letters from Professor Richard Schoenwald

…taught a class called “Society and the Arts” which I took during my third year of undergraduate architecture studies at Carnegie Mellon University – he would make a point of personally visiting the shows and installations of his students – and then surprise each with a typed letter of detailed, thoughtful, encouraging responses to the work (I particularly remember this installation with plants that I had created in the central hall of the College of Fine Arts which he was especially enthusiastic about) – and today I am sorting and storing various artifacts including all of my old letters – especially numerous from my days living in Italy pre-email when all correspondence was hand-written on paper – and I’m coming across many letters from Professor Schoenwald, including one that I received just days before his death in 1995 – and another particularly thoughtful and encouraging letter dated December 3rd, 1992, just months after my graduation, in which he responds to to an apparent crisis of direction I was experiencing at the time:

“I hope the disorientation will lessen. You live in a world with so many choices, and also the feeling that one must have, not just a vocation, but a perfect vocation. I remember all too well my own attacks of thinking I wanted to go to med school, once when I was out and teaching and married with a baby. The attacks passed, not without some regrets from time to time in later years, and now, after such a long while, I can finally think to myself, I am able to do what my teachers did for me, which is what I always wanted to – I come into class and I open things up. It’s like a dream, but now without the if’s, and’s, but’s.”

(classmate Eric Heiman also recorded his Schoenwald memories here a few years ago)