Architecture Professor Builds a World-Renowned Reputation as "Building Pathologist"

Most professors pass out grades to their students. UC architecture professor Wolfgang Preiser goes a step further. He grades some of the world's most prominent buildings.

Because architects and designers don't always have the foresight to understand all the needs of building users, University of Cincinnati architecture professor Wolfgang Preiser, who will retire from UC this summer, is often called upon to exercise hindsight to evaluate environments.

He's a "building pathologist" if you will, an internationally recognized expert on building-performance evaluation and the principles of universal design, or inclusive design as it's called in Europe. Universal design seeks to create structures that genuinely meet the needs of all users in assistive and adaptive ways, enabling a better life for the disabled, the aged, the young and other groups. The basic idea of his work is to examine work- and living spaces when they are first programmed and then again when they are being used after a building becomes "operational" and to find out what works and what doesn't for those users.

Preiser has been featured by such popular press as NBC news (where his own adaptive designs were featured by Jane Pauley) and by specialty publications like Progressive Architecture magazine and the AIA Journal. He is also invited to speak (and consult) around the globe and has published 16 books dealing - in various ways - with post-occupancy evaluations and universal design. His newest book, Designing for Designers which he co-edited with Jack Nasar of Ohio State University and with Thomas Fisher of the University of Minnesota, is due out this summer from Fairchild Books, New York.

Ironically, Preiser came very close to never pursuing architecture at all. One chance meeting and one conversation changed the whole course of his life when he was a high school student in Germany.

"My family and I were on vacation during my last few months in high school. I was all set to pursue electrical engineering, and I had arranged to work for an engineering firm the summer before I would start college work because work experience in a field was a requirement in Germany before enrolling to study in that field," he explained.

But then, Preiser and his family coincidentally met a good friend of the family. Preiser added, "He was my father's best friend, and he was the chief architect for the nation's rail roads, responsible for hundreds of projects. He walked with us around the lake we were at. When the conversation with him ended, I was set upon a new path. I quickly arranged to work at a construction site for the summer to gain my needed work experience and applied to five different architecture schools."

After completing his undergraduate degree in Austria, Preiser won a fellowship to study in Finland and then a Fulbright Fellowship to study in the United States.

While Finland in the late 1960s provided him his first introduction to universal design, it was in the U.S. that Preiser earned his reputation as leader in the field.

Starting as a student pursuing his Fulbright studies here, Preiser was also able to garner a record of 10 National Science Foundation grants to study and to write on universal design guidelines, including those for mobile homes and for electronic guidance systems for the visually impaired.

He recalled, "Even while still a student, I was able to do one of the first post-occupancy evaluations of college dorms, specifically the ones then at Virginia Tech. Thirty-four years later, I wrote what probably became my most important book for the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards: Improving Building Performance which became a hand book both within and outside of the profession." It and other books - like The Universal Design Handbook - have become "bibles" for designers, students, clients and builders.

One of Preiser's own design innovations won him national acclaim. It was a guidance system for visually impaired students at the University of New Mexico, a system he helped develop after conducting a post-occupancy evaluation on the university's renovated student union.

"The building had once been something of a standard box but had been renovated with curving spaces and angled hallways. The problem was that visually impaired students could not get their bearings within these spaces," he recollected.

That's when Preiser and others set to work and developed a guidance system - using radio frequencies that provided vibration and sound signals for the visually impaired - that enabled those same students to navigate even wide open outdoor spaces. "We created a half-mile path across campus wherein signals sent to canes typically used by the visually impaired kept those students on track to their destination," he said.

Preiser makes use of such achievements and his decades of experience in the field in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) classroom. Each spring, he leads a class on universal design. He has also sponsored an architectural research fellowship within DAAP's top-ranked architecture program, and he has helped to place 40 architecture and interior design students in international co-op work experiences in Germany and the United Kingdom.

"I had mentors who helped me to grow and progress, who really helped me to set and to achieve my goals. That's the best part of being a teacher...to be able to do that for the students who want that kind of mentoring," stated Preiser, who has earned an international reputation as a leader in post-occupancy evaluations and universal design. For instance, in 1999, Preiser received the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) "Career Award" and will receive the EDRA Lifetime Achievement Award in June. And this coming October, he'll be the keynote speaker at a Washington, D.C., conference on universal design.

But whether it's by teaching students, by placing them in co-op work positions or by writing, consulting and speaking internationally, Preiser has one goal: To transform the field of design so that architecture is "design for all," with structures, wayfinding and furnishings that work for nearly everyone of all sizes, shapes, ages and abilities.