Scott Gustafson's Graduation Address at Commencement

May 15 1999 . CAPD . Kansas State University

Through the course of our education here at Kansas State University, we have
been engaged in a two part course. On the one side are the facts, our education
is comprised of an understanding of architectural history, the social and political
forces which shaped the built environment through time and the technical
knowledge related to the construction of such buildings. The corresponding half
to our education is the search for architecture through our designs, training the
mind to see. The creation of architecture is not automatic or self-evident like the
making of a hamburger. Design Studio enables us to coalesce these diverse
aspects acquired into buildings. Architecture is at its broadest and most general
level a concern about building. However, in school we have not made buildings,
we produce models and drawings of an idea for a building. We have been
furnished with the tools to find an architecture of our own making, those spaces
that have not yet been brought into existence.

This notion of architecture's influence as a built reality gained the most relevance
for me a few years ago during a road trip to Ohio I took with Shawn Gehle and
John Pitman to see some recent projects by Peter Eisenman. They say that
architects always take the strangest vacations, opting for a trip through the
countryside on a rainy day to see an obscure house, or wishing to get to New
York while their friends and family look to the beaches of Florida. We were each
familiar with the buildings through the drawings and photos we had seen in the
journals and magazines. However, the experience of seeing these buildings with
our own eyes demystified the glossy aura of the magazines and put the work in
a human context, revealing the qualities of everyday life such as use, time and
material.

Our professors have given us plenty and put us through a lot, but they have not
made us architects, and passing the licensing exam alone is not enough to make
us architects either. Through a continued search to combine the needs and
aspirations of people into a constructed form, we will become architects and our
buildings works of architecture.