Mui Ho: Something to share with all my OWA friends by Mui Ho After teaching 33 years in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley since 1975, I have decided to say good-bye. I have been thinking about this for some time and hesitate to make the big leap. We are so tied in with our work and making changes is not easy. However, after I told the department in mid-July about my decision, I actually felt very good and surprisingly relieved. Looking back at these years with the Department, I have learned and have grown. Along the way, I have met wonderful colleagues and greater numbers of fantastic students. They all became significant architects in the community. When the Center for Research in the College of Environmental Design started the International Conference on the Study of Traditional Environment in the 1990s, it gave me a place to share my research work on the vernacular architecture of China with people interested in similar subjects. Our history courses are Euro-centric and the survey history lecture class covers only the Forbidden City in China. With the encouragement of the late Spiro Kostof, I organized this body of work into a seminar : Chinese Vernacular Architecture, and have been giving this seminar every three years. Since July, my workdays are pretty much the same except I allow myself to goof off for museum visits or taking long walks. I am still working on projects for Peizheng College in China and other smaller projects in the US and India, plus various pro-bono projects in the community. |
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Newsletter | Sep/Oct 2008