Tribute by Peter Hourihan (MArch ’71)

Reflecting on John’s passing brings me right back to Bailey and Winspear Ave in the fall of 1969, the school’s first home for a handful of “rebels with a cause”.

I can see walls covered with flow charts, process diagrams,and research questions.

I can hear John advocating for more investigation, better analysis, more options and more assessment of options with both a passionate advocacy and of course a critical challenge.

While at the time there was a belief that architecture was a patient search, with John, the process would be both patient and urgent. But more than often he required urgent results and change.

That urgency generated a missionary zeal to create new type of learning and a new type of design practice. It drove us then, it drives us now.

With John’s support, advocacy and leadership a few of us from the initial graduating class took the challenge of creating a new type of design practice.

We launched Building Science Inc and similar to BOSTI we created a teach/learn organization engaged with the school.

That decision set the structure for our profession practice life.

Hopefully John would have said that we too were “rebels with a cause”

Peter Hourihan, a retired principal of CannonDesign whose own career was invested in design research, saw Eberhard’s need to know “why” at the heart of his quest for evidence as the basis for design. He was one of the first students to join Eberhard's radical experiment in design education in the late 1960s.