Members' 25-Year Reminiscences

Stan Clauson, AICP

Stan Clauson Associates, LLC
Aspen, Colorado

My career owes a great debt of gratitude to the late University of Wisconsin-Madison planning professor Leo Jakobson. Leo was a native of Finland, an architect, and a broad thinker on issues of urban form. For years, he taught the Environmental Aesthetics course at Wisconsin — a multi-media teaching project of considerable scope that was a part of the curriculum for graduate planning students and undergraduates alike.

I was at Wisconsin working on my Ph.D. dissertation, not in planning, but comparative literature. I had taught for a couple of years at Western Illinois University, and then returned to Wisconsin to try to get my languishing dissertation moving along. This was the time of the war in Viet Nam and university campuses were in turmoil. Many of us who were involved in teaching felt these turbulent times on a very personal level. Some of our friends had gone off to war; others were battling police in protest activities. For many of us, the classroom no longer seemed a relevant place to spend time, not to mention the sustained abstract effort required of a doctoral dissertation.

One morning, I was having coffee with a former student at the Wisconsin student union. He told me that he had decided to abandon his graduate studies in history. He needed to do something he felt was more creative, more tangible. He had met a professor in planning, and together they had charted a course that would take my friend to the Illinois Institute of Technology — famous for its Bauhaus relationship to Mies Van der Rohe — to study industrial design. He was very excited about his new direction and suggested that I meet his new mentor, Leo Jakobson. The following week I did just that. We met at a bar just off campus.

I told Leo about my interest in cities, how people lived in different environments, and some of my studies relating architecture and the literary culture of different periods. Too bad, I said, that I don't have an engineering or art background, because then I could really work with the tangible qualities of architecture and urban planning.

"NO!" he exclaimed, "You have been working on just the right things, because planning needs people from the humanities. There are technicians enough, already."

His accent was charming, and so was the idea for a new direction in my life. I asked, hedging my bets, "Maybe there's some kind of aptitude test I can take?"

Leo was dismissive. "I've no time for those kinds of tests, come to work for me and see if you like it."

A month later, I was cutting cardboard for topo models under the tutelage of an undergraduate landscape architecture student and teaching a discussion section of Leo's Environmental Aesthetics course. Many years later, the melding of planning and design, abstract and physical, is still the basis for my life and work.

Stan Clauson's firm in Aspen, Colorado, provides planning and landscape architecture for communities and private clients. He began his planning studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and completed his degree in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has served as planning director for the cities of Montpelier, Vermont, and Aspen, and is a vice-president of the APA Colorado Chapter. In recent years, he has been working on comparing resort environments in Europe and the U.S. from the perspectives of transportation infrastructure and economic sustainability. The above photo is from a recent conference in Chamonix, Les Sommets du Tourisme, where he was an invited speaker.