CATEGORY: UNIVERSITY YEARS

The final presentation I mentioned in ALICE IN WONDERLAND AND THE WICKED WITCH was the one for the term, not the end of the year.  It was for a high rise building and we were free to determine what kind of building, and its function.  I wanted my building to be a department store with a fabulous restaurant, bar and dance floor on the top floor and I wanted the roof to be a glass frame that could roll out of sight, so that on warm summer evenings one could dine and dance literally under the stars. That was when people were still doing ballroom dancing and big bands were still popular.  Most high rise buildings have HVAC equipment on the roofs–lots of it.  So, to avoid that, I set the top floor above the building on structural columns that ran through the height of the building, leaving a floor’s width of space between it and the rest of the building.  That space left an exterior space for the roof equipment.  My building also had a “book tower” up one side: a place where people could take and leave books–actually not practical, but it looked interesting.

William (Bill) Kleinsasser was my assigned adviser.  He had played football for Princeton and had been a friend and classmate of Zach’s.  I found out that Zach had actually written to him and told him about me as a kind of complementary introduction.  However I don’t think that influenced him.  I think Bill truly liked me and thought I had potential.  He used to stop by my desk even when he wasn’t my adviser to see what I was working on and we would have really wonderful design conversations.  Later he was the Professor for the Bend Team and was my own terminal project adviser when I worked on the Inn.  He seemed to always have insightful things to say, such as, “What makes this side different from that side?”  Or, for the book tower, he just laughed along with me and had me explain exactly how I had come up with THAT idea.

I have one special memory about Bill Kleinsasser.  We were having a group session in a large room.  It was spring term, and the windows were open.  When Kleinsasser entered the room he was smoking a cigar.  He took the cigar out of his mouth and threw it across the room, between the heads of two students and exactly out the window.  It was such a perfect shot that it left the students with their eyes popped and their mouths open.  It was after that, that one of the other students told me Bill had been a quarterback for Princeton.