CATEGORY: UNIVERSITY YEARS
PHOTO: BOY’S COVERALLS

In my second year of architecture, one of our design problems was to design a kindergarten.  I cannot remember what kind of building I designed, but along with it I designed coveralls for the children to wear over their clothes.  They were divided vertically and were half solid color and half print.  For the boys the left side was blue denim and the right side canvas ticking.  They had ticking pockets and darker blue iron-on knee patches.  For the girls, the left side was also blue denim, but the right side was a floral print denim, and the pockets were reversed with blue denim on the print side and flower-print denim on the plain side.  These also had darker blue iron-on knee patches.  I cut these out of actual fabric, sewed on the pockets and pressed on the knee patches and made them part of my presentation.  They looked rather like clothes for paper dolls.

John Turnbull of Moore, Lynden, Turnbull and Whittier came up from California for a few weeks to assist Donlyn Lynden, who was head of the University of Oregon School of Architecture at that time.  He conducted the design review for this project.  Again, I can’t remember what he said about my kindergarten building, but he said very complementary things about my children’s coveralls.