Upon Daniel Friedman's appointment as dean, University of Washington Provost Phyllis Wise described him as “…an architect for the 21st century [who] is at the forefront of new thinking in the fields of architecture, design, and urban planning. He fully appreciates the importance of building sustainable structures, the impact of the built environment on the quality of our lives, and developing a generation of students who are prepared to tackle these challenges.”

Friedman writes and lectures widely on professional ethics and education, public architecture, and twentieth century theory. He is the co-founder and past editor of Practices magazine; and co-editor of Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, an anthology of critical and theoretical essays on geometry and hygiene. He has contributed numerous articles to professional journals, magazines, and critical anthologies.

He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2001. Friedman currently serves on the national AIA Board Knowledge committee and the AIA Chicago board of directors. He is 2007 chair of the AIA College of Fellows' Latrobe Prize jury.

Friedman has been director of the School of Architecture at University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), where he developed the school's five-year strategic plan, secured its most recent six-year accreditation, advanced improvements to the undergraduate and graduate curricula, instituted weekly convocations on architecture and public policy, led the initiative for a new post-professional graduate degree in healthcare design, and oversaw the student design and construction of interior renovations to the Art and Architecture building. Prior to joining UIC, Friedman taught at the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati from 1990 to 2002, serving his last two years there as school director. Friedman holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in architectural theory from the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel S. Friedman — Commencement Address
May 23, 2008

Thank you, Dean Fraker. Thanks also to this esteemed faculty; thanks and hearty congratulations to the families and friends of today's honored graduates. It's a huge privilege to join you today, more than I can say; and it's a singular privilege to share this moment with my friend Harrison Fraker, first among equals at any meeting of deans in our great professions. Few educators have raised our standards of excellence as high. I'm deeply grateful for his trust and his collegiality.

Even coming from the breathtaking geographical treasures of the Pacific Northwest, I envy your opportunity to work in and around a campus as beautiful as Berkeley. Working in a place like this can only serve to deepen one's sense of responsibility for the complex interdependence of natural and constructed environments. Given that unique responsibility, surely what will define you as a generation is how well and how imaginatively you manage the environmental consequences of global climate change, which threatens civilization itself. Scientists like Walter Broecker soberly warn us that in the absence of radical and massive intervention, we face immanent environmental ruin.(1) The underlying premise of biodiversity is finally that as the earth's dominant species, we have a unique duty to modulate our behavior in ways that sustain and promote the health of the whole system. We'll either succeed or we won't. Much of that is up to you.

The good news is, you have among your teachers at Berkeley some of the most gifted and creative environmental thinkers in the world. Arguably, no one is better equipped than you to greet this century's grand challenge; I'm certain most of you already have. Shortly you will all hold degrees from the world's greatest public university. Your success along the arduous path that brings you to this moment gives me faith that the leadership necessary to secure a healthy future is right here in this audience. And so I have much confidence that you will help us find ways to save the natural environment.

That said, I thought I might take this opportunity to address a few things you might want to save in the cultural environment, which is every bit as much or more at risk.

I'm sorry to say I can't talk to you about these things from the perspective of wisdom or special insight. My interest in these five items springs from personal failure — my own errors, my own propensity to take everyday life for granted, my own inability to break bad habits. As the great Brazilian architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner reminds us, "sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted,"(2) and the five things I have in mind to talk about today are all things I tend to squander. The chance to reflect on your great beginnings today somehow led me to reconsider their value.

Firstly, save time.

Obviously not in the sense that frozen food saves time by saving labor, so that we can spend the time we save on something more important, like leisure. The time I want to save, building on Paul Virilio's words, is "the loss of a sense of [time in] a world . . . reduced by technologies that have both [escaped gravity and mastered] the absolute speed of electromagnetic waves . . . In addition to the pollution of the substances that make up [our] environment . . . about which ecologists never cease to speak," Virilio argues, "[we] must . . . also address the sudden pollution of distances and of time periods that degrades the extent of our habitat."(3) The degrees you'll receive today suggest your unique responsibility to safeguard the way time frames human experience. Like poets you are custodians of temporality—of the comings and goings of light and seasons, of the infinitely variegated rhythms of city and country, of the dilations and contractions of youth and age. Environmental design and planning uniquely structure the physical proximity of people and communities without which we risk losing the essential anchor of being present in the world. Randy Hester captures this principle beautifully in a giant book called Design for Ecological Democracy, and so I'm confident that you're already well acquainted with this cultural asset.

Computers, jet aircraft, microwaves: what technology does to time is not technology's fault — if modern philosophy teaches us anything it teaches us that the essence of technology is not in itself technological. My point is: contemporary media thrive on relentless distraction, and the truer dimensions of time require sustained attention. For you, right now, and in the years ahead, as your careers achieve their own escape velocity — as you divide more and more of your time among more devices and more screens; and as you find ever more ways to compress, manipulate, and multiply the activities that occupy your time — I hope you'll save some of those precious, irrecoverable hours "'to capture [your] own time in thought'," in the words of Hegel, quoted here by Richard Rorty, "to try to find a description of what's taking place here and now, a description that might help [you] figure out how to make the future different from the past."(4) How well we define future and past depends in part on the authenticity and depth of our own relationship to time, both natural and cultural, and that to me is something truly worth saving.

Secondly, save ink.

Not in the sense of literary economy or editorial intervention; nor do I mean to suggest that the printed word is at risk; and yet just last month in Wurster Hall I heard credible predictions from knowledgeable faculty that print media — get used to it — will eventually go the way of vinyl records. So I'm not too worried that books are at risk. Rather, I worry that reading is at risk.

You know from hours upon hours spent with books that critical reading has a physical dimension: what a book feels like in the hand and how its sentences register in the mind constitute a pleasurable ratio that significantly enhances the proportion of reading to reflection. As designers, you especially understand what it means to read a book with a pencil. What I'm arguing for here is the cultural sustainability of reading, which by its physical properties engages us more deeply in the process of critical thinking.

I realize I don't need to sell you on the value of books, so please forgive me if these remarks seem self-evident. But in principle higher education presupposes advanced reading, and demographic statistics offer little reassurance that as a nation we value advanced literacy. A 2002 National Endowment for the Arts report concludes that all book reading by any group on any topic is trending downward,(5) and given today's popular literary diet everyone here today knows what I mean when I say critical reading isn't comfort food.

My plea for ink has no bearing on wisdom or social justice or party affiliation or the reduction of human suffering, only on the development of the self and self-trust, to quote Harold Bloom. Reading is finally a solitary activity. "We read frequently if not unknowingly in quest of a mind more original than our own," Bloom says; and he urges us to read if for no other reason than to recover our sense of irony, which "demands a certain attention span and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another."(6) Put another way by former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins: "I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light."(7)

Thirdly, save face.

To "save face" means "to retain respect and avoid humiliation."(8) Respect for the integrity of the "face" of others under all circumstances however challenging is the root principle of civility, manners, etiquette, courtesy, and compassion. All universities I know of cleave to this principle: it is the hallmark of an educated worldview. In the face of rude behavior, Emily Post entreats us never to duplicate the offense, always to take our conduct to a higher level — to model the respect we wish others to pay us; and to own our conduct even when coping with the unacceptable conduct of others. Most philosophies and religions align on this principle: as I act so I license others to act likewise. Whether in response to noisy neighbors or belligerent nations, both local etiquette and global diplomacy suggest that the superior path involves sustaining respect for one's opponent as long and far as possible. Humiliation destroys all possibilities for respect.

We will all invariably face conflict; we will all face enemies. My question here is simple: whatever we do to advance or defend our cause, however minor or great the threat, is there not some way we can proceed into disagreement that respects the potential integrity of our adversary, on principle, irrespective of their position or behavior, however offensive (save perhaps the most nefarious crimes against humanity)? To do otherwise will surely humiliate, and this earth knows no destructive force greater or more intractable than pride wounded by humiliation. By saving the face of our enemies, ultimately we save our own face.

Fourthly, save space.

As of this year over half the world's population lives in cities, and this century will witness the continuous rural migration to urban centers on a scale not yet witnessed. As we know only too well, reckless urban growth greatly exacerbates the tendency of capital to flatten and homogenize the space of appearance. Compounding the banality of privatized space is the virtual mutation of public space by digital simulation and teletechnology. Nowadays, of course, internet-wise, an entirely new form of democracy occupies an entirely new, etheric and virtual public realm. If in fact the concept of "public" manages to survive the twenty-first century, it will be up to you to champion the kinds of hybrid space that stimulate social and cultural exchange, that structure our encounter with strangers, and that sharpen our attention to the social mosaic, if for no other reason than to allow future generations to experience the truer wellsprings of identity and character, which can only be understood in juxtaposition with difference.

Finally, save room.

Mindful of the sobering inequities that increasingly divide the few who live with abundance from the many who live with scarcity, what I'm thinking about here is the responsibility to moderate our own appetites in consideration of unforeseen possibilities—"to make way, [to] yield place, [to] draw back or retire, so as to allow someone else to enter [or] pass."(9) To save room for something is to sustain accommodation, to anticipate the needs of others, to stop short of satiety, to leave a little room no matter how great our hunger or desire.

Save room for something yet to come; save room for others; save room for the unexpected; save room for another foreign language; save room for a differing opinion; save room for doubt; save room for play; save room for solitude; save room for love beyond the ones who love you.

Finally, notwithstanding my theme of conservation and rescue — notwithstanding my concern for the sustainability of time, ink, face, space, and room — there's something I think you should expressly not save. This is something I know all of you already possess in great measure. Here I lean on Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay, Compensation: "Beware of too much good staying in your hand."(10)

By which Emerson means: give generously of your good hearts; give generously of your good ideas; give generously of your good nature.

Notes
(1)   Walter S. Broecker and Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat — and How to Counter It (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).
(2)   Jaime Lerner, "Foreward," Molly O’Meara Sheehan, et al., State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), xx–xxii.
(3)   Paul Virilio, "Gray Ecology," in Anywhere, ed. D. Davidson (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 189.
(4)   Richard Rorty, "Persuasion is a Good Thing," in Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. E. Mendieta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 84–85.
(5)   Kelly Hill, Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America [Research Division Report #46] (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004).
(6)   Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2001), 25, 27.
(7)   Billy Collins, "Books," in Sailing Alone Across the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001), 12–13.
(8)   Oxford American Dictionary [Mac OS X version 10.4.10], s.v. "face."
(9)   Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "save."
(10)   R.W. Emerson, Compensation (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1908?), 23.

Copyright Daniel S. Friedman 2008