There are two cruel maxims that circulate in society: 1) that those who can't cut it in the private sector, turn to teaching, and 2) that those who can't teach, turn to administration. Those may apply to some people, but not to Larry Speck.

Over the 25 years he has been teaching architecture at The University of Texas at Austin, he has maintained his own practice and has designed many of the most prestigious projects in Central Texas, including the Austin Convention Center and the terminal of Austin's new Bergstrom International Airport. And as for his teaching, before he was promoted to dean in 1993, he held the Blunk Memorial Professorship, awarded by the University for outstanding undergraduate teaching. He also had won the Amoco and Texas Excellence teaching awards as well as the School of Architecture Teaching Award.

When The University of Texas decided to put together a new master plan for campus development, it was natural to tap UT's own architectural resources. So the president appointed a rookie dean to the committee. He must have made an impression, because since that time, Lawrence W. Speck has been asked to participate in, if not chair, virtually every visionary, mission-oriented committee or group formed in the central administration, including the Mars Team (which speculated on what values UT would need to retain if it were to be recreated on Mars), the committee distilling the University's core purpose and core values, and the Texas Theme Steering Committee, which culminated with UT Interactive, a university-wide open house.

There is a youngness to him. Perhaps it's that he wears his salt-and-pepper hair just a tad longer than his male peers. Maybe it's his laid-back manner and a vocabulary that often includes "cool." But don't mistake a relaxed manner for a lack of purpose. On a campus of fairly passionate deans, few can match Speck's, whose passion for the University can transcend tact; in an attempt to roust committee members out of their complacency, he habitually will employ a well-placed four-letter word, while gently pounding a fist on the table for extra emphasis: "This University has the most amazing g--damned resources in the country, and we've got to tell people about them!" might be a typical proclamation.

In 1971, Speck earned two bachelor's degrees--in architecture and management--at MIT, where he received his master's the following year. In 1975, he returned to his native Texas and began steadily scaling the faculty/administration ladder at UT Austin. In 1993, Speck, the Roland G. Roessner Centennial Professor in Architecture, was appointed the fourth dean of UT's School of Architecture.

Speck has published articles on design theory and history, including pieces on regionalism and American urbanism. He is author of Landmarks of Texas Architecture and wrote and hosted the PBS documentary Building the American City/San Antonio. He has won national awards for his design work, from homes to large-scale planning projects, and he teaches an entry-level lecture course, "Architecture and Society."

When he was dean, Speck fully integrated the school's architecture and planning programs. He re-oriented architectural history core courses to emphasize global architecture--not just the Western tradition--and drew new computer technologies into applications throughout the curriculum.

Now married to Mandy Dealey, Speck, who has two sons, has lived in eight houses in the same West Campus neighborhood since moving to Austin. We caught up to one of the University's busiest movers and shakers in his office in Goldsmith Hall, hardwood floors bathed in afternoon sunlight through stylish pale green shutters. . .

Friendswood, a small town just outside of Houston. When I was there it had a population of 900. There were 40 people in my graduating class. It was a little hick Texas town.

My father owned a trucking company that did oil field hauling, and he was very successful. Took it from five trucks to 100 trucks, then sold it when I was in college and has a fabulous retirement doing all kinds of civic volunteer kinds of things. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and also very much a civic volunteer. You name it, she was everything in the community a good mom should be. One other important thing for me is that my mother was an art major at UT. When we went on vacations, she dragged my dad and all of us kids to museums and things like that. My dad was the business end and much more the guy thing. But I certainly got a lot of cultural and artistic appreciation of life from my mother.

So when did you have an inkling that you'd wind up as an architect?

I can remember at least by sixth grade I knew that's what I wanted to do. I didn't know beans about it, but it sounded cool, and I liked buildings. We traveled a fair amount when I was a kid and I'd always identify certain buildings in a city I wanted to see. My brother and I were sort of the vacation planners. We'd get in the station wagon and travel around and we'd get brochures from all the states' tourist agencies. And one of the things I'd look for was what buildings did I want to see.

My brother's a very successful lawyer in Washington, D.C., and went to Harvard while I was at MIT. There are a lot of lawyers in the family and everybody thought I should have been a lawyer, but it wasn't in the cards for me.

That's another one of those things that's almost inexplicable to me. Like architecture, I didn't know why, I just knew that was what I wanted to do. At a very young age I got MIT in my head. It sounded cool. Big-name, smart-kid university. So I just decided I was going there, much to the chagrin of my parents. Nobody from my town ever went to that school. Not that many had been to college. I had never been to Boston. So when I decided, they said, "Well, you'll need a car." Of course, in Boston, you don't need a car, but we didn't know that. So Dad said, "Here's the budget. Go and buy yourself a car." I shopped around and found myself a little '64 Mustang, really cool car, packed it up, and drove off.

I have crystal clear memories of being very surprised. I couldn't find a place to park my car. So I finally found a place, and left it in that place for three days because I knew I'd never find another parking space. Just worked outta that car! I really enjoyed Boston. It was a huge, wonderful adventure.

I have an enormous empathy for being a freshman. I also have students who are adventuresome and have changed environments rapidly, who perhaps came from a small town and went to a huge university. They definitely have my heart because I've been there.

I'd been teaching at MIT for three years and, although I'd really enjoyed living in Boston, I knew I didn't want to live the rest of my life there. It wasn't the kind of place where I wanted to raise a family. It was a very urban life. So when I got to the point of wanting to put down roots, wondering where I'd like to raise my kids--well, I knew I didn't want to raise Yankee kids!--I wanted to come back to Texas. And Austin was always my psychological home. Both of my grandparents had lived here, and I was on campus all the time, going to football games and lots of campus events with my parents. So if I was going to live in Texas, there was only one place it was going to be. I was green behind the ears--26 years old. It was a really wonderful period of time then, when I could have passed for a graduate student easily. I was just one of the guys. You can't pull the authority thing at that age, and I just enjoyed learning with them. At a certain point you get a little more gray hair and can't do that anymore. You turn into a different kind of teacher.

I went away to Australia for a year, and when I came back, there seemed to have been a change. Maybe that was just me realizing it and the change had been happening for a long time. I used to go out and lie on the grass on the South Mall and read papers along with the students. That was great, but at a certain point, it felt extremely awkward. I thought, "I can't do this anymore."

It wasn't a wool suit, believe me. Still blue jeans at that point. But I am very cognizant as dean of the importance of some faculty members that are quite young and that students can look to them and say, "They are where I'll be in five or 10 years." I have a real soft spot in my heart for assistant professors. We have a great crop of them right now, and I feel very personally committed to them.

Relatively painless. As it's inevitably painful now, I sometimes yearn for a period when it wasn't quite so painful. It's just so difficult now. You're constantly having to prove yourself, and if you don't run your career so that you're going to be sure you're going to hit all the bases, do all the right things, then you run a big risk of not being successful. When I was going through it, you could just be who you were and do what you thought was the best thing for your career development and it would probably work out. But if someone decided that for three of their six years of probation they would just burrow into being a great teacher and say "Bugger!" with scholarship, I'd have to as dean say, "That's not a good thing. In this six-year period you have to show your capability in this area and this area and this area." The University has gotten to be a much more rigorous environment.

Actually, it's a little different in architecture because it's a profession as well. So if things are very lively in the practice of architecture, there is that alternative. And most of our faculty would be in a position of being able to switch back and forth. We just have phenomenal human beings at this point on our faculty. Often they are very capable of being very good professionals. They also write books, give papers, lecture all over the world, and they also are good citizens of the community and do community service. It's almost expected that you're good at all of those things. But that means that in terms of a glut, these people have lots of alternatives. They can do other things.

Actually, I gave a tour yesterday afternoon for Voltaire's Coffee, a Plan II activity [Ed.: Plan II is UT's oldest honors program]. I was trying to give the students a sense of how the architecture of the campus affects them. One of the things I was really probing them about is how they decided where to go to college. One of them volunteered that he had gone to the University of Pittsburgh, which, for some reason, was on his short list. And within 30 minutes he knew, "I can't go here. It just doesn't feel right." And it was the architecture that had just alienated him. And any number of them volunteered that they had visited here and gotten this feeling of a great, important, dignified university. "I wanted to be a player. I wanted to be in the big time and it felt that way."

That's just the campus environment. But certainly down to your house and your office. This office is great for me to work in. It feels really good. I've visited a number of other dean's offices on campus and I couldn't work there. They're nice offices, and they may be just right for someone else. Take this conference room. Our committee interaction would not be the same if it were in a different type of room. It sets a tone for the importance of what's being discussed. It also sets a tone for a collegiality that exists here. And in a little, cramped, white-walled, gray carpet, fluorescent-light room, we wouldn't have the same discussions we have.

Much, much more subconscious than conscious. Architecture is all about subliminal experience. As opposed to, say, fine arts. You listen to music, you look at a painting. But you live in architecture, and it affects you whether you're even conscious of it. I've taught for a long time Architecture 308, "Architecture and Society." And really that class is about helping people understand all those ways architecture does affect them subliminally and beginning to get a handle on it. Because if you're not a little conscious of that sort of thing, you can allow your life to not be as rich as it could be because you're not in command of that really important factor.

My brother, the hot-shot Washington lawyer, had this ratty apartment on Capitol Hill, just an awful, awful apartment. I went down to visit him, and I told him, "You've got to do something about this place. You're going to be so depressed if you live in this place." He said, "Look, I'm working 16 hours a day, all I do is sleep here, it doesn't really make any difference, it's convenient, I'm going to keep it." Six months later, I'm on the phone with him and he says, "Jeez, I am just so strung out, wrung out, sick of everything." He was depressed. And I said, "It's your apartment! You need to get a new place to live!" And so I went down there one weekend, and the first thing we did was we fixed that one up minimally. But then I told him, "You've got to get some furniture. You've got to look for another place because this one's not going to do." So he calls me up after he's in the new place and says, "You won't believe it! This is fantastic! I went out and played tennis. We came back to the apartment, read the newspaper, had coffee. I could never entertain anybody before because there was never any place to sit. The light comes in here in the morning. I go out on the patio and have my coffee. I stay at the house until 7:30 instead of leaving at 6. And on weekends I bring my work here and really enjoy it. I have a stereo, the music's really wonderful." I said, "Of course! It makes a huge, huge difference in your life."

So that class is getting students to understand how fundamentally this can either enrich their lives, or make life unpleasant, depressing, miserable. You need to be in control of it, especially of your home environment.

Is this a function of money, though? Or is it a function of having a good eye?

It's both of those things, but you don't have to spend a lot of money to have a great environment. The first house I bought here in Austin, anyone would have thought it was in the slums. It was in a part of town that was not so great at this point. Well, I was poor as a church mouse, assistant professor's salary, $13,000 a year. Had no money. But we went in there and just with sweat equity, hung sheetrock, refinished the wood floors, had a few nice things, not much furniture, but what I did have was good stuff. It was bright and cheerful and had a great view of the Capitol Building. So you don't have to spend a lot of money.

The other side of it is, gad, we spend money like crazy! We spend it on stereos and cell phones and trips, so yeah, investing a little in the physical environment makes a lot of sense. Good investment.

And you enjoy it and you can sell it often for more than you pay for it. What can you do like that? You can't do that with your car or your stereo or your trip to the Bahamas. Heck, spend a lot of money.

Battle Hall. Wonderful room on the inside, beautiful building on the outside. And it had a great architect, Cass Gilbert, who did the original master plan for campus. That's an exquisite building. Very sophisticated, beautiful detail as well as nice materials. It's well-built, plus, it's the architecture library. What can I say?

That's a difficult one because there are a lot of good contenders! (Laughs) I'd have to say the worst is RLM [Robert Lee Moore Hall] because it's so damned big and ugly, and even functionally, it's just atrocious.

Do you go to the escalators? Do you go to the elevators? How do you get around in it? How do you get to the library? It's just functionally lousy. Aesthetically, it's lousy. Upstairs in those faculty offices, it's a pretty dismal environment.

So if you were retained to do something with that building, other than leveling it and starting over, what sorts of things could you possibly do?

You know, with any building, a lot can be done to make it better. That whole functional problem on the ground level--it would take some money, redoing the elevators and some other things--but that could be fixed. Certainly the office floors could be made a great deal more social--there are all these corridors that twist and wind around, and it feels anonymous and alienating. Even for students going to see a professor, it's just not easy to feel comfortable and welcome. Any building that's a dog, there are ways to help it; it's not a matter of either leveling it or just living with it.

Yes, not in as thorough a way I would have hoped by now, but there were things done in the Campus Master Plan that affected even the generation of buildings that were in progress at that time. One example is Gregory Gym, where I think some real improvements were made in the direction that design was going. Every time I go to Gregory Gym, I think, "Yeah, that was good work." Other things are really initial steps that will lead to great benefit later, like where the parking garages have been located. Those projects are under way so that we can pull some of the cars off of certain parts of the campus. All of the work at the stadium was greatly enhanced by Campus Master Plan issues, everything from exactly where what is located to what materials were used. Another building that was already under way was the Moffett Building, which would have been jumbo bricks but for a great deal more consciousness added to that process, and that now is very beautiful stonework.

The master plan did a lot of things that are more on a planning scale: bringing the campus back to a pedestrian environment, establishing where infill buildings could occur, conceiving a new generation of housing, those are more planning kinds of efforts. But there is a set of architectural design guidelines that are meant to affect the actual architectural character of the new buildings. The new psychology building, the new computer science building, and the Blanton Museum of Art--the architects of those are taking very seriously the principles outlined in the master plan. It's not, "Okay, it's gotta look like this." It's principles about bulk of building, breaking down the mass, and it's about proportions of buildings, building materials. It's about rhythms and scale of buildings. But it doesn't, by any means, say, it's got to look like this. Even in the Paul Cret part of campus, which is what everyone admires the most, there's a wide variety of visual vocabulary there. Take the Texas Memorial Museum. It does not have a red tile roof, does not have a pitched roof, and even in terms of its style is art deco, but it fits beautifully in the campus, and it's completely appropriate, especially for a museum building, on the campus. So there's got to be that range, we've got to be able to build a football stadium or an art museum or a classroom building.

Actually, I would say it's more a return to principles of campus planning and building design that would have been there in Cass Gilbert's era, Paul Cret's era. Even with some of these buildings, you wouldn't say, "That's a classical building." Goldsmith Hall is a picturesque composition. You think, "classical, symmetrical axes." Well, no, it's not that. Its entrance is off to the edge. It's got a little funny courtyard that's asymmetrical to the axis of the building. So if you actually start using architectural terms, it's hard to say, "Yeah, it's this style." It's more principles of planning that were used from 1910 to about 1955 by a lot of different architects with a lot of variation that are very comfortable together. The Main Building is a tower--it's a skyscraper! There's nothing you can find in Renaissance architecture like that.

(Laughs) Well, it's certainly not a classical composition as a building. It's a hybrid.

What was the mentality behind the design of a building like RLM? Was it just the regents saying, "We want X-thousand square feet of space as cheap as we can possibly get it," or was there a coolness to that style when it was built, perhaps a futuristic thing?

I was in a regents building committee meeting yesterday and someone said that there was a period of time when architects were building monuments to themselves. And I would take some issue with that, because those buildings were very much a reflection of the values and attitudes of the people who built them. It wasn't just some architect's whim. It was a period when the University was growing very quickly. They needed a lot of space and needed it fast. It was a period when society as a whole didn't put much priority on beautiful, amenable environments. You can look off the campus. There were all kinds of buildings in that era that were just "Throw 'em up!" especially here in Texas. We were real victims of that. They were poorly built. They're not high-quality construction. They were looked at as square feet, just functional space. Some of them weren't very functional, but they were seen as functional. We weren't alone. Some of the most beautiful campuses around the country also got that treatment. They were not interested in hiring the best architects in the country, the best talent available, and bringing them to those projects. They just didn't have that kind of search process, like we have for the Blanton Museum of Art and the psychology building.

Yes. I feel really good about those efforts. With the core purpose, core values, boy, I would have spent that time with those people even if the final product had been slipped in a drawer and nothing ever happened, because that was totally inspiring to me to have those discussions, and it certainly changed the way I do my job.

It focused me on things that I've always had in the back of my head. The notion that the core purpose of the University is to transform lives for the benefit of society, that gives me a focus that just in day-to-day decision making I can sometimes realize, "Wait, yes, of course we have to do that. That's our core purpose." I find that incredibly meaningful to donors, for example. They want to invest in transforming lives for the benefit of society.

There are several specific ones in there. One of the core values is "to serve as a catalyst for positive change in Texas and beyond." That phrase has refocused my energies very much, as I realize that I, as a dean, need to be thinking how we act as a catalyst for positive change in my discipline.

The Texas Theme Steering Committee met during a very difficult administrative period. It was started by [former UT president] Bob Berdahl and he was only here for a short period of time. Then [interim president] Dr. Flawn embraced it and supported it, and then came [current president] Larry Faulkner. We were changing presidents so quickly, and I think it was actually very helpful to have something like that that carried a message through. But at the same time it was really hard to keep that momentum when it was a different voice at the top frequently. The culmination of all the Texas Theme work was UT Interactive [Ed.: a university-wide open house], which was phenomenally successful and which will be a legacy of that activity. We're recommending doing [an open house] every year, and it has the potential to be an institution-changing event.

I'm totally convinced that one way we have to change universities in the United States is to connect them much more to everybody's life outside. When our funding depended on a legislature that we had some inroads into, and that funding was predictable and stable, then we could be an ivory tower and just sit apart from everyday culture. But now, the legislature wants to know: "What is your justification for your existence? Why are we spending this money?" We better have a populace out there raising its hands and saying, "I know why," because the legislature's going to listen to the populace. We've got to connect ourselves to that populace and UT Interactive is a great opportunity for that. We got a whole series of e-mails and letters after that with the greatest stories.

I never see them as in conflict. They seem to be part of the same thing. Part of my role as dean is to participate in things at the University level. It's part of the job description. That's how the community gets stronger; all of us get out of our little corners and do our part in trying make a great university.

When I first took the job, I had a real misconception and there was about a three-year adjustment. I had been associate dean; I had all the background for knowing. Hal Box, the previous dean and one of the most influential people in my life whom I love to death--I thought I knew what Hal did, but I didn't have a clue what Hal did. I never realized just how many pieces of paper come across that desk and what an enormous amount of correspondence and e-mail is involved. Had no idea. They come in those red folders. (Points to desk) Those red folders are the bane of my existence. The other thing is that I never realized what kind of social commitment there is, especially for fund-raising. Now, anytime we interview somebody for dean, I take it as my personal responsibility to tell them, "I hope you realize how many nights and weekends this is." You don't have any control over when those things happen, and if you do your job well, you ought to be there. There's a period of time in the fall and the spring for about eight or nine weeks that's just a barrage. The one thing that is good about academic life is that it is cyclical, and right now, I'm just holding my breath until after graduation. Thursday night we have our gala, then we have alumni weekend, then there's advisory council, honors weekend, UT Interactive, pretty much every weekend there's something.

Maybe you shouldn't call it "spare time," because there are things I insist on doing in my life. One thing is I exercise regularly. I'm an inveterate jock. I go to Gregory Gym usually five or six days a week. I do weights, aerobics, and the exercise bicycle. It's about an hour of really intense, sweaty exercise a day, and that is really important to me. It's very energizing, and it also clears all the stress out of your system. If I don't have a good sweat, I get lackadaisical.

The other thing is I travel for pleasure. We took a trip in January to South Beach in Miami, one of our favorite places, and just did nothing but hang out, go to the beach and shop. I really enjoy working hard and all of that, but I could easily be a beach bum. When I go on vacation, I turn all that off and I don't miss it a bit. I don't have any desire to call the office.

I also read a lot, and reasonably good literature. I've been on a biography kick for about the past six months. I'm reading Robert Carrow's book on Robert Moses. For a while I was on a 19th century French literature kick and read every Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo book, and so I tend to go in cycles.

One good thing about the projects I've been involved in recently--and about the only way I can practice as dean--is that they are large and have more predictable schedules where I can mete out my time evenly as opposed to having to be on-call all the time. The airport I worked on for five and a half years. I generally work eight hours a week in my practice. It's totally erratic, but sometimes I'll go over there early in the morning before I come in. Sometimes I'll go at the end of the day. I'll go in for a meeting if I have to, then come back. Other than that, it's weekends and evenings.

I live on a hill in Pemberton, just west of campus. I set my alarm for 10 'til 5, and I lie in bed until I hear the chimes of the Tower strike 5, then I get up. It's a very romantic way to get up. "Mother UT calls!"

By Avrel Seale,
from Texas Alcalde magazine (July/August 1999)
Photographs by Robert Pandya

Links:

UT Austin:

• School of Architecture
  • Lawrence W. Speck
  • History

• Goldsmith Hall

• Battle Hall

  • One of seven wonders of structural design in Texas
  • UT Library in 1915

• Architecture and Planning Library

  • Alexander Architectural Archive

• Sutton Hall

• Gregory Gym:

  • Photos
  • U.T. RecSports

• The Louise and James Robert Moffett Molecular Biology Building

• Robert Lee Moore Hall

• Blanton Museum of Art

• Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Psychology, Child Development, and Family Relations Building

• Campus Master Plan

  • Campus Planning
  • Principles of Plan
  • Overview
  • Status Report

• Cass Gilbert

  • Alexander Architectural Archive
  • UT Library in 1915
  • Library Reading Room

• Paul Cret

  • Paul Cret
  • Student Reflections on Paul Cret

• Institutional Purpose

• The Mars Group

  • Core Purpose and Core Values
  • Peter Flawn Faculty Address

• UT Interactive

• Plan II Honors Program

• Texas Alcalde Magazine

The Handbook of Texas Online:
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online

• Paul Cret

• Cass Gilbert

• Hugo Franz Kuehne, founder of the UT School of Architecture

• Texas Society of Architects

• Friendswood, Texas