Architecture, Art and Planning Dean Anthony Vidler poses in the Fine Arts Library in Sibley Hall. Charles Harrington/University Photography
Unlike his most recent predecessors, Anthony Vidler, the new dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, is not a professional architect, artist or planner. Not since at least 1970 has the college been led by someone from outside the profession.
"I would classify myself as a historian and critic," said the British-born Vidler during a recent interview in his Sibley Hall office. Trained as an architect at Cambridge, where he studied under the influential architectural theorist Colin Rowe, who taught at Cornell from 1962 to 1990, Vidler has taught architectural classes, design studies and other related courses for more than 30 years. At Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1993, Vidler held an endowed chair in architecture and directed the School of Architecture's doctoral program. Prior to his Cornell appointment, Vidler was a professor of architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles (1993-96).
His research has examined the study of urban planning and architecture, with a special interest in European architecture, the architecture of the Enlightenment, 18th-century France and 19th- and 20th-century Paris. Noted for his criticism of contemporary architecture and art, Vidler won the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award for Claude-Nicholas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Regime (1991).
His reputation as a distinguished scholar and his three decades of experience in academe is what made him the top choice to lead the College of Architecture, Art and Planning into the future. In announcing Vidler's appointment as dean, Provost Don M. Randel said Vidler's abilities and experience make him "ideally suited to address academic issues facing the college as a whole, as well as to play a leading role in discussions among a set of related disciplines that are widely distributed across campus."
Sitting in his undecorated office amidst unopened packing boxes, which only recently arrived from California, Vidler speaks quietly and calmly with only a trace of a British accent. He speaks without the jargon of academe and addresses issues straight on with a comfortable confidence.
Vidler wants to strengthen and enhance the skills and knowledge students need for life after Cornell, where the professions in question have gone through tumultuous changes driven as much by technology as by social and economic development. There's also the task of building sensible relationships among the college's professions, which are at once disparate and similar, and addressing the ever-increasing demands on the college's somewhat antiquated facilities. All this, Vidler notes, must be administered within a budget that is becoming tighter and tighter. The college has about 70 faculty members, 730 undergraduate and graduate students and an annual budget of $10.4 million.
As jobs in architecture become less plentiful and therefore more competitive, graduates in this field need to become more flexible in their understanding of the design arts and technology, Vidler offers. "Firms looking to hire recent college graduates are looking not in the traditional sense for draftspeople, but rather for independent thinkers who can train themselves as managers of complex local, national and global organizations," he said. "They must have the abilities to understand a wide range of concerns from the design of company logos and interior spaces to the historical use of spaces and to the development of a company's facilities strategies."
The focus of planning has changed as well, Vidler believes. "The nature has shifted to a need for regional, national and global intelligence rather than a local focus," he said. "I think we are at the forefront of addressing these issues and we are making connections with other disciplines." Planning students already have teamed up with students in the design and environmental analysis program in the College of Human Ecology to address issues such as planning and developing health-care facilities.
Technology has changed the skills needed by artists and has created new possibilities for them, Vidler said. "Performance art, installation art, video art and Web site design are the new venues of expression for our artists," he said. "Technology and its impact on art needs to be addressed continually, but in doing so we must not diminish the importance of more traditional mediums, which affect skill development."
Another priority for Vidler is to foster scholarly relationships between the majors in the college. It's rare today to find a campus that has a college similar to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Many planning programs broke away from architecture schools when the program emphasis changed from the physical aspects of planning to those dealing with policy and politics. Art students are often in colleges with undergraduates in the performing arts. But Vidler sees the trio of professions represented here as beneficial to the academic environment.
"Architects need to understand urban and regional issues; planners need to have a knowledge of the physical aspect of planning," offered Vidler. "Art gives a dimension to architecture that is sometimes lost in the professional environment; without art, architecture can become too technical."
Closer working relationships between faculty and students in the different departments may be fostered by the creation of a new program in digital arts, which Vidler would like to see in place in the near future. "This is the type of program that will cut across the disciplines," he said. "I want to create relationships where they make sense and where they will be fruitful to all involved."
He also wants to encourage and help build relationships with programs and departments in Cornell's other schools and colleges. "I want to establish an intellectual style of openness and collaboration both within and outside the college," he said.
Vidler gives his plans for improving the college's facilities as much import as
those for addressing academics. The art department is expected to be in its new home --
the renovated Olive Tjaden Hall -- early next year, but architecture and planning are
still compressed into space in Rand and Sibley
halls. "My short-term goal is to make Rand and Sibley habitable in every respect,"
he said. "I'd like to see Sibley brought back
to its historical splendor, and I want to make sure the right thing is done with Rand;
what that is now, I can't say."
A feasibility study completed several years back on the college's facilities and space needs suggested, among other projects, that a three-story wing be added to Sibley Hall to house the Fine Arts Library. Vidler says he wants to review that study further before work progresses.
Vidler is no stranger to Cornell. In 1993 he lived in Ithaca and commuted to Princeton, while his wife, Emily Apter, was a Society Fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities. Apter, a professor of comparative literature, will head that department at Cornell next fall.
Vidler will juggle his administrative duties with his faculty responsibilities. He currently teaches, with Professor Chris Otto, a course on the cultural and architectural history of Berlin in the early 20th century.
"I have never not taught," said Vidler. "I couldn't imagine not teaching. Teaching helps me know what it is I am administering and brings me closer to the concerns of the faculty and the students."