Lance Jay Brown, FAIA is the current President of Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization, former AIA New York President, founding co-chair of Design for Risk + Reconstruction Committee, + the 2007 recipient of the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education for his years as a professor at the City College of New York.
Location: Manhattan, New York - Coffee Shop
1. Beverage of choice?
Vodka, straight. Preferably Belvedere.
2. What are you best known for?
My voice.
3. How did we meet?
Seminar, in your Thesis year at City College. It’s a course I have been teaching since 1984 + I taught it to you in 2010. Your project was on the history of architecture in Birmingham.
4. How did you get here?
My people come from the desert, but today I walked here from West 22 Street.
5. What are you compensated to do (job)?
To be an architect + to educate.
6. What do you like to do?
Currently, I like to use a chainsaw + I’m getting the hang of it.
7. Can you suggest a book?
Meeting with Remarkable Men. One Man Caravan is also a wonderful chronical of self; it was given to me by a student, Jason Lang.
8. What is the best lesson you have taught someone?
Think positively.
9. Where do you go to find inspiration?
In books. In Mongolia as well, because nothing is everything there.
10. Favorite city and why?
New York City is the best city in the world. It is the most creative + enamored, but it is not the most beautiful. The beauty is in the ugliness.
11. What advice would you give to future generations?
Take care.
12. What would you tell your younger self?
Don’t worry.
13. Who mentored you and what did they teach you?
I would have liked one. I did not have a mentor per se, but I had a great facilitator. When I was at the Cooper Union, I had a professor for mechanical engineering who wrote a recommendation letter for the Fulbright Grant on my behalf. It allowed me to go to Paris after Harvard. When I came back, that professor was the Head of Princeton’s Architecture school. He later became the founding Dean at the City College. Bernard P. Spring was directly involved in many of the opportunities I got in the 1960s + 1970s.
14. Message in a show or film that resonated with you. What was the film, what was the message?
Cold Mountain, when Renee Zellweger’s character says, “If you need me, here I am”.
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