The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 266

1 4- Sunday, May 6, 1984 Philadelphia Inquirer With an eye on the human element, an architect gives substance to ideas By Eugenia Cook SftcW it 1 fiNiuirer Honored architect and professor though he is, Robert Geddes does not stand on ceremony He comes into the reception area of his Princeton offices to lead a guest back to his quarters. Dad in a pin-stripe shirt and bow tie, he gives off sparks of cheerful energy. High white walls and a neutral carpet soften? the uncluttered spareness of the room where, he works. Leading the way to a round white? conference table, he sits, carefully assembling a pad and pen before him. Throughout the conversation, he uses them, sketching ou(f schemes, emphasizing his conversational points with graphic explanations.

i The tools signify his vocation as designer i and visual thinker, but their constant use reveals his parallel profession, one that has also brought him distinction: that of educator His firm, Geddes Brecher Quails Cunningham, known as GBQC, received the prestigious Architectural Design Award from the Ameri can Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1979. Today in Phoenix, Geddes is to be honored by the AIA and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture for his contribution to architectural education. It is the first lime that a liSWi ---J 1 i v'v gfe iiMlW prt -f l-PSf company has won both the coveted design award and the one for education. Geddes' roots in the area, particularly In New Jersey, run deep. Born in Philadelphia in i he grew up in Ventnor.

He took his graduate work at Harvard, studying under Walter Gropius and Joseph Hudnut. His first job after Harvard brought him back to this area. "I got started designing public playgrounds in. Philadelphia during the Clark-Dilworth period," he says, "and I still like working in the public sector." He stayed in Philadelphia until 196S, working first for the city, then opening his own practice with George Quails. All along he held teaching positions at the architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania.

When he left Philadelphia for Princeton, he had left his mark on some of the city's ings: He designed the Police Administration' building, called the Roundhouse because of its' shape. And his was the first plan for Penn's Landing. "At the time, having grown up in the area, knew South Jersey. In fact, my grandparents' helped found Woodbine. But I knew nothing about Central or North Jersey.

If was definitely moving away for me. "And it changed my perceptions, too. When I was in Philadelphia, I used to think of Center, City as the center. Here, it's one town on the, axis." As he speaks, he draws a line of large penetrated by a single line. "It stretches from Boston, oh, down through Baltimore and Washington.

It's given me a different sense of Architecture, says Geddes, "is a social art. The demand for buildings comes from society. In turn, what we build affects society." He describes himself as an "optimistic archt tect" one, who, like Frank Lloyd Wright," believes that good architecture can have an" Influence on the society it serves. "There are ideas in buildings that inform them, that then become a central driving force," he says. is needed in today's architecture, he believes, is more optimism and more attention 1 to humane issues, including aesthetics.

He tells an apocryphal story about an architect who bragged that he could design a house that would guarantee a divorce in six months. Similarly, he has no trouble pointing to the known features that make a building bad: "Buildings that allow no privacy, that create -great stress, where people can't work and be together. Or those which have a negative ef-; feet on the landscape. And there's an economic" SpMl to Tin Inqunr MARK SHERMAN In their offices in Princeton, architect-professor Robert Geddes (left) goes over plans with a colleague, Hamilton Ross.