Architectural school at the University of Cincinnati was the beginning of a roller coaster ride that is still going on today. I paid my way through school partially by painting. I had a gallery of my own in Louisville, Kentucky and was selling paintings off the easel before they were even finished. My wife Susan ran the gallery while I was in school sessions. She was an artist as well and we both made money. Opposite is one of my watercolors of Chartres Cathedral in France.
Susan and I went to London right after we got married. The architectural school at UC had a co-op program where you could work three months and go to school three months thereby enabling students to pay their own way through school. This is the only way I could have gone. The school gave me their only European connection at the time – a job with an architectural firm in London called Lancaster and Lodge. The job was so boring that I quit after two weeks and bought a motorcycle.
I put Susan on the back and we headed for Africa. The bike broke down in Southern Italy and we spent the rest of the time on Elba, the island on which Napoleon was exiled. Needless to say, I got kicked out of school for disrespectfully pissing off the school’s only connection in Europe for student jobs. My painting and my writings ( I kept a journal of my thoughts expressing why this trek was more educational than working at the boring, dead architectural firm) somehow got me back in school.
I went on the next year to get published for the first time in Architectural Record Magazine while still in school. By this time I knew that I did not want to be an architect like the architects I had seen on my work session jobs. I almost went into art.
