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Dean Balfour’s address to the alumni at a reception in the Piedmont Driving Club on August 15, 2008 [Dean Balfour was introduced by President Gary Schuster]

It is such an honor to be named the fourth dean of the College of Architecture. Especially in the one-hundredth year of architecture at Georgia Tech. Let me begin with a snapshot of the history – I have reason for this. Quoting from the website:

The Georgia School of Technology, as it was known from its founding in 1885, formally began teaching architecture in 1908 when the school appointed Preston A. Hopkins of Boston to teach an entering class of twenty students and to organize a curriculum for the study of architecture.

In 1909, Francis P. Smith (B.S. University of Pennsylvania, 1907) became the first department head [a very young man]. And Georgia Tech granted its first architecture degree, the Bachelor of Science in Architecture, in 1911.  This event placed Georgia Tech among the earliest public universities in the United States to offer an architecture degree.

After heading the school, Francis Palmer Smith went on to establish a distinguished architectural practice which was carried on by his son Henry, and I am pleased to say that Henry Smith is with us in the room tonight - Henry Smith.

I am further pleased that over the past few years, Henry has agreed to donate his father’s papers to the Heffernan Design Archive at Georgia Tech –  and we thank Henry for this gift.

This will be added to an archive, which will soon move from the Heffernan House to a secure new space in the Price Gilbert Library at Georgia Tech; an archive waiting for the papers of the distinguished graduates of school and college.

Our historian Robert Craig has worked closely with Henry to bring the papers to Georgia Tech and has just completed a book on Francis Palmer Smith soon to be published by the University of Georgia Press.

After Francis Palmer Smith, John L. Skinner (M Arch, Harvard, 1921) in 1922 led the department until Harold Bush-Brown (M Arch, Harvard, 1915) became director in 1925.  Bush-Brown served as director for an astonishing 31 years. On his retiring Paul M. Heffernan (M Arch, Harvard, 1935) became the director in 1956. ‘P.M.,’ as he was affectionately known, led the school until it became a college in 1974.

William Fash, the first dean of the college was followed by Thomas P. Galloway, followed by Douglas Allen and now by me.

I would like to take a minute to thank Douglas both for the extraordinary effort he put into sustaining the school in the months following the untimely death of Dean Galloway – months fraught with unexpected difficulty. I must also thank him for leading the effort to secure the future of and expand the archives and most significantly for encouraging me to consider returning to a school for which I have such fond thoughts and memories.

Moving is difficult.

In recent weeks I have spent time around and in the Heffernan House – I have sensed P.M.'s presence. And I can feel the day that Frank Lloyd Wright sat in the living room with students lined up outside along Fifth Street waiting to talk with the god.

John Portman remembers asking, ‘what does it take to be a great architect, Mr. Wright,’ to which Mr. Wright answered, ‘read Emerson.’ He said the same to everyone.

Bush-Brown and Heffernan were very good architects – their robust, non ideological position on modernism laid the basis for a powerful architectural culture created in Georgia Tech and shaped by Atlanta, that has influenced practice worldwide. And they must be an example for any holding this position.

Heffernan’s School of Architecture from 1953 still retains an exceptional formal elegance and when restored will be constant reminder to our students of the poetic subtlety of modernism. The Hinman Building designed by Bush-Brown, Gailey, and Heffernan in 1938 was one of the earliest modern buildings in Georgia. It is a massive workshop, a vast superb space that, beginning this year, will redesigned to accommodate the programs from the College of Architecture. I am proud to be following in their imagination.

The college today:  Five programs by discipline – music technology, city & regional planning, industrial design, building construction, and architecture; and a distinct doctoral program that spans disciplines. They are all good programs with distinguished graduates nationally and internationally and they all could be better. It is my task to help make happen. To provide leadership and, where appropriate, vision, such that this college advances in reputation and influence in all fields.

I will do this by gaining the most thorough understanding of the present state of the college – by sitting in classrooms and studios, meeting with faculty and students thus gaining a sense of the ambition and visions of the community. But I will also measure all I see in relation to the stated vision of Georgia Tech that all colleges in their own way help define the technological research university of the twenty-first century and educate the leaders of a technologically driven world – a vision I strongly support.

Within this year I will form an academic plan, a business plan, a lobbying plan and a philanthropic plan aimed at making all aspects of this college as strong and ambitious as possible.

And then I will enlist the help of others in making the plan a reality.

Your ideas and help have never been more needed or appreciated – I look forward to enlisting all present.

Back to the one-hundredth:  Problems with the State budget will not stop us from celebrating the one-hundredth. There will be an exhibition in three phases of student work from every decade. A year long series of lectures and discussion with distinguished alumni will begin with John Portman (Arch 1950) on August 27 – in my judgment a figure of world significance. Still in planning will be an illustrated history of the school. And on April 25, 2009, there will a grand celebration party, which I hope will bring graduates back to the campus from many decades.

In welcoming our alumni lecturers I confess that I intend to use the mysterious balcony outside of what was Heffernan’s office that had been empty for too long.

The history of the College on the web shows two views of the Atlanta skyline – one as shaped as it is today by the graduates of Georgia Tech and the other without their presence.  There is no Atlanta without Georgia Tech.

This celebration and the archive are very important not only to the College and to the architecture, design and planning, and construction community, but to Atlanta, the State, and indeed the entire Southeastern region.  The transformation of the post-Civil War south from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and then to a powerhouse on the global stage of the service and distribution industries is due in no small part to the Georgia Institute of Technology, and this is no small reason to celebrate.