Adèle Naudé Santos, dean of the school of Architecture and planning at MIT, set to receive 2009 Topaz Medallion for excellence in education
Flashback to the summer of 2000.
It was the height of the dot com boom in San Francisco. Our small office at Adele Santos' studio was enjoying a momentary flurry of work for a dot com start up eager to build a clustered campus of buildings at the edge of South San Francisco. We were busy and happy. From time to time I remember us lamenting the displacement of small local businesses for pioneering internet start ups eager to cash in on the promise of quick profits. Looking back, everything as we new it then, was a temporary bliss.
I sat alongside Berkeley classmates Alice Roche and Jake Watkins that breezy SOMA summer. Every morning I was greeted by Petey the talking parrot. That bird hated me. Basking in morning courtyard sun, days spun by with great memories alongside. It was a balanced experience of critical design debate and creative production fueled with homemade tamales wrapped in banana leaves. We were nothing short of a professional family and Adèle was at the center.
Every young architect deserves a great intern period where skills develop and confidence is fostered. The summer of 2000 did just that for us ( I feel confident in writing). Adèle let us go to do what we did best. We built models by hand and computer, drew wildly free by hand. Feedback was critical but we were ultimately supported in our academic perspectives. At the end of the summer we had compiled a convincing schematic proposal for a series of buildings destined to forever live on paper.
It was an experience I will never forget.
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