Princeton University has shared news of the passing of beloved longtime School of Architecture faculty member Anthony Vidler yesterday, October 20th, after a short battle with illness. He was 82.
Vidler was known throughout academia as a formative mentor and thought leader who shaped the development of architecture from within the apparatus of higher education, inspiring thousands of students into both teaching and professional practice during his over 50-year career.
Born in England, Vidler studied at the University of Cambridge and Delft University of Technology before coming to the United States to teach as Princeton's William R. Kenan Jr. Chair of Architecture. It was there, in 1965, that he became the SoA’s first-ever History and Theory Ph.D. program director, steering it for a period of 30 years before he departed to serve as the Dean of Cornell University's College of Art, Architecture and Planning. He would later go on to be appointed Dean of The Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in 2002, where he taught before returning to Princeton as a Visiting Professor in 2014.
"Tony transformed the discipline of architecture during his time at Princeton," Princeton's Dean, Mónica Ponce de León, said in an online announcement. "He was an integral figure in the history of the school. His legacy is present today and will continue for decades to come. We were fortunate that he had returned to teaching at Princeton and that new generations of SoA graduates and undergraduates students got to know him. This is a huge loss to the field of architecture, the world of ideas, and for our school."
"Tony Vidler is in the DNA of Princeton. Tony was always a remarkable colleague and mentor. He arrived to teach in the school of architecture in 1965 at the age of 24, soon followed by Kenneth Frampton and Alan Colquhoun. Like the British invasion in pop music, it was a revolution. Architectural history became cool and Princeton the place to be," his colleague Beatriz Colomina remembered finally.
Vidler's 2013 lecture 'Toward an Other Architecture' at California College of the Arts can be viewed below.
1 Comment
This is really too bad. I liked Tony; his mischievousness, his wit, and his great contributions to critical architectural thought. I first met him at a gin-infused gathering at Bob Stearn's silver-walled New Haven apartment in about 2004 or so at an after-conference gathering I was invited to with a then-girlfriend who had gone to Yale. As one might imagine, it was a gathering of a veritable whose-who in the room. Tony was taking surreptitious photographs of the people in attendance at the party with a small, handheld digital camera from under his black trench coat, and when I caught him he giggled like a 10-year-old and grinned at me, saying "Shhhhh, don't say anything!" We chatted happily for a while before someone else took him away to meet someone and then he was gone thereafter. For me, it was the highlight of the night. That moment, in that night, still makes me smile every time I think about it, which is about every couple of months or so.
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