As I’ve written blog posts about all the friends we’ve visited and stayed with this past year, I’ve noticed a paradox – the more time I’ve spent with someone over the years, the harder it is to write about them. If it’s an old high school buddy whom I haven’t seen in 30 years, time (and age) acts as a filter. I remember certain stories from the distant past (and doubtless have forgotten many more) that frame the friendship, and then I can follow with the holiday-letter synopsis of their adult life. But if it’s someone with whom your friendship has evolved continually over the years, there are just too many aspects to cover, so these posts necessarily feel more cursory, or inadequate. This has certainly been true in writing about our family members, and with some close friends, such as Jerry and Gunilla Finrow.

I first spoke to Jerry in 1990, when I called about a job at the UO for which I had seen an ad in Architectural Record. Jerry surprised me when he said he had heard of the firm where I worked, and he strongly encouraged me to apply for the job. I did, and that pretty much set me on the course of my life since.

Jerry had grown up in eastern Washington, and attended the undergraduate architecture program at UW. He worked for some noted architects and landscape architects in Seattle, and then went off to graduate school at Berkeley in the 1960s. He was there for the intellectual and political foment that was Berkeley in that period, and he was actually in the Christopher Alexander seminar where they first began to develop the idea of the Pattern Language. Jerry and Gunilla met at Berkeley, as she was a graduate student also, after having grown up in Helsinki and gone to architecture school at the ETH in Switzerland. They left the Bay Area to move to Eugene, where Jerry became a faculty member (and later department head) in architecture, while Gunilla became a faculty member (and later program director) in interior architecture. They lived in a house on Fairmount which they beautifully remodelled, and where they raised their children Eric and Eva.

The year after I (and Linda) arrived in Eugene, Jerry became the dean of AAA. We had a great, but necessarily limited relationship, as deans are always travelling or busy, and don’t spend a lot of time just hanging out with junior faculty. But Jerry and I had a lot of overlapping interests (such as housing), and even while he was busy running the school, he always found time to track what I was doing, and give me excellent pointers and suggestions. Linda and Gunilla had a closer relationship, as they worked together in a much smaller program, although their relationship went back further: Gunilla had been Linda’s adviser when Linda was in graduate school at the UO, and Gunilla had been the one who encouraged her to apply for the faculty position back at the UO when it became open. So it’s very clear that without multiple interventions by the Finrows, Linda and I would never have met.

In 1995, Jerry accepted the job of dean at the University of Washington, and they moved to Seattle. We missed having them in Eugene, but visited them several times there while on work-related trips, including the summer of 2001, when Linda was pregnant. While we were there, they mentioned that they had started construction on a summer house on Whidbey Island, and did we want to run up to see it? We did, and fell in love with the place. The house was exquisite, a blend of vernacular, modernist and Scandinavian influences, simple and impeccably detailed.

We were also taken with the historic town of Coupeville, and the landscape of Ebey’s Landing. I remember eating lunch on the beach at Ft. Casey, and Gunilla relating how she had grown up on the water in Helsinki, but then had lived inland in Eugene for 25 years, and was never quite content. Now she would be able to see the water every day, and it felt right. I completely understood, as I had moved back to Eugene two years before after four years in Portland; Eugene was the only place I’d lived in my life that didn’t have salt water, and it didn’t feel right to me either. We visited them on the island several times after Greta was born, and eventually bought our own property in the town and built a house (often staying with the Finrows until it was occupiable). So once again the Finrows casually set us on a major life trajectory

Linda and I managed to have Greta without any interventions by the Finrows, but they’ve been an important part of her life ever since. As all of Greta’s grandparents were much older and across the country, she didn’t get to see them very often, and the Finrows became her surrogate West Coast grandparents. We’ve been spending our summers on Whidbey for ten years now, a half mile from the Finrows, and being able to to spend time with them (as well as Bill and Mary Gilland, who built a house across Penn Cove), has been one of the things we most look forward to every year. Over the years Linda and Gunilla have spent a lot of time consulting on gardening, and I can sometimes drag Jerry out to be the helmsman on the boat.

Jerry and Gunilla are now both retired, living between downtown Seattle and Coupeville – spending their time gardening, cooking, going to the symphony, and relaxing after busy careers. They’ve also been travelling quite a bit – usually trips to visit Gunilla’s family in Finland, or garden tours in the UK. When we get together at the beginning of each summer, Bill and Jerry (both former deans of AAA) will ask me how things are going at the UO, and will listen attentively as I launch into a narrative about the latest administrative crises and outrages, etc. After a few minutes they both begin to grin, and one will say to the other, Boy I’m glad I don’t have to deal with any of that anymore. I have a few years to go, but I’m looking forward to joining them.

Jerry and Gunilla had been heading south for some time every winter, and a few years ago they decided they needed another architectural project, so they designed another great house in Santa Cruz. They use it as an intermittent vacation residence, and their daughter Eva and her family use it as a weekend house, coming over the hills from the Bay Area. It works really well as a multigenerational house, with the main living spaces and the Finrows on the upper level (with a view of the ocean), and the Born family occupying the ground floor. Something they didn’t plan on (but they must have grasped at some intuitive level) was that Keyes family would be showing up again someday, and the house has superb urban camping amenities, with a nicely secluded spot for our trailer behind the porte cochere.  

Our unplanned timing was great, as we not only got to see the Finrows, but also Eva’s family. (Greta has known the Born boys since she was little.) Eva’s husband Colin took Greta along to the beach, and six-year-old Peter taught her how to boogie-board while Colin and Ben were surfing. We also spent an evening talking about our travels with Colin, who would love to undertake such a trip someday, and who has also been the only person we’ve seen on our trip who has understood the central importance of making an Allman Brothers pilgrimage to Macon, Georgia.

By this stage we realized that were on the last leg of our trip, and were frankly a little exhausted, not feeling the impetus to do every single cool thing that could be done in every place. Just as the landscape was starting to feel more familiar, giving us some signs that we were home, staying with the Finrows was very familiar also. They’ve been such constant friends and wonderful hosts over the years that staying with them felt a lot like being at home, and we just relaxed after months on the go. And it was very thoughtful of them to build a house that fit in so well with our itinerary.

Albert Narath showed up at the end of our hallway about six years ago. Linda and I had offices on a hard-to-find, dead-end corridor in the upper reaches of Lawrence Hall, and one September we returned to find Albert ensconced in the one other nearby office. Actually, he was more tentatively perched than ensconced, in the midst of the standard new faculty experience at the UO, having been assigned an office only to discover that it didn’t come with any really useful furniture. We passed him some extra chairs, and alerted him to where on campus were the best scrounging spots for furniture. Albert took all of this with good humor, which is the essential quality for a new faculty member being able to survive at the UO.

Albert was the new architectural historian in our school, having gone to grad school at Columbia after growing up in Albuquerque and college at Bowdoin, a trajectory that seemed to reflect a desire for maximum geographical diversity as much as academic focus. He was notably funny and interesting, and was such an engaging neighbor that I eventually had to make myself deliberately walk past his office sometimes without stopping in to chat; he was too polite to throw me out, and I knew that if I kept distracting him he would never get enough work done to get tenure.

Soon thereafter we met Jolie Kerns, who had come from New York with Albert. Jolie had grown up in Sacramento, gone to Berkeley, worked in the building industry, and then gone to architecture school at Columbia, where she and Albert met. She had stayed in New York, working for some very notable small firms, such as those run by Bernard Tschumi (the dean at Columbia), and Toshiko Mori (the department chair at Harvard). Jolie was interested in establishing her own design practice in Eugene, and Linda and I had the moral dilemma of deciding whether we should try to save her a lot of grief by explaining the circumstances in Eugene which made this highly unlikely (and perhaps souring her on the place soon after her arrival), or letting her learn this on her own. (I think we gave her a few hints and answered direct questions, but really pursued the latter strategy.)

Both Albert and Jolie settled in to the school perfectly. Albert was an enormously engaging teacher, as could be seen by the constant lines of students sitting in the hall outside his office, waiting for a chance to talk to him. He taught courses in modern architecture and design, but began to inflect his work towards his new milieu. The architecture department at the UO has been at the forefront of environmentally-sensitive and energy-efficient design for decades, pushing sustainable design long before anyone started using that word. Albert dove into the history of this movement, and initiated a very popular course on it. (Albert informed me of what was known around the country as the “Oregon conspiracy”, the fact that almost everyone who teaches in this area elsewhere has a strong connection to the UO architecture department). Our students loved his classes, and I found them constantly referring to ideas they had gleaned from them.

Jolie began teaching studios as an adjunct in our department, which often brought her background and approach as an architect into the very different landscape she now found herself in. I reviewed some of those studios, and was struck by the conceptual clarity of the work, the rigor which her students exhibited. So I was later really pleased to be able to co-teach studios with Jolie a couple of times – both second-year undergraduate and first year graduate students. Teaching is usually a solitary pursuit, which just feels wrong to those of us with professional architectural experience – a good office is usually based upon the collaboration of colleagues with a wide range of talents and approaches, seldom just upon the insights of the sole design genius. Jolie had attended Columbia twenty years after I did – a period in which the conceptual approach of the profession had changed dramatically – and consequently her background and approach to design were very different from mine. We both sort of scratched our heads at first upon seeing how the other engaged a problem, but we were both open-minded and willing to try different methods, and the studios were richer and better because of it. It’s a commonplace in academia to say how we learn from our students, and how being exposed to energetic and idealistic young people keeps us from becoming too set in our ways, but I think the influx of younger colleagues is even more important. They have processed the new approaches of their youth and have integrated them into mature viewpoints, which they are then able to demonstrate to their older colleagues as well as their students. Jolie brought all this, plus she had the innate qualities of a great design instructor – insight, empathy, adaptability, humor, and the ability to think on her feet and react immediately.

Jolie and Albert also settled into life in Eugene. Their daughter, the adorable Willa, was born. They had a tres Eugene wedding out at Mt. Pisgah. They bought a cool modern house up in the hills. We figured they were around for the long run, but it was not to be. They ran into the trailing spouse problem which is widespread in Eugene – the non-tenure-track partner is usually unable to find professional employment commensurate with her prior experience and skills, and the UO has long been notable for not doing very much to help solve this problem (unless the employee in question is a member of the central administration); our department wasn’t able to make a commitment of sustained employment to Jolie. There was also the allure of life back in California, which had become more central after Willa’s birth, with Jolie’s family (and Willa’s young cousins) in the Bay Area. So Albert looked around for new positions, and was hired at UC Santa Cruz.

Greta and I spent a couple of entertaining days with them – Albert and Willa showed us the hip new commercial developments (especially the gourmet hot dog cart), and all of us toured around the UCSC campus together. Jolie is now working as a campus architect, in charge of building projects on the campus. Her most significant new project is the renovation of Kresge College, the very important residential complex designed by Charles Moore (more on this later).

Willa was a very different child than the one we knew (being 100% older than when she left Eugene) – still adorable, but with the self-possession of a happy four-year-old. (As we wandered around the campus, Greta pondered what would obviously be Willa’s familiar fate: being dragged around the world behind her parents, looking at architecture.) Albert and Jolie were just the same, and we immediately fell back into talking at great length. We were happy to see them so well, and how well life is working out for them in California, but we really wish they were still living in Eugene.

Greta got to meet many of my old friends on this trip, but only one old girlfriend. Beth and Greta had actually met once before, when Beth was in Eugene on a business trip and came over to our house for dinner, but Greta had no memory of this, as she was at an age where she was still playing happily in the bath tub, as Beth recalled.

Beth and I met in Boston in 1980 (a prime support of Bill McGowan’s claim that he had introduced me to all of my girlfriends on the East Coast). We lived a few blocks from each other across the Beacon Street Cambridge-Somerville border, (in that district which used to supply incredibly cheap housing to broke graduate students and recent college grads), in a ground floor apartment with a constantly-changing cast of roommates, all of whom were smart, young, beautiful and charming.

Beth had grown up in Concord, attended Bowdoin, and in Boston was leading a life revolving around involvement in the arts – she played the flute, sang in choirs, and seemed to spend all of her waking hours drinking coffee and reading books. This interest in the arts led her through a series of jobs – on the staff at Boston’s classical radio station, and then as manager for a number of performing arts ensembles. In later years she directed programs at the humanities center at MIT, and then worked in the education department at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I was working in an architect’s office in Boston, and we spent our spare time doing what young professionals in that demographic do – hanging out, eating brunch, talking about the meaning of life. Beth’s ancient VW Beetle allowed us to take day trips to beaches,

and she even taught me how to drive a stick shift in that car with the miserable clutch. I met Beth’s mother early one Saturday morning, when she dropped in to visit while Beth and I were eating breakfast; she never dropped in unannounced again. Despite that inauspicious meeting, and the time that I almost capsized her dad’s Dark Harbor 17 sailing in Maine, her family was always wonderful to me, and getting to know them was a very nice part of the package.

We had met just after I had applied to architecture graduate schools, and in the fall I moved to New York to attend Columbia. So Beth and I had a commuter relationship for more than a year, taking Greyhound buses back and forth a couple of times a month. The older and wiser version of myself wishes I could have informed my younger self that this almost never works (a viewpoint confirmed by over 25 years observing young adult architecture students in relationships). We were both determined to make our way in our widely-separated career paths, and so we split up, contentiously, but not irrevocably so.

We stayed intermittently in touch, and I was pleased to receive reports from our mutual friends on what they knew about the not completely prepossessing guys Beth was seeing. (You may not want old girlfriends who’ve dumped you to be miserable, but you don’t want them to be too happy either.) This changed when I began to hear rumors about this Brian Donoghue, who was well-known as a theater director in Boston and around the country. He sounded impressive, the relationship sounded serious, and I eventually got to meet Brian at their wedding in 1991, during the Summer When All of My Old Girlfriends Got Married. The ex-boyfriend doesn’t get to spend a lot of time with the groom at a wedding, but I liked what I saw.

Brian had taken a job as the director of the performing arts center in Carmel, and they moved out to Carmel Valley, along with Brian’s son, Ryan. It was a radical change of life for Beth – her first home outside of New England, removal from the arts world where she’d spent her whole career, and raising a son through a high-intensity adolescence. Beth switched gears professionally, and entered the world of textbook publishing, where she is now a VP and editor-in-chief for biological and environmental science at Pearson. (All of her old friends find this astounding for a music and English major, someone whom the College Board wanted to study, as the spread between her verbal and math SAT scores was amongst the highest they’d ever recorded.)

Brian retired about eight years ago, and Beth splits her time between working in the San Francisco office (and a small apartment in the Marina), and her home office in the backyard of their house in Carmel Valley. The house is spectacular – everything an iconic California house should be (even if the driveway did present the most extreme trailer-backing challenge of the trip, with an S-curve overlaid on two compound diagonal slopes with a gate in the middle).

It is built of concrete block, wood and glass, designed by Mark Mills, an employee of FL Wright’s who moved to Carmel to superintend the construction of the famous FLW house on the water, and then stayed on to start his own career. The detailing, materials, spaces, sequences and views out to the oak savannah hillside are amazing. Even more amazing is what Brian and Beth have done to restore it – when they bought it, there was wall-to-wall carpeting on the concrete slab floors, and three levels of window treatments obscuring the views. I am an incredible stickler when it comes to design decisions and workmanship in a project like this, but the work, which Brian has largely done himself, is sympathetic to the original design and impeccable. One bathroom, which Brian gut-remodeled with stone and a large skylight, beats out the campground in Apalachicola for our award for the most beautiful bathroom of the trip.

We had a wonderful time staying with Beth and Brian, in a beautiful environment where we felt at home and very comfortable, after months mainly spent in a tiny trailer. There were a few long, talk-filled dinners, including one where they had invited their lovely friends Kate and Richard, who had heard about our trip and wanted to meet us. It was great to see how good their life is, with a happy marriage and interesting careers, in a beautiful place surrounded by friends.

Brian didn’t know whether Greta had heard about our past history, so he was planning on being circumspect, until Beth told him it was okay. Beth and Brian now have two granddaughters, so they are well-attuned to teenage girls, and they and Greta hit it off instantly. As has happened before on this trip, I was pleased to see Greta make a good impression and acquire another surrogate aunt and uncle. For myself, it was wonderful to reconnect in a friendship with Beth that has lasted over half of our lives, and to spend enough time with Brian to figure out that we are now friends too.

The first Westerner I ever got to know was Brian Leverich. He lived down the hall from us in Hurlbut Hall, that “…dorm full of eccentrics, misfits and savants…” where I first encountered so many of my best college friends. Brian’s family was from Oklahoma, or Colorado, or some other vague place west of the Eastern Seaboard that I couldn’t quite place. Having spent my whole life in the New York metropolitan area, at first I couldn’t figure him out at all – he talked slowly and softly, with significant pauses, when you couldn’t tell if he was done speaking. In my world, talking in this manner was generally taken as an indication of mental deficiency, but after a little while hanging out with Brian, I realized that he was actually very smart, and often subtly funny. In retrospect, being friends with Brian was the beginning of the acculturation process that prepared me for marrying a woman from Kansas, and spending most of my adult life in Oregon.

The other weird thing about Brian was that he was a conservative, a Goldwater Republican. Even though I came from markedly Republican stock myself, this was the mid-1970s, at Harvard, where the acceptable range of Republicanism ran from the patrician Cabot Lodge pole to the liberal Edward Brooke end of the spectrum. I had never before met an actual, libertarian-leaning, Western Republican, and I began to suspect he might have fired a gun at some point in his life. But just as I came to understand his intellect, I also learned that his political beliefs were reasonable, in that they derived from reason, and not just a knee-jerk anti-gummint answer to every question in life. Brian didn’t unthinkingly parrot the beliefs of his tribe, in an era when dogmatic certainty was the norm. (Once, when I had the audacity to question some left-wing shibboleth in a letter to the Crimson, an angry response referred to me as the “Spiro Agnew of Harvard.”) Brian was comfortable and rational in his opinions, and enjoyed poking at the liberal verities with which he was surrounded.

Sophomore year we moved into different Houses, and saw each other intermittently throughout college, then completely lost touch afterwards. Brian continued his studies in engineering at Stanford, but after a few years there realized it wasn’t a good fit. However, while there he did meet his future wife, Karen Isaacson, who was also a grad student at Stanford, so those years were not wasted. Brian began a career which I can’t comprehend in detail, but it involved working as consultant on public policy / engineering-related issues (often defense policy), flitting in and out of the Rand Corporation, and at some point getting his PhD from the Rand Graduate School. These were the heady years of the Republican ascendancy, and Brian was there as the New World Order led to the End of History.

During this period, Karen had developed an interest in genealogy, and she and Brian were perfectly situated, as engineering nerds with a clear understanding of the potential of the emerging interwebs, to be among the first to see how genealogy could be brought into the modern world of technology. They were living in their little cabin up in the mountains of southern California, from where they were able to put their work up online. A major commercial genealogical venture, Ancestry.com, was developing at the same time, but Karen and Brian seemed to be able to do on their own just about what Ancestry was doing with a big company. Tired of the pesky little competitor, Ancestry bought out their company – Rootsweb.com – and Karen and Brian moved on.

They eventually settled in San Luis Obispo, and a few years ago bought a fantastic place about two miles south of downtown. It sits up on a little ridge in the middle of farmland near the airport, with panoramic views in every direction.

Here they continue to pursue their many interests – genealogy through their new venture, Linkpendium.com, and participation in genealogical associations, extensive hiking in the mountains of the West, ham radio activity (Brian is currently trying to figure out the precise best place for a 60-foot aerial on their ridge), and hanging out with their huskies. Pictured above are McKinley and Denali, two charming dogs who are very highly placed on Greta’s list of Best Vicarious Pets of the trip, for their combination of liveliness and calm. Unfortunately, Denali died suddenly shortly after our visit, and Brian and Karen are now up to their eyeballs with a new huskie puppy.

As with many of my long-lost friends whom we’ve visited on this trip, Brian and I reconnected through Facebook several years ago. I’ve really learned a lot from his posts in recent years – he understands the worlds of economics, public policy and politics as a professional, and amazingly after all his years in the trenches, he still has the same integrity and thoughtfulness I noticed over 40 years ago. Brian has stayed true to his core principles, and has been aghast as the Republican party has marched off the cliff into know-nothingness and licking the boots of the Masters of the Universe. His arguments are about the most cogent I’ve seen in any online discussion – not assertions of moral superiority and self-righteousness, but clearly-reasoned positions based upon a wide-ranging base of facts and knowledge. He hasn’t quite converted me to being a Goldwater Republican, although I have come to recognize that I’ve always been an Eisenhower Republican at heart (and hence almost a Socialist in our current mileu.) As a way out of our current horrific political polarization and stalemate, the best option I’ve been able to come up with is to put Brian in charge.

Greta has always enjoyed my nerdy and amusing college friends, so she was really looking forward to meeting Brian and Karen. We had a great time with them, hanging around drinking and eating, seeing the sights of the greater SLO area (including our first sight of the Pacific in eight months at Morro Bay and Montaña de Oro State Park). But perhaps the best group activity (certainly for the nerdy end of the spectrum) was going to the movies. Greta had been counting the days until the opening of the Captain America Civil War movie, but our plans to see it the opening weekend in Bakersfield were dashed by the blown-out tire in the Mojave. When we inquired about possible movie venues upon our arrival in SLO, Brian’s eyes lit up. He too had been eagerly anticipating the movie, but despaired of finding an appropriate viewing companion, one who would have the requisite detailed knowledge and appreciation of the complex Marvel movies universe (MCU), and so be able to meaningfully participate in the critical post-movie analysis and discussion. We all enjoyed the movie (sitting in our electrically-controlled chaise-lounges with drink and popcorn holders, ahh California!), but the young and the old nerd were in heaven, continuing the discussion into the next evening back at home, when other DVDs in the series were pulled out, to bring the complete experience to a sense of closure.

Karen grew up in Oregon, and her mom lives in Vancouver, Washington, so they do pass by our neck of the woods from time to time. We’re counting on seeing them again soon (just as we hope all of the friends we visited will now come see us), perhaps coordinated with the release of the next Marvel movie.

photo from CAED

Christine Theodoropoulos joined our department in Eugene in the mid-1990s, coming from a prior teaching position in southern California.  Our department has an unusual criterion when we are searching for new faculty members: everyone who will teach courses in the department should also teach design studios.  We don’t want some faculty (especially those who teach technical courses) to be isolated in their specialties; since architecture is all about integrating an incredibly wide range of scales and issues into a design project, we think it is important that specialized knowledge and different approaches be brought into the studio, and we want our faculty to always be thinking about how their particular focus and expertise contributes to the design process.  Christine was a perfect faculty candidate from this perspective. She had an undergraduate engineering degree from Princeton, then a masters in architecture from Yale (where she was friends with Mark Rylander, another factor to her credit).  She left LA and moved to Eugene with her husband Mark (who had extensive experience working as a construction manager on the Getty, among other projects), and her two young sons.

From the beginning, working with Christine was a pleasure. She was a thoughtful and smart design teacher, and with her structural engineering colleagues, fundamentally changed the way we teach structures, shifting it more towards how architects actually apply structural concepts in the design process, rather than just the learning of abstract structural principles (which was certainly the way I was taught).  But more than that, she was a good friend and the definition of collegiality – someone who more than pulled her own weight, who was always searching for simple solutions, and who didn’t feel the need to belabor the obvious (not a common characteristic in academia).  Once when she and I were on a faculty search committee together, she walked into a meeting and said, These are the three candidates whom I think are clearly the best.  I said I completely agreed, and she said let’s just invite them to campus.  We then adjourned what was probably the shortest committee meeting ever held.

Given these qualities, she was a natural for the thankless job of being department head.  When we needed to find a new head in the early 2000s, Christine and I were both mid-career faculty and likely candidates, so I did a quick survey of our relative qualifications, which immediately convinced me that Christine was much better suited for the job.  Happily Christine and the rest of the faculty concurred, and Christine took on the position, eventually agreeing to re-up for two more three-year terms.

As always, these were years of tumult and straitened circumstances at the university, but Christine strategically navigated them with tremendous steadiness, integrity, and innovative thinking.  She had enough experience and wisdom to keep things in perspective, and she quietly accomplished a lot, with a minimum of fuss.  My favorite moment was when I had attended a meeting with many other faculty from across the university, and found that they were all freaking out about some directive out of the provost’s office.  They were having meetings, plotting strategies, writing memos and letters.  One colleague asked me how our department was dealing with this, and I said that I hadn’t heard anything about this before; she just stared at me in disbelief.  I went back to Lawrence Hall and asked Christine about this crisis.  She said, Oh, I just don’t think this has reached the level yet where we have to pay any attention to it.  She was right – it never became a big issue for us, and she saved us weeks of worry and unnecessary dithering by just quietly tracking it herself.

Christine’s sterling qualities were noticed not just by us, so four years ago she moved off to San Luis Obispo to be the dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly.  It is an excellent school, with a very large undergraduate architecture program that is consistently ranked the best in the country.  Christine and Mark moved into a cool rowhouse/loft unit in a hip new mixed-use building downtown (their boys are grown and off on their own), where they are enjoying the down-sized simplicity and urban pleasures of life in SLO, after the years of suburban family domesticity in Eugene.

We had a lovely dinner visiting with Christine, catching up on family and friends, hearing about her life at Cal Poly and in the more general world of architectural education in the US, and some interesting adventures she’d had in consulting on architecture programs in the Mideast. But as always with Christine, much of the conversation was about how things and people were doing in Oregon, and how we had been faring on our trip; even after years in her new life, Christine still hasn’t let go of the habits of caring about and strategizing for all of us back in her old home.