Most fresnans are familiar with the brain drain concept. It is a term referring to the most talented individuals draining away from our region because better opportunities and higher quality environments exist for them elsewhere. In the impact series we demonstrate that many of these individuals should not be mourned but celebrated for the impact they are having on the built environment around the world.

In this impact article we introduce you to professor Milton Curry. We first learned that Milton was a Fresno native during an interview with one of his students, Enoch Sears.

Milton has taught extensively at Cornell University for 15 years, and at Arizona State University and Harvard University. The coursework ranges from architecture to to the arts, urban design, and real estate. His full biography can be found on the Cornell website. Below is the Q&A that I had with Milton.

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KIEL: What was your experience like growing up in Fresno? Do you have any memories with strong ties to places here?

MILTON: I grew up in West Fresno during the late 1960’s to early 1980’s. I have fond memories of a city caught between a rural sensibility and the growing pains of a mid-sized American city trying to figure out how to manage growth. It was a politically active time, coming out of the mid-1960’s and the aftermath of 1968. Fresno, however, felt isolated from the rougher edges of the political situation, and somewhat distanced from in-the-streets protest. i wondered about this later while I was in graduate school and realized all that was going on outside of Fresno, in cities like Oakland, Chicago, and many other American cities.

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KIEL: Much of your academic work has a socio-ecomonics/spatial equity focus. How did this become an interest of yours?

MILTON: I realized in college that architecture has a unique role to play in making the social and political commitments to a democratic society physical – that is, to actualize common aspirations using design and aesthetics. Eventhough aesthetic intention doesn’t always translate to everyone, it establishes a dialogue, and the dialogue is what is vitally important. When affordable housing or a city hall physicalizes the aspirations for a customized living unit or a participatory and transparent hall of government, then i believe architecture has connected with its constituencies.

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KIEL: With Fresno’s concentration of poverty and other issues, did it play a role in your work? Has it been a case study in any of your classes or writing?

MILTON: I have not revisited Fresno as a site of my own research work. I recently sat on a final thesis review at University of Virginia and for the first time critiqued a student whose project dealt with the San Joaquin Valley and its problem with fog and air pollution. It hit me then that Fresno should be leading a discourse on new sustainable agriculture and progressive solutions to improve air quality because these problems are so pervasive throughout the Valley. I don’t know if that kind of work has found a constituency in the political domain in fresno, but it certainly is a timely set of topics for the citizens of Fresno.

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KIEL: How do you stitch together the varying subject of design, real estate development, and art?

MILTON: Global transformations in the financing of urban development and the pace of urbanization in the Asian peninsula, the Middle East, and parts of Europe has led to an increased disciplinary focus on the processes of urbanization. I have been working on issues of race and class for a while – predominantly concerned with cities and the evolution of inner cities and suburbs. These issues are magnified by the current subprime crisis – which exposes a pervasive and peculiar aspiration for a single family home on a 1-3 acre plot. Simultaneously, I have been working with artists and curators on the interaction bewteen contemporary art and architecture, specifically the reimagining of public space and new typologies of urban development where art and installation art is a vital component.

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KIEL: What lessons have you learned from design studios you taught on Mexico City and Havana?

MILTON: Urbanization in Mexico City, Havana, and other latin and South American cities evolved differently than it did in the United States in the postwar period. These cities have unique historical patterns of development that end up merging or synergizing with modernist building types and modern building and construction processes. Therefore, the modernism of the city is reacting to a different context than say Chicago or Fresno. The modern architecture in these cities has a more regional personality to it, eventhough massive masterplanned cities and large-scale urban developments have had negative impacts on the diversity of building design.

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KIEL: So far what is your most significant accomplishment?

MILTON: Teaching for over 15 years at Cornell University, one of the nation’s premiere program in architecture. We have a tremendously talented and diverse student body – they graduate with an informed perspective on the real-world challenges that exceed simplistic architectural solutions. i am proud to be a part of their intellectual development.

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KIEL: What are you currently working on (design, academic and/or teaching)?

MILTON: I am working on some large-scale urban development in Northern California, and on designing some unique prototypes for compact urban living within what would be traditionally identified as suburban contexts.

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READER QUESTION: “The San Joaquin Valley’s abysmal poverty and education attainment rate – among the worst in the U.S., combined with a limited range of distinguished architectural practice and infrastructure – approximates the conditions that spawned the late Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio in the Deep South. What inspiration might you offer our region’s architecture profession to use its transformative bag of tricks to similarly address our regrettably similar socioeconomic/quality of life conditions?”

MILTON: When I return to Fresno for Christmas Holidays I am amazed by the sameness of the entire built landscape. I ask myself why there is not more experimentation, more diversity. I think that clients and designers need to simply take more risks. In a place like Fresno I think there is tremendous opportunity to deviate from the norm and create a real following – whether its in the area of a local business, temporary structures for Summer, or occupying vacant storefronts.

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READER QUESTION: “Do you think Fresno has a distinctive vernacular style?”

MILTON: No. What i remember about the Fresno that I grew up in, what I remember the most is the vast landscape of open space, farmland, and the incredible potential to inhabit the landscape. I often imagined what Fresno was like when it was all desert. I lived and taught in Phoenix/Tempe for 3 years – before its last growth period that produced the worst problems of suburban sprawl – I grew to love the desert as an inhabitable landscape but also for the mystical qualities that it possessed when the sun set or when the monsoons drenched the land. I hope that that magical quality to imagine these uncanny qualities of the city are not lost. Every city needs this parallel reality that also gets physicalized once in a while.

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If you know of any fresnans making a strong impact in the built environment around the world that we should write about, then leave a comment or contact us.