Recently appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts Gary Hack has joined teaching and research to practice in projects as diverse as New York's West Side Highway and Development Plan and master planning for Tokyo, Taipei and Bangkok. Arguably among the foremost urban designers in the world, he brings to Penn a belief in cross-pollination among disciplines and between theory and practice. In two interviews, one with Compass Editor Libby Rosof, and one with architect Harris Steinberg (C '78& GSFA '82) of Steinberg & Stevens, Hack spoke about his plans for GSFA.

What are your plans for GSFA?

First the school is to be centered on design, not in the narrow sense of only artistic vision, but also including the technical, social and political processes by which designs become realities. Design cannot exist in a vacuum. Designers need to recognize how all the culture, economics and politics, and materials influence the final outcome of a project.

Second, we're in an urban environment, so we will center on urbanism. We're cemented to the collective environment we inhabit. We need to design the urban fabric well and bring to it artistic sensibilities. It's the "soft" elements -- signs, advertising, public art, landscape, and so on -- that humanize the places we inhabit.

Third, we need to be linking theory and practice. In science, researchers work in a laboratory, and that is how they test their theories against reality. But in urban design, the lab can't be in the university. In our case, having a practice is necessary, because much of our theory comes from trying things out in practice. It's a two-way street. The practice inspires the theory, and the theory inspires the practice.

How would you incorporate practice into the program?

One of the things I want to do in working with the faculty this year is to explore the possibility of creating a practice foundation which would be similar to the kind of foundations that they have in medical school or clinical law practice. We would engage students in a learning that has to do with doing. I guess one of my models for that is the work that I've done over the last few years at MIT. We've just finished a new plan for Bangkok. We managed to do it using students and faculty. I've kept on for a year three students who have helped put the plan together. It's been a magnificent learning experience for all of those people, a kind of experience that they couldn't have received by going to lectures.

How would you differentiate your institute from private practice?

We should be doing the kinds of things that normal practitioners can't easily do. Let me give you an example. At MIT we did a project in Tokyo. We did studies on what the impacts of higher densities would be and questions of how they might finance whatever needed infrastructure would support the higher densities. That kind of objective analysis can better be done by a university because there is a certain level of objectivity in the university, whereas private practitioners in Japan were in one way or another tied into people who had a stake in these outcomes.

While dean, will you continue consulting and practicing with your firm?

I'm not taking on any large projects. It's hard to practice and teach full time concurrently. You can do it serially. Doing a big project and being a consultant, you need flexibility of your time. Teaching is not at all flexible. When students show up for a class, they expect you to be there. There are not a lot of people who had full-gauge practices and did full-gauge teaching at the same time. This school needs attention and needs a full-time dean. My hope is that when I resume doing practice, what I'll do is practice through the new practice unit that we create here in the school.

Do you plan any changes in faculty?

We will recruit two new faces in planning, including someone who can anchor our efforts in the urban agenda. In Architecture, we will fill the Miller Chair, hopefully with a distinguished designer. I will try to push people to work on things with this agenda. And I plan to reward the people we have for good work -- good teaching, good research, good work.

How do you plan to make the fine arts faculty feel like they are part of the department? They are physically moving further away from planning and architecture. How will you encourage the integration of fine art sensibility into planning if people don't get a chance to rub elbows?

Addams Hall (a new facility nearing completion at 33rd and Chestnut) will pick up one-half to two-thirds of our fine arts activity now. At first, we will keep some of our fine arts people in what people jokingly refer to as the "Blau Haus" -- that's the blue prefab building at 33rd and Chestnut and that's a pun on Bauhaus. Later, as the building grows, everyone will be in Addams Hall.

I am concerned about how far away Addams Hall is, but Sansom Street could be made into a parallel walkway to Locust Walk, and the green space next to Hill House could become a town common. The Law School has a similar problem of being separated from the rest of campus. Making those changes would incorporate those fringes into the central life of the campus.

I am interested in finding ways by which we can re-engage the fine arts' relationship with architecture, landscape architecture and planning. I would like, for example, to see more work in the area of public art, which is a nexus of all those fields. I'd like to see more of the sensibilities of people in fine arts -- seeing and drawing and making of objects -- find their way into architecture and landscape architecture.

What is your agenda for fine arts?

I have three agendas in fine arts.

One, we have to teach visual literacy to all undergraduates here. So much of our culture is communicated through visual images. It would help to have a visual arts requirement, like the University of Chicago's. The requirement should not just be art history; it's important for people to try to have the experience of expressing things themselves through visual media like painting and sculpture.

Two, we ought to be teaching people to become artists and teachers in the arts in our master's program. Faculty need students as much as students need faculty to provide models for new ideas, new ways to see things and do things.

Three, we need the fine arts here at Penn for a constant infusion of artistic vision. The fine arts give us new ways of representing things and seeing things. Planning needs to emerge from artistic vision about places.

What is the university's relationship to the community that surrounds it?

This university has a huge stake in the inner city. Philadelphia is a wonderful place. It has to do with its smallness and congeniality. We have to pay attention to West Philadelphia.

How do you view the future relationship between the suburbs and the cities?

Suburbs and cities are intimately tied together -- economically, socially. Suburbs can't survive if the core city is in bad shape, and the core city these days can't survive unless it has the revenues and responsibilities of people who live in the suburbs.

Return to Compass Features for October 1, 1996