Fritz Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at PennDesign, inaugurates a new series of reflections by students and faculty members on the theory and practice of design.
The first time I came to Penn as a student in 1975, my department chair, Ian McHarg, had become infatuated with cultural anthropology. He saw human ecology as a local extension of plant and animal ecology and thought ethnography employed methods that could be useful for design and planning. As a result, Professor McHarg hired a group of anthropologists.
One of them was Yehudi Cohen, a Rutgers professor who had edited the foundational three-volume Man in Adaptation. Professor Cohen would commute from New Brunswick once a week. We were assigned the third volume of Man in Adaptation on “the cultural present” and the Sunday edition of The New York Times. He directed us to consider New York City as “our village” and the The New York Times as our “key informant.”
Each student selected a section of the newspaper: the wedding announcements, the book reviews, sports, the real estate, business, the editorials, sports, local news, advertisements and classifieds, and the arts. Each week we reported on the comings and goings in our village. I selected the obituaries and have read my village’s newspaper ever since.
I'm an early riser, and like other early risers, I start my morning routine by reading the paper with a cup of coffee. The process usually takes a half hour or so, starting with the arts section, then headlines, style, the op-eds, business, sports, and finishes with reading the obituaries.
In the past 40 years, I've moved around a fair amount, which meant introducing and removing papers from the routine: The Lewiston Tribune, The Denver Post, The Arizona Republic, the Austin-American Statesman, and for the past year, the Philadelphia Inquirer. What hasn't changed in all these years, though, is the mainstay of the routine: the home-delivered New York Times.
The Times became an anchor of my mornings nearly 40 years ago and, as I read the obituaries each morning, I realized each of us has only so many days. As a result, what we do every day is important. In addition, the ethnographic methods that I learned at Penn have been invaluable in my work in teaching and practicing planning and design. These tools have helped me to understand the cultural phenomena of the communities where I have worked with students and colleagues.
