Corps values: in the Peace Corps, architects learn to think globally and design locally - practice

Residential Architect, August, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

architect Jack Tucker owes his life's direction to the call of adventure and the hand of fate. As a student at the University of Arkansas in the early 1960s, he was on a date with a girl who mentioned that the Peace Corps exams were being held the next day. Interested in the prospect of travel, he agreed to meet her at the student union in the morning. "We partied heavily that night," recalls Tucker, FAIA, Jack R. Tucker & Associates Architects, Memphis, Tenn. "I wasn't feeling good the next day, and she didn't show up."

He took the exams anyway, one thing led to another, and soon he was on a plane to Tunisia. "You stumble onto things," Tucker says. "But the experience with another culture and another language just expanded my horizons as to what the history of architecture was about."

Such serendipitous encounters seem commonplace in the Peace Corps, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. It is a 42-year-old fraternity of sorts, a thriving subculture with different tribes and factions that frequently sparks lifelong relationships: Architects Robert Hull, FAIA, and David Miller, FAIA, volunteers in Afghanistan and Brazil, respectively, went on to co-found the Miller/Hull Partnership in Seattle. Stanley Hallet, FAIA, met his American wife in Tunisia, and over the years has practiced architecture in Washington, D.C., with fellow Peace Corps volunteer Roger K. Lewis, FAIA. St. Joseph, Mich., architect John Allegretti, AIA, married a Samoan woman whom he met while working there in the early '70s. And the University of Arkansas coed who slept in? She and Tucker are still friends.

Whether they were in North Africa or the South Seas, architects say Peace Corps work has changed their lives. Although the program still recruits architects, the largest group participated in the 1960s and '70s, when newly independent countries were undergoing ambitious development programs and requesting formal architectural services. Those energetic interns arrived with their idealism and new degrees, and departed two years later with values and skills that have stuck with them throughout their careers.

fundamental things

Part of the thrill of being in a foreign culture is that daily routines, identities, and expectations are left behind. There's a sense of power that comes from being in a totally unfamiliar setting, where many of the things that define you no longer apply, and the possibilities seem endless.

That realization was both humbling and liberating for architect Steve Lloyd, Chester, Conn., when he arrived in Tunisia in 1972. "I had done well in college and was proud of my credentials," he says. "But to say anything about America in the context I was living in meant nothing to the local inhabitants. It didn't matter what number I graduated or whether I went to an Ivy League college-the only American name they recognized was a soccer star's."

Misplaced altruism fell by the wayside, too. Stanley Hallet thought he would save Tunisia by introducing the "miracle joint" he invented for his MIT thesis on housing in developing countries. When he arrived, though, he discovered that Tunisians already knew how to put buildings together, using stone and brick to make fabulous vaults. And so he ended up working for the bureau of tourism, designing hotels for the rich, instead of housing for the poor. "They convinced me that these hotels would provide indirectly many more housing units than my miracle joint would ever accomplish," he says. "I-felt very guilty."

Many architects gained a real appreciation for economy. David Miller says that both he, in Brazil, and Hull, in Afghanistan, learned to solve problems with on-hand resources. They used natural systems for heating and ventilation, and mud bricks for building. "That philosophy of being very efficient about means is something that underpins the work of Miller/Hull today," he says.

John Allegretti, too, found that scarcity inspires practical solutions. In Samoa, where the most technical building component was a jalousie window, everything was used well, and used again. Coconut fibers served a dozen different purposes. Nails were unavailable, so the woven fibers were used for lashing posts and beams--simple fasteners that nevertheless could withstand 150-mile-an-hour winds.

quick studies

In 1964, 23-year-old Roger Lewis arrived in Nabeul, a small town in Tunisia that hadn't seen an architect in 10 years. After the country gained independence from France in 1956, the French and Italian architects who'd been working there returned to Europe. "As soon as I arrived, government officials started walking in the door asking for buildings to be designed," he says. "I could hardly keep up with the work." With his shaky grasp of French and Arabic, Lewis began working on public buildings--a hotel on a beach, municipal auditoriums, a movie theater, and shopping complexes. He was given a desk and a drafting board, but several months went by before he had a lamp. Tracing paper was in short supply, and getting a print made was a challenge.