Haldenby’s ‘next big thing’
Sure, he has stepped down as director of the School of Architecture, but that just opens time for a myriad of other projects
WHEN HE WAS A CHILD, Rick Haldenby would take to the backyard of his Toronto house and build. The neighbours didn’t like the six-year-old boy’s buildings, and his architect father would be pressured to demolish the “ugly” constructions while his son was out with the rest of the family. That didn’t faze Haldenby, whose positive outlook continues to characterize his life. His optimism certainly marked his productive and imaginative 26-year tenure as director of the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture.
“I always felt that one’s disposition is the most important aspect of one’s life,” he says.
“My mother taught me that you’ve got a choice – look on the positive and be ambitious and aspire, or think that things are stacking up against you,” he says. “I’ve always felt I could do things.” On Dec. 31, Haldenby, 62, stepped down as director of UW’s School of Architecture. Ila Berman, director of architecture at the California College of the Arts, was appointed the new director.
“I wasn’t worn out or short of ideas,” Haldenby says. “It’s time for someone new, and we got one of the most distinguished architecture academics in North America.” Last November, more than 100 people fêted him at a dinner party at the School of Architecture, part of which was transformed into a Roman piazza, and students and colleagues wrote a fat book of essays praising his influence.
Students were especially eloquent when they spoke of the effect that the four-month Rome program – which he created – had on them.
One essay playfully compared the School of Architecture to Hogwarts School of Wizardry, and Haldenby to wise headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
The UW school “is, confusingly, not in Waterloo,” undergraduate student Samuel Ganton writes. “It vanished from the university campus and reappeared in a completely new city 10 years ago. One might reasonably argue that Rick Haldenby ‘magicked’ the new school into being.
“Rick uses similar skills in his teaching,” Ganton says. “He is a wizard in service of the students, painting the vision of Rome on our minds to keep us moving, keep us going, until we reach the end.”
On a sunny January weekday, Haldenby is imagining how his new office at the School of Architecture will look once his meeting table is moved in and piles of books are off the floor.
He’s wondering what’s inside the boxes in the hallway, some of which have followed him around since he began teaching in 1976. He was 25 years old and had graduated from UW’s architecture program only a year earlier.
It has been 10 years since Haldenby launched and led the relocation of the School of Architecture from the Waterloo campus to the renovated Riverside Silk Mills building that sits above the Grand River in the Galt area of Cambridge.
The airy, light-filled building has won multiple design awards and spurred a transformation of downtown Galt. Haldenby considers it the highlight of his service to the university and community.
It was a pivotal moment when architecture faculty members, meeting temporarily in the old mill while they were discussing a design for a “perfect” new building, turned their gaze on the mill.
“It was so obvious for him that this was the right solution,” says architecture professor Robert Jan van Pelt.
Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig recalls: “He convinced me that if the city was to put in $7.5 million and they could raise the rest of the funds, that it would have a great impact on the downtown of Cambridge and history has proven that.
“When they came down here, he integrated the school right into the community fabric >>
>> and he integrated a number of his profs and himself into the different activities that were taking place down here,” Craig says.
“He’s a brilliant man and he’s very engaging.”
Haldenby is an optimist, a storyteller, a charismatic seeker of ideas, an imaginative, get-it-done guy, the kind of person who, though inevitably busy with one project or another, gives his total attention to your conversation.
“When you are with Rick, you are it. There is no one else in the world,” van Pelt says.
He is “legendary” in many ways, including his support of faculty members, says van Pelt, who is known internationally for his research into issues surrounding the architecture of the Holocaust.
“Not only Haldenby, the whole school has been consistently supportive of my work, and I realize that is kind of a rare environment.”
Quite simply, Haldenby is a positive person to be around.
“He emanates an incredible amount of joy,” van Pelt says. “I think there’s an incredible love for life in this man and . . . I think everyone is picked up by that.”
He speaks fluent Italian, and he’s known for his cheery “Ciao” greeting.
“It is a nice way to be welcomed, and it’s a very nice way over 25 years to be welcomed day after day like that,” van Pelt says.
Most people would sit back, enjoy a break and ponder a world trip after stepping down from the demanding directorship of an architectural school that produces the best graduates in the country, van Pelt says.
“I certainly would take a holiday, but obviously that is not the way he deals with change,” van Pelt says, laughing. “He throws himself into more change.”
Haldenby is immersed in “the next big thing” – van Pelt’s expression for his friend’s penchant for taking on ambitious projects.
“I’m able, and not at all interested in giving that up,” Haldenby says. “I’m going to be around for awhile.”
Haldenby has a mountain of accomplishments to his credit so far. And now he has a to-do list that’s almost as big.
He’s rolling up his sleeves to attack a ton of other projects – some of which you’ll see this summer in Waterloo Region.
As associate professor, Haldenby is continuing to teach courses in Cambridge and also in Rome at the prize-winning program for fourth-year architecture students that he started in 1979.
The students spend a term in the Waterloo Studio, located in a 17-century building in the Trastevere district of Rome. The program is considered a rite of passage, a “pilgrimage” by many students and earned Haldenby a UW Distinguished Teacher Award.
Now, he is working on a plan to expand UW’s presence in Rome so students in arts, math and environmental studies have the same opportunity to study there.
In addition, he started the ball rolling on an ambitious proposal to add a new program in Integrated Design, rooted in digital technology, which would double the size of the School of Architecture in 2016.
He wants to publish archeological material related to excavations he did in Carthage, and a book about the “poetics of the Roman villa” in architecture.
He’ll continue to advocate for the important role of design in middle-sized cities in Canada.
These days, Haldenby and Esther Shipman, curator of architecture and design at Cambridge Galleries, and other partners are working feverishly on a program of exhibits that will raise the profile of architecture and design locally.
The exhibits will celebrate everything from the heritage of industrial buildings in Waterloo Region to the history of architecture and fashion.
It will look at the re-use of industrial buildings and how high-quality industrial architecture inspires contemporary architecture. It will focus on the radical rebuilding of Waterloo Region after the Second World War.
And it will shine a light on award-winning buildings in the region, six of which have won Governor General’s Medals, the highest architectural honour. Two other buildings have won national and international awards. Waterloo Region’s medal count
places it fourth behind Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, he says. The school’s 10th anniversary and the construction of light rail transit – the theme of another exhibit – are the impetus for the shows, he says. “What’s going to change? What are the challenges? “I hope any citizen in Waterloo Region visits one or more of these shows and thinks about how important the built environment is and how they want it to improve and develop over the next decade,” Haldenby says. “We have to take stock.
“It should make this place the envy of the nation in terms of quality of the environment we live in.” He admits some people are wondering how he’s going to pull off the multiple exhibits that will engage us in a discussion about architecture, light rail transit and our community’s future. Just watch him. “I think I’m going to be happy because I’m going to keep doing things, and things that at first seem impossible,” he says. Haldenby hasn’t accomplished his successes without challenge. Some people told him that the School of Architecture was never going to locate in Cambridge. In fact, the school’s success has sparked other communities, with Haldenby’s help, to pursue similar university-city partnerships in core areas.
Sudbury’s Laurentian University is locating the first new school of architecture in Canada in more than 40 years in the city’s downtown. The University of Saskatchewan is looking at an architecture school in a former industrial building in Saskatoon’s core, he says. And Brock University in St. Catharines is relocating its faculty of fine and performing arts in a 19th-century textile manufacturing building. Some people couldn’t believe he’d get UW to Rome. “I just kept at it,” he says, adding he had huge student support. To date, about 2,000 UW architecture students have studied and gained experience in Rome. The fourth-year class has grown to about 80 students. >>
>> In Rome, Haldenby’s marathon lecture at the Forum is legendary.
He’ll just be getting warmed up when tourists, fascinated by his enthusiasm and knowledge, join the gaggle of architecture students trying to keep up with him.
“The on-site lecture starts with a verbal history of Rome from the geological processes that formed the seven hills to the ham-fisted insertion of the Via dei Fori Imperiali by Mussolini,” says masters architecture graduate Sean Irwin in his tribute.
He covers thousands of years in a morning, Irwin says.
“Once Haldenby starts talking he doesn’t stop until he’s finished. No breaks for water and no hesitations; it just pours out of him.
“The afternoon is a slow tour beginning at the Basilica Julia and ending at the Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius. Haldenby knows the name, history and significance of every podium, column and pediment in the Forum.”
In 2002, Mayor Craig, a history buff, visited the Forum in Rome with Haldenby and 20 students.
“As we went through the Forum . . . the first thing they said to me was: ‘There’s a sunshine law.’ I said, ‘What does that mean?’
“Well, at the end of the day, the staff will come over and tell Rick he has to leave because they’re closing it down.’”
True to form, Haldenby’s group swelled with tourists that day and at 7:30 p.m., he was told it was closing time.
“He’s a fascinating, knowledgeable individual,” Craig says.
The tour has a profound effect on students, many of whom chose UW’s School of Architecture because of the Rome experience, as well as its co-op education.
“The way I teach, I’m not interested in just getting names and dates across,” Haldenby says. “I’m interested in ideas and personal connections. . . . The last thing I want to do is make people memorize. I want to feel
and imagine with them.”
Rome is Haldenby’s second home. He fell in love with Rome and he fell in love in Rome.
He met his wife, Rosemary Aicher, a fine arts and anthropology graduate of the University of Toronto, at an archeological dig in the southern province of Basilicata. She was the artist on the project; he was the architect surveying the property.
They married in 1985 in an ancient church in Rome and lived in Rome while Haldenby taught at UW’s architecture program.
Their son, Adrian, was baptized in the Pantheon. “At the time, there had been no baptisms for 160 years in the Pantheon,” Haldenby says.
And their younger son, Julian, was baptized in Constantine’s Baptistery beside the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
Haldenby became fascinated with Roman archeology when he was a student.
A remarkable UW professor, Larry
Cummings, “awakened an understanding of the imaginative power of history that led me to embark on a personal study of Mediterranean architecture and cities,” Haldenby says. From January 1975 to August,1976, he took a bicycle trip from Greece to England, visiting hundreds of sites along the way. “I consider it my graduate school,” he says. In 1977, he made a second bicycle trip from one end of Italy to the other.
A year later, he returned to Italy again, this time to study Latin with papal Latinist Father Reginald Foster whom he’d first spotted at the Forum during that bike trip. “I was in the Roman Forum where I used to hang out and draw and think,” Haldenby recalls. “This monk would walk into the Forum with trainees and tour all day in Latin.
“I’d studied five years of Latin in high school, so I would follow him. I was entranced.” Haldenby didn’t discover Foster’s identity until later. After returning to Canada to teach at UW, he decided on a whim to write to the Vatican and ask if Foster taught any programs in Latin.
“I found Latin fundamental to the way we think and the way we use language,” he says.
He heard nothing until the following winter when he received a postcard in Foster’s tiny script which suggested he could come that summer. Haldenby spent an “amazing” summer in 1978 studying with the Vatican’s top Latinist.
He started the Rome Program in 1979 when he was only 28 years old.
“Rome is a constant inspiration because you can never reach the end of it,” Haldenby says. “I love the landscape. I love the diversity of the city.”
Whenever he arrives in Italy, “the first thing I do is go to the Pantheon,” Haldenby says. “I feel grounded and infinite.” It helps prepare him for the next big thing. “When I walk out the door, I have a clear head.”