This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of "Furniture Studio: Materials, Craft, and Architecture" (UW Press, 2012), by Jeffrey Ochsner, a colleague of Phil's in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. Read some additional interesting background on the Furniture Shop here.

In summer 1961 Philip Thiel was spending a few days in Seattle and took the opportunity to meet with Dean Robert Dietz and Professor Victor Steinbrueck of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Thiel was on his way to take up a teaching assignment at Washington University in St. Louis, but when Dietz offered a position at the UW, Thiel chose to accept. His wife, Midori, had family in Seattle, and she and Phil thought it would be a good place to raise their children.

The early 1960s were a time of growth and change for the university and the college. When Robert Dietz became dean in 1961, he sought to broaden architecture and planning education and to place a greater emphasis on research. With an increase in student enrollment, there was a parallel growth in the number of instructors, and this gave Dietz the chance to diversify the faculty through a series of new appointments.

Phil Thiel was an experienced and attractive faculty candidate. He had received his undergraduate education at the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, earning his degree in naval architecture and marine engineering in 1943, and had spent the last years of World War II in Boston working on ship design. After the war, he earned a master’s degree in naval architecture at the University of Michigan, and, on graduation, was offered a position as an instructor in naval architecture at MIT. While teaching at MIT he took the opportunity to enroll in courses in visual design in the school of architecture with György Kepes, who was just beginning the program that later became MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Kepes's offer of a teaching assistantship prompted Thiel to pursue an education in architecture; he completed his professional Bachelor of Architecture in 1952. Thiel was also able to work with Kevin Lynch when Lynch initiated his studies of human understanding of urban space.15 These experiences helped shape Thiel's lifelong interests in representation, the visual aspects of design, and the nature of human perception.

Thiel's interests also included materials and their properties and uses. Beginning in elementary school, he had had the opportunity to work in a shop because manual-training courses were then routinely offered in New York City schools, and he had developed skills with tools and equipment as well as a practical knowledge of material properties. At Webb Institute he had been appointed to a managerial position in the school shop, and at MIT Thiel had used the shop facilities in connection with mounting several of Kepes's exhibition designs.

After graduating from MIT, Thiel went to teach at the University of California at Berkeley, where William Wurster, who had previously been dean at MIT, had become dean of the School of Architecture in 1950. As part of his effort to transform the architectural education at Berkeley, Wurster appointed noted designer Charles Eames to create a new introductory program, with Jesse Reichek and Thiel as his assistants, who were tasked with running the program during Eames's frequent absences. Wurster also arranged for the installation of shop facilities at Berkeley to support the new program.

When Thiel came to the University of Washington in fall 1961, he sought to build on the experience he had had at MIT and Berkeley. Thiel worked toward the creation of new facilities--a shop and a photo lab--and he advocated the transformation of the introductory year of architectural studio. In the undergraduate five-year architecture program, the freshman year focused on general education. Sophomore architecture students took three quarters of Design Grade I, their first design studio, which addressed "basic design." The idea of basic design, developed at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, had been implemented at Harvard under the direction of Walter Gropius after World War II, and was adopted at the University of Washington in 1948. Basic design focused on fundamental concepts in space and form and introduced students to the abstract language of modernism that was considered the foundation that should be taken before working in a specific design field. Thiel argued that the focus on abstract visual composition was too narrow given the increasing complexity of the design fields, and he suggested that the course should be reconceived with three components, one addressing visual communication, the next addressing technology, and the last addressing human behavior and programming. Conceived in this way, Design Grade I would allow students to achieve a level of competence in each separate area before being asked to integrate them in design problems during their next three years. Thiel thought that each segment of Design Grade I should introduce recent research findings, so students would learn to incorporate the results of research in their design thinking. The visual communication and technology segments would also each have a "hands-on" aspect: visual communication would include work in a photo lab, and technology would require experimentation, transformation, and testing of real materials in a shop. Thiel argued that this kind of program would provide a better introduction to the variety of environmental design disciplines and would not privilege architecture over other disciplines such as planning or landscape architecture. Further, by incorporating technology and human behavior/programming as equal components in the new first-year pedagogy, Thiel sought to show that visual composition was only one element of an architect's professional responsibility.

By summer 1962 Dean Dietz had secured the necessary funding, and the transformation of the facilities and the curriculum followed. A photo lab was created in a space beneath the front stairs to Architecture Hall. A shop was installed in an existing annex space, a low one-story unheated addition that had been constructed at the back of Architecture Hall as storage space during the years when the building housed the university's chemistry department.

At the same time, the college secured Berner ("Brenner") E. Kirkebo to be the first shop manager, beginning in January 1963. Although Thiel had had experience running a shop, he knew the success of the facility would require a full-time shop manager--someone who knew wood- and metalcraft, who knew how to clean and maintain the equipment, and who would be sympathetic to the students, many of whom would arrive with little shop experience. Kirkebo, who was Norwegian, had spent most of his career as a carpenter in Alaska, but was then living in Seattle. He was knowledgeable about equipment and adept in the use of tools. Those who remember him have characterized him as "gruff, but fair."

Kirkebo, assisted by Thiel, acquired a good selection of equipment, including two table saws, a band saw, two drill presses, planer, jointer, sander, metal shear, metal roller, metal brake, bender, hole punch, anvil, and welder. In addition, they acquired chisels, gouges, clamps, a miter box, and a variety of nonpowered hand tools. The list is a remarkable one; just two years previously the school had not had a shop at all, but now it had one of the best-equipped shops to be found in any American architecture school. The school invested in high-quality tools and equipment meant to last; most of these remain in use today, five decades later.

In winter 1963, with the shop coming on line, the department launched the new introductory class in which beginning students explored the use of hand and power tools to transform a variety of materials. Over the next several years, as students who had gained shop experience in their introductory year moved through the program, the shop continued to serve their needs, and a stronger "hands-on" culture began to take root. One of the larger projects of the time that depended on the shop was the annual art and architecture pavilion--a joint project of students in the two schools that would be erected somewhere on campus each spring quarter. The pieces were typically fabricated in the shop, and then assembled on site. One year the pavilion was erected in front of the HUB (Husky Union Building, the student union), and another year it was constructed in Drumheller Fountain (the major water feature in the center of the Science Quadrangle).

In early 1969, Berner Kirkebo resigned due to illness. Thiel turned to Andris (Andy) Vanags, who had received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the UW School of Art the previous spring. In those years, Design Grade I not only served as the introduction to all the disciplines of the college but also served the School of Art programs in interiors and industrial design. Andy had been Thiel's student in 1965, and Andy had sought and received permission to continue to use the shop after he completed Design Grade I. In need of a job, Andy accepted Thiel's offer and became the college's shop manager in spring 1969.