Remembering Professor Emeritus Lars Lerup (1940–2025), influential thinker and educator
The College of Environmental Design was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Emeritus of Architecture Lars Lerup, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 85. Lerup (BArch 1968) was an influential thinker about buildings, cities, and people; the author of numerous books; and a widely exhibited artist. Above all, he was an educator who thrilled students with his electrifying lectures and brilliant critiques, and an inspiring mentor who built a community of like-minded architectural visionaries.
Professor Emeritus Stanley Saitowitz, who was Lerup’s graduate student in the mid-1970s and then his colleague on the architecture faculty, recalls in his recent book Lectures Writings Pictures, “Lars [was] one of those rare great teachers, and I feel very fortunate that he took me on as a student then, and then kept me on for all these years since. . . . Lars did what he has done for so many students again and again over the years, he cracked open a door, and pointed a direction.”
Lerup was born in 1940 in Sweden, where he received his first undergraduate degree, in civil engineering, before moving to the U.S. He attended UC Berkeley, earning a BArch, followed by a MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He returned to Berkeley in 1970 to join the faculty of architecture, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Lerup then went on to have a major second act, serving as dean of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, from 1993 until 2009.
“Teaching students how to sail”: Lars Lerup as teacher and mentor at UC Berkeley
At Berkeley, Lerup made a lasting impression as the longtime instructor of Environmental Design 4, a large introductory course pitched to a broad undergraduate campus audience. Lerup’s performative lecture style and ability to spark connections across disciplines was instrumental in attracting students into CED majors.
Lerup’s ED4 lectures formed the basis for his 1977 book Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action, which argues that meaning in architecture is created, and re-created, through ongoing interactions between people and places. He illustrates this with examples of the types of structures we all encounter every day, from bridges to staircases to street grids, and shows how the meaning of the built environment is fluid, complex, and contingent.
As a teacher and mentor of graduate architecture students, Lerup is remembered for his generosity and insight. Michael Bell (MArch 1987), a professor of architecture at Columbia GSAPP who was one of Lerup’s thesis students and research assistants at Berkeley in the 1980s, recalls, “Lars was deeply interested in students’ ideas. He was curious about what motivated you — he wasn’t trying to mold you into a copy of himself. He pushed you to evaluate your own work and motivations. Calling me by my last name while staring at my drawing, he would declare: ‘Bell, it looks good.’ After a pause he would turn to look at me and ask: ‘Is it?’ I am sure he did this with many others, emphasizing their name like a contract. He invested an immense amount of energy in bringing out talent and backing up idiosyncrasies in work.”
Lerup’s architecture studio reviews were legendary and drew students from throughout the building. Saitowitz says Lerup’s critiques “set the lobby ablaze with brilliance.” Thomas Robinson (BA Architecture 1991), principal of LEVER Architects, remembers seeking out Lerup’s reviews as an undergraduate: “He had this uncanny ability to provide insights into students’ work that left me in awe and wondering if he could somehow see through the drawings into the soul of each student at every stage of design. I remember him once asking a student if he had flipped his proposal midway through the semester, and of course the answer was ‘yes,’ and of course this had been a mistake.”
Saitowitz writes of Lerup’s impact as a teacher, “He [was] a navigator who found his way through the intellectual labyrinth of the 1980s and 1990s to direct his students, teaching them how to sail, to know how to catch the winds and always keep on the move.”
Drawing as visual thinking: Lars Lerup as artist
In addition to writing and teaching, Lerup developed and transmitted his ideas through paintings and drawings that were exhibited at museums around the world. Bell understands Lerup’s drawing practice as being connected to his training as an engineer: “He approached drawings as theorems, but they are beautiful, combining mechanical and free-hand techniques.”
While teaching at Berkeley, Lerup exhibited his influential project Love/House at the Berkeley Art Museum in the exhibition MATRIX 76 (1984). Comprising 49 drawings and a model of a “house for estranged lovers” based on Roland Barthes’s A Lovers Discourse, the project embodied Lerup’s range of interests — painting, language, narrative, psychology, philosophy — and, like his writings, was an investigation into the making of meaning in architecture.
As exhibition curator Constance Lewallen wrote, “Lerup appropriates Barthes’s semiotic vocabulary of signs to interpret his architecture, peeling away the layers of connotative meaning in order to unmask the original significance of architectural elements, such as windows and doors, and their relationships to people, ideas and emotions.”
“The city a giant switchboard”: Lars Lerup as urbanist
After Lerup retired from UC Berkeley and took the helm of the Rice School of Architecture, the city of Houston inspired several decades’ worth of scholarship focused on cities: After the City (2000), One Millions Acres & No Zoning (2011), The Continuous City: Fourteen Essays on Architecture and Urbanization (2017), and other publications. In this work, he continued to center subjectivity, the experience of the built environment, as he does in his landmark essay “Stim and Dross,” written in 1994 for Assemblage soon after his arrival in Houston. He begins by narrating the view from his 28th-floor apartment:
“The sky is as dark as the ground; the stars, piercingly bright, a million astral specks that have fallen onto the city. On this light-studded scrim the stationary lights appear confident, the moving ones, like tracer bullets, utterly determined, while the pervasive blackness throws everything else into oblivion. The city a giant switchboard, its million points switched either on or off.”
Rice University is planning a celebration of Lerup’s life. Please consult their website for details.