Professor Tom Rochon featured in NYIT's "Five Questions" Series
Posted: Wednesday, December 31, 1969 7 p.m.
"Teaching, Building and Globetrotting”
Associate Professor Tom Rochon attributes his passion for "green" architecture to his days in the U.S. Peace Corps in Tunisia. Recently, Tom shared those adventures and the projects he designed there with the NYIT community in a lecture entitled “Insights: Revisiting Tunisia” at the Manhattan campus. He also discussed how those post-college years abroad shaped his life, his architecture, and his teaching.
Tom says that as a boy growing up in Detroit, he spent hours sketching designs. “I wanted to be an architect for as long as I can remember; it was almost chosen for me. I liked math and liked to draw and plan,” he says. After graduating from the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, “I thought I could either work in an office or go to Tunisia and become an architect,” says Tom. “At that time, alternative lifestyles were gaining popularity, and I wanted an alternative lifestyle.”
In 1969, he returned to the U.S. and became an associate with Richard Moger FAIA, where he continued to do international work. In 1976, he started his own firm, Thomas Rochon Associates, in SoHo, and focused on recycling and rehabilitating historic structures. A year later, he joined NYIT as an adjunct associate professor and since then has been very involved in curriculum planning in addition to teaching future architects.
1. How did your time in Tunisia influence your career and your architecture?
Sustainable architecture has always been part of my practice, and it started from my days in Miami, which has a hot wet climate, and Tunisia, where there is a hot arid climate. After returning from Africa, I settled in New York, and eventually started my firm in SoHo recycling loft buildings and turning those into studios.
2. How have you taken your work experience to the classroom?
All of my courses are organized around sustainability. In 1978, I wrote the curriculum for “tropical architecture” at NYIT, and I’ve been a faculty advisor for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon contests we entered in 2005 and 2007.
3. What are your goals and plans for this academic year?
In past years, I’ve taught site planning, but this year, we changed that to “environmental site planning.” I collaborated with Michele Bertomen, associate professor of architecture, in drafting an outline for a new course called “Ecology of Architecture.” This semester, we also started a course called “Solar Decathlon” via distance learning, where we are asking students for proposals for Solar Decathlon 2011. Our strategy is to give the students ownership of the competition.
4. When you aren’t designing buildings or teaching, what are you involved in?
I’m actively involved in activities around the world. The United Nations contracted me to help the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific create a master plan for tackling problems related to global warming. I am trying to introduce it to the curriculum so students have a chance to work on this. Several years ago, I went to Bali for a conference on sustainable architecture sponsored by the U.N. and presented a design for a village for indigenous people that was later built in Johannesburg, South Africa. I also was part of a conference that planned a holistic center on an organic coconut farm in Brazil. Here, closer to home, I founded the Fort Royal Foundation Inc., a non-profit that specializes in preserving architecture in Mohawk County, N.Y.
5. What inspired the “Insights: Revisiting Tunisia” lecture?
I returned to Tunisia last May for the 40th anniversary of completing my projects there. As I reflected upon the 40th anniversary of the many events in 1969, including Woodstock, the Vietnam War demonstrations, Monty Python, and the first moon landing, it struck me that I finished the projects in Tunisia that same year. When I returned, I discovered that the town of Houmt-Souk [Tunisia] had doubled in population, but the character and the culture haven’t changed.
