Ray Lifchez, an appreciation

A long life inevitably means that the survivors’ memories of the deceased are partial, reflecting what they experienced directly and learned over time from others. Ray Lifchez falls in this category for me. We weren’t especially close, but I knew him for half a century — long enough to gain an impression.

We collaborated on a book he wrote with Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living, and I taught his Architecture 101 course with our mutual friend Shelley Hampden-Turner. After I left graduate school in 1978, our encounters were more sporadic, but late in his life, he asked for help with what started as a book project but quickly foundered on his diminishing capacity. I gave up, although I think he would have continued to pay me to be a psychologist of sorts.

It’s important to look through the fog of Ray’s endgame to see the good he did in several arenas. His commitment to what’s now known as universal design was thorough, but also grounded in his conviction that ordinary people, including children, have a role to play in shaping their surroundings so they feel safe and supported, able to do what they, as humans, are here to do with their lives.

Ray’s commitment to the cosmopolitan nature of architecture and to the place of writing in elaborating architects’ ideas led him to establish and personally fund the Berkeley Prize, which built on and in the end returned to his insight that conversations with the people who live and work in a given setting are crucial to designing it well. For 25 years, this program attracted entries from architecture students across the planet. Ben Clavan, Thea Chroman, and Jessie Canon ran the program ably with and for Ray, interfacing with the entrants, readers, and judges.

Ray was also greatly aided by Helen Lamé, who managed the Berkeley end of things, including the annual poetry lecture series he dedicated to his late wife, the poet Judith Stronach. The small books documenting these talks, designed by Chuck Byrne and issued by the Bancroft Library, wonderfully trace their arc. Both were remarkable gifts to the community around contemporary poetry, broadly construed — a legacy of Judith and Ray both.

From conversations with Ray in 2019, it was clear to me how profoundly the loss of Judith affected him. Their house in Claremont Canyon became a sort of museum, but that was no substitute for her presence.

I interviewed the neo-classical architect Thomas Gordon Smith in 2017 and he cited Ray as his most supportive and influential professor while in grad school at UC Berkeley CED. At the investiture of Smith’s son at St. Jerome’s in El Cerrito, Ray sat with me and my wife, and mentioned that he made room for Smith to do his own work — those gorgeous drawings.

This was typical of Ray, who had an affinity for outsiders. Our one collaboration, in the mid-1970s, was a paper on using empathy as a research tool, which became Chapter Five of his and Winslow’s book.

Others will have their own stories, because Ray involved himself in many things. I look forward to reading them. These are mine. A good man is hard to find, the expression has it. He was. Not a saint, but a good man.