Architect lays out ‘room to dream’ on UA campus

TUCSON—Buildings should accommodate dreamers, says retired architect Dick Williams.

So he donated a room on the roof of the University of Arizona’s Architecture College with sweeping views of the Santa Catalinas to dream by.

As a member of the building committee for the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Williams had embraced a vision that was capped by a fourth floor with a window wall providing an unobstructed view of the mountains.

“The original idea was el studio grande. Put everything on the fourth floor. Get all the students up where they could see the horizon. Connect with the art building, invite the artists in, make it a celebration, a dream.

"It was too radical, too expensive,” he said.

As the cost of materials mounted during construction, the fourth story was scrapped.

Instead, there is one small, glass-walled room atop the third story of the glass-walled addition to the UA’s streetscape. It is assigned to no one, dedicated to no particular purpose.

The Archon Seminar Room is, says Williams, “a room to dream” – open to dreamers and collaborators campuswide and beyond.

It has been in steady use since it was built _ for student reviews, contest juries and meetings of groups.

Anyone with a use for it just needs to make a reservation and come pick up a key, he said.

Williams, 92, and retired from his architecture practice and his faculty post at the University of Illinois, calls the room on the roof “a paraphrase” of the original grand idea.

It, too, would have fallen victim to the escalating costs of materials during construction, except that Williams offered to pay for the room himself.

In addition to the $108,000 he spent on his “room to dream,” he previously gave the college a $400,000 endowment for graduate scholarships. He also sponsors the Archon Prize, a yearly design contest with $12,000 in prizes for teams consisting of an architecture and a landscape architecture student.

Collaboration has been the goal of his teaching, he said.

“I always think of architecture and landscape as one entity. We work with nature and man, respect, as best we can, both culture and natural setting.”