. In 1988-89 he was the Hyde Professor at the University of Nebraska. In 1990 he returned to Carnegie Mellon and started the Urban Laboratory, which continues to this day. In the late sixties and early seventies he was a core member of the American Institute of Architects' (AIA) Regional/Urban Design Assistance Teams (R/UDAT's), and was Chairman of the AIA's National Urban Design Committee in 1976-77. In 1976 he was a Founder-Member of the International Institute of Urban Design.

Professor Lewis is the founder of Urban Design Associates (UDA), a nationally-renowned urban design firm that practices in the spirit of participatory design. He continues to inspired students and practioners alike as Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies in the School of Architecture, and head of the fifth-year studio, Urban Laboratory: Community and Urban Design Studio. Professor Lewis is a Fellow of the AIA. He has been recognized countless times at the local, state and national level. He has been awarded the AIA's Kemper Award for service to the profession, the Pennsylvania Gold Medal for Architecture and most recently, the Athena Medal from the Congress for the New Urbanism, named for the goddess, defender of the city, weaver of fabric. In 1988, he chaired the International Remaking Cities Conference at which HRH The Prince of Wales was the Honorary Chair.

In addition to authoring a number of books on art, architecture and urban design, Professor Lewis is also a painter and has held a number of one-person exhibitions.

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