Rice names architecture dean

Princeton’s Sarah Whiting to take helm in January

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Sarah Whiting, a member of the Princeton University School of Architecture faculty and an expert in urban and architectural theory, has been named dean of the Rice School of Architecture.

Whiting will take the helm Jan. 1 from John Casbarian, the school’s longtime associate dean who is serving as dean until Dec. 31. Lars Lerup stepped down as dean earlier this year after 16 years and will return to Rice in 2010 as a professor.

	SARAH WHITING

“Sarah Whiting’s strengths as a teacher, author and architect are clear, and she brings abundant energy and intellect to Rice,” President David Leebron said. “Her aspirations for the School of Architecture align perfectly with the goals we set for Rice in the Vision for the Second Century, in particular our commitment to broaden and deepen our interaction with our home city of Houston. Under Sarah’s leadership, we expect our already acclaimed school to be at the forefront of innovation in architecture education and enterprise.”

Whiting, a native of Evanston, Ill., comes to Rice with extensive experience. Before joining Princeton in 2005, she was at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design for six years. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Kentucky, the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Florida.

Whiting earned her Bachelor of Arts at Yale, a Master of Architecture at Princeton and her Ph.D. in the history, theory and criticism of art, architecture and urban form at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a principal of WW Architecture, a firm she co-founded with her husband, Ron Witte, she is currently working on projects for the drama division of the Juilliard School in New York and the Golden House, a private residence in Princeton, N.J. Before forming WW, she worked with Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where she was a designer on a number of architectural, urban and writing projects, including the master planning of Euralille, a business center in Lille, France, that opened in 1994.

Perhaps best known for her criticism, Whiting has published dozens of articles on urban and architectural theory. In addition to editing several journals, she has edited books on Ignasi de Solà-Morales and James Carpenter and is the series editor of “Point,” a new architectural book series to be published by Princeton University Press beginning next spring. She is the author of the forthcoming book, “Superblock City.”

“I feel the variety of her experiences is a real asset,” said Rice Provost Eugene Levy. “She’s been on the faculty of a diverse set of institutions, which has fostered a broad set of perceptions and openness to thinking about the challenges of the discipline and the challenges of leadership that will be extremely valuable.”

Whiting is no stranger to the Rice School of Architecture. She has served on end-of-term project reviews many times over the last decade. She has also lectured at the school several times, most recently at the Paul A. Kennon Memorial Symposium last spring.

“Leading the Rice School of Architecture is a dream job,” Whiting said. “Because it is small, everyone — faculty and students alike — is engaged. The dean is not a distanced administrator like at big architecture schools, but is right in there focusing the school’s ambition.”

“I look forward with great anticipation to Sarah’s arrival and to her leadership in taking the school to the next level of excellence,” Casbarian said. “She has a distinguished record of achievement in the profession and in the history and theory of architecture.  And, based on my initial conversations with her, she has a very compelling vision for the future of the school.”

That her views coincide so well with Rice’s Vision for the Second Century is “a happy coincidence,” Whiting said.  “Two of the school’s strongest attributes are its historic commitment to innovative practice and its focus on the contemporary city.

“Cities like Houston, in particular, have often been ignored in urban studies, even though they are the paradigmatic cities of the 21st century. These strengths form a terrific base for moving the school forward.  Architecture can — has to — invigorate the public realm. This is a two-pronged project: It is an intellectual project for academia and an immediate project for practice.”

Whiting cited Austrian architect Hans Hollein, who famously proclaimed, “All is Architecture.”

“Forty years later, this proclamation borders on the achingly obvious: To say that architecture is a generalist, horizontal discipline is a given,” she said.  “The real question is what to do with that given, particularly as that ‘all’ only grows exponentially by the heartbeat.

“In my teaching, writing and practice, I’m committed to an architecture that situates this ‘all’ with respect to a single armature: Architecture’s necessary relation to a collective subject — the public.”

Whiting called architecture “a public form of culture.”

Architecture’s combination of form and space affects the public by forming an aesthetic realm, but it also fosters new experiences, relationships, economies and possibilities,” she said.

More broadly, Whiting brings a strong commitment to the humanities, to emerging developments in science and technology and to the overlap between these realms that architecture is uniquely poised to exploit.

Witte will also join the architecture faculty. Whiting and Witte met as graduate students at Princeton and have served together on the faculties at Harvard and Princeton. They plan to move WW Architecture to Houston.

Whiting takes over a school that has earned a sterling reputation in recent years. The School of Architecture was ranked No. 8 in the nation by the Design Futures Council in January, and has been among the top 10 programs for the last decade. The school’s graduate program has consistently been among the country’s top 20.

Whiting did not fail to notice that Rice University was named this week as the Princeton Review’s No. 1 school for “best quality of life” and earlier this month as one of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For.”

“Both were absolute affirmations of what I sensed when I came to campus,” she said. “Everything felt just right — poised for new possibilities. I can’t wait to take on those new horizons come January.”