California State Polytechnic University in Pomona? ... areas of the school as a surprise: This is what the ... list of contacts and asked, âWhy don't you go to ...
Was macht eigentlich ...
Imagination is never left out, never!
CalPoly Professor Emeritus Chester Volski, interviewed by Udo Weilacher in December 2013
Udo Weilacher ist Professor für Landschaftsarchitektur
Udo Weilacher: Chet, it’s a real pleasure to have you here again as our guest. It’s not the first time that you are in Germany.
Chester Volski ist emeritierter Professor für Landscape Design an der California State Polytechnic University in Pomona (USA)
Chester Volski: The first time I came to Germany I was with the US Air Force and I didn’t even know that the TU Munich-Weihenstephan existed. Before that, I was working for The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a company started by Walter Gropius in 1946. In the fifties they had a contract to redesign 12 Air Force bases in the United States. My friend Dave Held and I worked together on that project from 1957 to 1959. When did you start to teach at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona? At the end of 1959, I went from TAC to CalPoly. I only taught the first quarter, as a Colonel from the US Air Force requested I come to Germany for a large project. The Americans had designed the F-4 Phantom, a new all service aircraft for the US military. All air bases had to be modified to accommodate
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the F-4, and I had the needed experience. I resigned from the University and took a good position with the military, redesigning many bases in Germany and Europe. I loved to travel, discovered most of Europe and returned to the States in 1962 to start the Urban Planning Program at CalPoly. Why was a landscape architect redesigning air bases? Was landscape so important at that time? It is really like urban planning and you know our role there. TAC was a true collaborative of planers, architects, landscape architects, artists and so on in the spirit of the ‚Bauhaus’. Landscape architecture was a natural component of every design. Plus, the leader of the design group in the US military had a master's degree in landscape architecture from Harvard. He knew the depth of our expertise. At Harvard and at TAC the distinction between the disciplines was nonexistent. As a landscape architect I was thrown into the pot and worked together with all the other disciplines. That was a big lesson for me.
After starting again at CalPoly in 1962, how did you get back to Germany for the second time? I taught at CalPoly for 37 years and took my first sabbatical leave in 1971. At that time I was very excited to work with computers and design. We had started this in 1965 and the first project was a plant selection program but I thought we could do more things with the computer. All the students that took my classes stayed with me for everything that I taught. We modeled everything, landscape construction, landscape design, landscape history, etcetera. We always used the computer as the base for our work and had our own facility. We allowed no intruders at all and when our work was finished we posted it in the public areas of the school as a surprise: This is what the computer can do! Everyone said, “Volski you are absolutely crazy”, but I said, “No, it’s impossible to ignore this machine.” Knowing you as someone using the pencil very creatively, it’s hard to imagine
that the same person is working with the computer, trying to eliminate the pencil. I still needed the pencil. I wasn’t punching cards but I was writing problems in a way that required students to think systematically. I knew that the computer organized data in the same way. Carl Steinitz in Harvard had started to work on the program SYMAP (Synagraphic Mapping System), profiting from a good programming background that I didn’t have. So we tried a parallel approach from a design background. In 1971 an Israeli landscape architect was visiting CalPoly, after coming back from a lecture tour to all German landscape architecture programs. He had a list of contacts and asked, “Why don’t you go to Germany and lecture?”. I wrote all the schools and I got invited to most. Professor Carl Ludwig Schreiber was the first to write back. I met him just briefly and gave my lecture. Professor Haber was one of the visitors at my lecture at Weihenstephan. My second stop was with Günther Grzimek in Kassel.
©© Tobias Kramer (4)
He was appointed as professor at the TU Munich in 1972. After meeting him he asked me to take his classes in Kassel for a whole day, including an evening crit session in the architecture department a very nice compliment. Here in Freising, Fritz Duhme and Horst Köhlmann took me under their wing and we became very close friends. I also met Jörg Schaller and Michael Sittard whom I introduced to Jack Dangermond, the owner of ESRI in California. They coordinated their work and opened their successful office in Kranzberg. What was your impression when you were teaching here? What was new, what was unusual? nodium #6
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Was macht eigentlich ...
The students were fine but the professors were a bit self-centered, and that bothered me. When I came back 1985 to teach here for a whole year, I never closed my office door and told the students that I was open to talking with them. Quite often I came back from class, the secretary, dear Frau Huber had closed my door to keep the students out. Why did you come back in 1985? Because of the really close friendship with Fritz Duhme. He used to send students to me and this is how I got to know Helmut Wartner and Wolfgang Losert. They were the first two students to study at Cal Poly with me. What was different, comparing the students from CalPoly to the students here? Students were a bit casual here. It seemed to me, they felt like they could do anything, they wanted to do but they were not really into aesthetics. Almost a bit superficial. I also think in the program here, a lot of the stuff wasn’t broken down to small enough pieces, that people could really handle and apply. I taught spatial concepts and a systematic approach to design. I think, that helped a lot of people here.
What is the secret of getting students more deeply involved into landscape architecture? They need to be taken step by step to understand the design theory and process. They can’t just take a problem statement and jump into it. When I went to the Harvard Graduate school I shared studios with top notch designers like Peter Walker, William Johnson, David Held and others. Every time we had a review, Walker explained, “My spatial concept was this and that”, and I thought, “What are you talking about?” I honestly did not understand three-dimensional space and for this reason I did a lot of two-dimensional design. At the same time Bill Johnson, a graphic pro, taught a sketching-class that I took. The two-point-perspective method was a bore but he was teaching one-point-perspective and it caught on. When I understood these concepts I was doing super large drawings, and the three-dimensional spatial concept was clear to me. It made me a professional. Coming here in 1985, I wanted to take the student by the throat and just say, “look, this is the way you do it!”. Albert Gründel gave me a hand and we had a great partnership. Did you discover particular strengths of the German students?
What the students showed here, was a very good sense of scale. The scale in the old European towns is a human scale and that is hard to find in the United States. Students here lived this scale. Design means combining scientific principles, technical information and imagination. Wasn’t it risky to concentrate on computers, leaving the imagination out? Imagination is never left out, never! It’s in your design. But you have to ask the computer to help. “Tell me where the best place to put this particular use. I need a five percent slope, a southwest orientation, wind from a certain direction, etcetera” and it will show you areas that fit these requirements. It takes a lot of the guess-work out, and it prevents you from designing things in the wrong place.
go to many apps for site data and look at the power of your tiny smartphone. When I taught at the ETH Zurich, Greg Lynn was teaching computer generated design there. He created basic threedimensional elements, connected datavectors to these forms, pushed a button and the object began to mutate with the data coming in. At a certain point the architect pushed a ‘freeze’-button and got an aesthetically pleasing product. Isn’t that an irrational procedure? No, I don’t think its irrational. But there has to be an evaluation stage in every design. If you don’t do that, you just produce nonsense. You need to go back and check, how your design is maturing. You need to check: Is that enough or is it overworked?
What were the critical aspects of the euphoric belief in computer technology in the 1970s?
You have only been here on Campus for a few hours, but if you compare the current situation here in Weihenstephan to your earlier impressions – what has changed?
I don’t see any. The people that grabbed onto this technology had the foresight to know what the computer was capable of. There was a lot of faith involved, but when you really thought about it, you could not dismiss the power of the computer. For collecting data, you can now
You are so well equipped with excellent technical tools, that’s unbelievable. The staff, working with you is really more open and on the ball. But to really understand the current standing, it would be of course necessary to work with the students on a few projects. Invite me back!
