A Disaster For You And A Disaster For Us

Yale’s School of Architecture asked for womens’ stories. The truth of situations is usually odd and nuanced, and I tried to tell the truth here because it’s rarely as simple as labeling someone a ‘bad person’ and throwing them under the bus, or being a 100% feminist superhero:

I got married in 2003 when I was twenty-three. I had my son, Luca, when I was twenty-four. Very soon after that, I realized: 1. I needed to get divorced and 2. I needed a career, and, if that career was to be in architecture, I needed to get licensed. Yale was a path towards major life change and licensure.

I attended the open house for accepted students in what must have been the spring of 2007. I was still debating between attending the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture which would have been free and very practical (I have family near the school). But, having gone to UVA as an undergraduate, I was disturbed by the idea of living my life on repeat at a time when I craved major change.

In my mind, the biggest hurdle to attending Yale was childcare. I didn’t know what to do with my son, and every daycare facility in New Haven had a long waiting list. After some research, I concluded that the law school’s childcare facility would be the best choice for me. They too had no openings and a long waitlist, so I thought perhaps the dean of the architecture school, Bob Stern, could help me procure a spot. After all, the architecture school did not have its own child care facility but the law school did.

I sought out Bob, explained that I wanted to bring my toddler son to school with me, and asked if there was any way to obtain a spot on the law school daycare waitlist. In my seemingly endless naïveté, I saw him as a potentially helpful elderly administrator, not a feisty and iconoclastic ruler of an architectural empire.

I’ll never forget his response. He looked at me with absolute disdain and said, “Don’t come. It will be a disaster for you and a disaster for us.”

I left his office quickly — trying to hold myself together until I had some privacy to cry. But something decisive also clicked in me. I decided to attend and wrote my deposit check before leaving New Haven.

I’ve thought a lot about Bob’s words over the years, and, ironically, I bet there are few members of my class who admire and respect Bob quite like I do. I particularly respect that Bob largely says what he thinks, and openly acknowledges that having a successful architecture practice requires a myriad of skills and circumstances that have nothing to do with architecture. In providing this quote about Bob, I’m not attempting to diminish his legacy. I think a campus of politically correct speech — where biases exist but are carefully concealed — is much more harmful than Bob’s brand of tell-it-like-you-see-it bluntness and off-the-cuff sincere wisdom.

Bob always emphasized the need for money, marrying well, social connections, familial connections, et cetera in architectural success. There is a lot of truth in all of the Bob-isms, and the profession suffers grievously from hipster architects on their parents’ dole pretending that their success is a joyous coincidence and replicable by someone from Ohio with 150k of student loans.

Having idiotically married at age twenty-three with no consideration for anything practical, Bob’s cold-eyed assessments of the world rang true to me. I also felt that a side benefit of Yale would be that my future dream-self, a Yale educated architect with a successful practice and rock hard abdominal muscles, might have a better shot at remarrying and having a normal family than your run-of-the-mill schlubby single mother. Had I waltzed into Bob’s office and led with that stream of logic, he might have helped me get into the law school daycare!

Anyway, for me, the bottom line was that Bob’s words absolutely enraged me and filled me with the fuel I needed to rise to the occasion and do well in school. I felt a burning, visceral need to prove him wrong. “Don’t come. It will be a disaster for you and a disaster for us.” It was like he saw me for exactly the poor single-mother-loser-failure that I very much felt I was, and doing well in school was the vehicle by which I could rewrite the whole mess.

School itself was a hellish nightmare. I did not fit in. My peers were worried about their projects. My projects and papers were the least of my problems. I was mid-divorce watching what few assets I had plummet in value (my time at Yale coincided with the Great Recession). My son, who was born with a cleft lip, had ongoing medical procedures which I was not allowed to miss studio for (his dad very much supported me and carried a heavy load). I was intent on working out feverishly everyday because I would be damned if I actually looked like a mother. I had kitchen design side hustles to earn extra money chomping at my non-existent free time. Assignments due, money worries, frail attempts at dating . . . fires and humiliations were seemingly endless. I felt stripped of all dignity.

But, through it all, my obsession with proving Bob wrong propelled me forward with an intensity that I’m not sure I would ever have been able to find by myself. And that forward motion had the effect of turning me into someone I felt a little bit proud of. Ten years out, I feel tremendous gratitude. Bob spoke his truth. And I needed to hear it.

Carmel Greer, AIA, YSOA ‘10