UTSA architect program grows to new heights
At the same time the American Institute of Architects is holding its national convention at the east end of downtown, new architects by the multiple busload are being produced at the west end.
“In the last five or six years we have been the fastest-growing architecture program in the country,” said Julius Gribou, dean of the UTSA College of Architecture. “That kind of growth is virtually impossible to cope with in most cases.”
UTSA began offering architecture courses in 1979, with a faculty of two — Richard Tangum and his first hire, Jon Thompson, still teach there. The program grew steadily over the next two decades, but its visibility and ambition were limited by its status as a concentration within the college of fine arts.
A university restructuring, intended to raise the stature of UTSA’s architecture and engineering programs, brought rapid change starting in 2000.
That year, the architecture program became the School of Architecture, a semi-autonomous division of the College of Fine Arts. Gribou came from Texas A&M to be the first dean.
Over the first two years of Gribou’s tenure, the school’s bachelor of science degree program in interior design and its master of architecture program received their provisional three-year accreditations, which have since been renewed for full six-year terms.
During the same period, the school moved from the Loop 1604 campus to the new downtown campus.
“The move downtown was the key to our ability to grow. It allowed us to engage the professional community and the community at large,” Gribou said.
The downtown location was crucial for two reasons.
First, even though tenured and tenure track positions have nearly doubled, the college still must rely heavily on part-time faculty, drawn from local professionals, to teach design studios. Nearly all the city’s major architecture firms, and many of the small ones, are located in or near downtown.
Second, the inner-city location put the college’s design studios in close proximity to a real-world laboratory for architecture and urban design problems.
The student count grew from the low 400s in 2001 to 670 in 2004, when the semi-autonomous school became a full-fledged college, one of the university’s major components. Last fall, the total reached 1,013 in all programs. About a fifth of those are interior design students, Gribou said.
The students are coming from farther afield than they did before.
“We used to get pretty much all San Antonio students who couldn’t go anywhere else,” Gribou said.
Today, students from Mexico, Laredo and the Lower Rio Grande Valley are a major presence, and students from Asia are not uncommon. Also conspicuous are “career-change” students, some of them in their 40s and 50s. One third-year student is a Vietnam War veteran.
Another benefit of the downtown location is convenient access to student internships, which often become full-time jobs. A visit to nearly nearly any architecture office in San Antonio, from sole practitioners to large shops, will turn up current or recently graduated UTSA students.
“For years we have hired student interns from UTSA and San Antonio College — mainly from UTSA,” said Davis Sprinkle, of Sprinkle-Robey Architects. Two of his firm’s full-time employees started out as interns, he said, and a third will join the office after graduation this month.
Has he been pleased with the results?
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely,” he said, with audible enthusiasm.
Braden Haley landed a job with O’Neill Conrad Oppelt Architects a month after his graduation from UTSA in 2002. He’s still working there.
Asked how well the architecture school prepared him for the real practice of architecture, Haley said, “They emphasize design and theory, and I was ready to go on that. In terms of design, they did a great job.”
He found himself lacking in knowledge of construction, materials and “how an office is run.”
But he added: “You’re going to learn construction and materials on the job. You only have one chance to learn the conceptual phase. The theory part and the conceptual — they’re what carry you.”
The college has put more stress on materials and construction in the past few years. A recent visit to the campus would have found students of Sue-Ann Pemberton building outdoor seating arrangements in a variety of materials, including adobe and rammed earth. This summer, Shantha Gunawardena plans to take 10 students to Houston to design and build a Buddhist meditation center.
The post-graduate program remains small, but it is growing. The program admitted 36 students last fall, and only 24 the previous year. But the undergraduate program, all of whose 240 available slots for entering students were filled last fall, is bursting at the seams.
So is the militantly undistinguished four-story building the college occupies — it was built in the 1980s as an incubator for high-tech businesses and was colonized by UTSA a few years ago.
Gribou wants to shrink the undergraduate program and expand the graduate program. He’s working on a joint proposal with the College of Business for a master’s degree in construction management, and with the College of Public Policy on a master of science in urban and regional planning.
He hopes that his legacy will include a new building, or at least a firm plan for one.
“It’ll take creativity and a public-private partnership. I’m working on it.”
