Word: gsd
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...various theoretical and stylistic changes never seemed to affect the education GSD students received. Lawrence Halprin (BLA '44) expresses typical sentiments: "What I got was a great sense of value systems, role models, attitudes and processes. The aesthetic system was not very important...you learn it as a background and then cast it off...the International Style never influenced...
This relocation of the academic cutting edge did not seem to impair the education of graduates. According to Alan J. Plattus, a visiting professor of architecture at Yale, the GSD has tried hard to introduce variety into coursework. "Harvard has always been scared...of becoming too monolithic," he says, adding that sometimes the students "are benificiaries of more diversity than they can handle...the variety can dilute the experience...
Dean Gerald M. McCue believes the GSD has caught up with the avant-garde. "We are among the leaders, I think, in schools that are really probing how one blends the best of modernism and the best of other classical periods at the same time," he says. "We are trying to rediscover the theoretical propositions which created architecturee at various eras," McCue says, "instead of copying the manifestations of that, trying to rethink what was being thought at that time...
When asked what their time at the GSD was like, the answer inevitably boils down to one word: tough. "It was angst-ridden. It wasn't fun, but that's not why I was supposed to be there," says Janet Josselyn (MAR '84). "Part of the problem is that you come out overtrained," says Eugene Lew (MAR '61). But now that Lew has his own practice, he believes that "it's no question that the training paid...
...students have any complaint, it is that "at the GSD one learns architecture, and not how to be an architect," says Brad Walker (MAR '85). "Many employers want an employee who knows how to function in their offices. [The GSD] is not a vocational education...