School History

(3) After becoming President of ACSA, Goldsmith went to the University of Texas to head up the architecture program in 1928. (4) After Goldsmith left Kansas, Joseph Kellogg, educated at Cornell and with professional experience in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, became Chair of Architecture. By then, and throughout the 1930s, KU, along with Cornell, Princeton, Yale and Southern California, began to move away from the Beaux Arts method of teaching design with its emphasis on juried competitions in New York and historical styles promulgated by Paris. Kellogg leaned more toward the practices of the so-called Chicago School of thought, influenced by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, owing to his contact with architecture faculty members George Beal and Vernor Smith, Wright came to KU to lecture in January, 1935. The Wright connection persisted at KU for over half of a century through Curtis Besinger, a 1930s graduate who went to Taliesin as an apprentice in 1939 and worked for Wright until the completion of the drawings for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1955. Professor Besinger taught at KU from 1955 until his retirement in 1984. Prior to his death in 2000, Oxford University Press published his memoirs, Working with Mr. Wright. (5)
In the decade after World War II, the Architecture Program under George Beal struggled to adapt to considerable growth and expansion within the School of Engineering. To cope, many new faculty came from the ranks of recent alumni of the Program; but in 1962, Eugene George became Chair of Architecture. George came from the University of Texas where he had once been taught by Goldwin Goldsmith and from Harvard where he had worked under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Under George, KU continued its orientation away from the Beaux Arts tradition and reinforced its intellectual connection to east coast schools such as Harvard and Cornell, to which Texas faculty were tied through the theoretical writings of Colin Rowe at Cornell. By the mid-1960s, most of the new faculty members in architecture at KU were coming from Austin.
In 1967, following an accreditation visit, the National Architecture Accrediting Board (NAAB) recommended that the conditions were right for the Architecture Program at KU to become an autonomous school of the University, with its own quarters, own library, and an administration directly responsible to the University administration and separate from the School of Engineering. In 1968, Charles Kahn, a Professor of Architecture at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and an M.I.T. graduate, became the first Dean of the new School of Architecture and Urban Design.
During Kahn’s tenure at Kansas the new school grew significantly in numbers of both students and faculty. Under his leadership, the modernist, Bauhaus-based and cosmopolitan orientation of the program expanded, with the additional emphases on social concerns and international relations. Kahn brought to KU the rationalism and scientific attitudes of M.I.T. coupled with the strong Bauhaus-based design orientation of North Carolina State that was derived from that school’s connection to the presence of ex-Bauhaus faculty members such as Josef Albers at nearby Black Mountain College. In addition, Kahn’s own social activism of the late 1960s influenced his attitude towards the curriculum. To Kahn, architectural design was a problem-solving activity that relied
upon a deep understanding of human nature and social institutions, a movement that was gaining currency in a number of British schools of architecture. (6) In his recruiting of new faculty, Kahn sought young architects who represented these concerns.

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