by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Maurice Cox became the director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts on October 2. Previously a professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, Cox also was mayor of Charlottesville, Va., from 2002–2004. In 2004, Cox was dubbed a Master of Design by Fast Company for his attempts to bring “democratic design” across economic boundaries. In his new role, Cox will supervise the panel selection and grant-making process in design; oversee the Mayors' Institute on City Design, Governors' Institute on Community Design, and Your Town programs; and provide professional leadership to the field.

Education and early practice: I am a graduate from the Cooper Union School of Architecture, New York City, so I have a BArch. I’m a Loeb Fellow from 2004–2005 at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, which turned into a 10-year stay. I did my professional apprenticeship there. I graduated in 1983, lived in Florence from ’83 to ’93, and practiced and started teaching there at Syracuse University. I had a practice together with my wife, Giovanna Galfione, who is an architect. We worked on a number of urban-scale institutional projects, mostly working in an urban fringe suburban context and specifically trying to create urban places.

Formative experiences: Living in the Italian context was formative in my outlook on the profession and myself as a citizen. It influenced my whole understanding of design as a cultural phenomena that can be accessible to people from all walks of life. I went to an art and design magnet high school in Manhattan, so from my high school years, I was surrounded by design. Then, going to Cooper Union and living in Manhattan, and certainly the extraordinary experience of studying under John Hejduk was formative, but when I look back on the things that made me understand the role that designers can play in the society, I think Italy was decisive in my awareness of designers as opinion-makers and -shapers, just by their public role and participation in the daily cultural and political life of a community.

From ex-pat to mayor: I came back in ’93 to teach full time at the University of Virginia. I got immersed in the local context there in large part because of what appeared to be the absence of presence of the architect as a civic leader. I was accustomed to seeing architects in political roles in Italy. It was not uncommon to see an architect as a part of a political slate running for office. When I got back to the United States, I was actually somewhat surprised by the fact that the architect had no particular civic voice. They were not necessarily perceived as opinion-makers or -shapers and I think I was motivated to be engaged because of what I perceived to be a voiceless role that architects had slipped into.

Three years after I came to Charlottesville, I ran for public office. I think I was motivated by watching those who were in elected positions sometimes being misguided or, unbeknownst to them, making decisions about the direction our city would go in without having the tools that they needed. I became a very vocal advocate for thinking about design in a comprehensive way and it got so much attention that, before you knew it, people were asking me to run for office. It certainly was the last thing on my mind. I had no political ambition. I simply wanted to make a contribution in an area in which I felt I had expertise. I won by a landslide, so it must have resonated with the electorate of Charlottesville. I served on the city council for eight years, with the last two years as mayor.

After city council and on to the NEA: Well, I was no longer in office and no longer in charge. I won’t pretend that the demands of being a public citizen are not significant. It was simply exhausting and demanding, but in many ways I accomplished much of what I had desired to do. I never thought of public service as a career: I saw it as a contribution that I could make. It has a beginning and it has an end, so after eight years it certainly felt that I had accomplished what I had hoped to do in improving the quality of life and redirecting the city towards a much more urban, pedestrian-oriented pattern. I went looking for a way to use these experiences to help other communities if I could, and I did that primarily through the founding of a new partnership called Community Planning and Design, which I founded after the Loeb Fellowship in 2005 with Ken Schwartz, who’s a colleague at the University of Virginia.

Our purpose was to work on community design and specifically to engage a broad cross-section of stakeholders in the creation of communities, trying to use the knowledge that we had gained. He was chair of the planning commission during a number of those years that I was on City Council, and we fundamentally believe that architecture and politics are indivisible. Therefore, our knowledge of both could help any number of communities that are trying to wrestle with how to regenerate parts of their community. We’ve tackled some really tough assignments that involved how you build consensus to act and how you get buy in from everyone from the general public to the professional staffs to the political leaders.

The position of design director has a number of leadership initiatives, but the most well know is the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and a new initiative begun by Jeff Speck, the last director of design, called the Governors’ Institute. They also have a program for rural communities called Your Town. These programs attempt to educate mayors, governors, and other policymakers on the tools that shape the built environment. So the possibility of working with dozens of mayors and a half a dozen governors a year—rather than a handful of mayors every year in my own practice—had an enormous appeal to me. Additionally, the overall mission of the NEA to have arts reach in every corner of the United States worked consistently with my own philosophy of trying to put design within reach of the everyday lives of Americans.

Goal during tenure at NEA: I really hope to be able to democratize design and somehow continue to expand its reach into communities that traditionally don’t have an expectation of design. When I speak of design, I mean issues of quality of life, urban life in particular, and how you can speak to ordinary citizens’ own experience of design. My hope would be to try to make design understandable to ordinary people and make it socially and culturally relevant to their everyday life. This is what I saw in Italy. Because they were so attentive to their built environment, everything from the plazas and the buildings to the interiors and the products that they use, there was an enormous attention to their utility and their beauty. I think that was an acknowledgement of how important something as simple as beauty is, and what a wonderful thing it is to aspire to. But to achieve that, people have to demand it. And to demand a better quality of life, there needs to be a rigorous and vigorous public discussion about the value that design adds to our life. There is something inherently democratic about that: the assumption that everyone has a right to live in a quality environment. I hope to give some voice to that during my tenure as the design director.

Citizen architects: I think there are incredibly positive signs that the professional community wants to engage in their profession in a much more socially relevant way. In my travels, I’m impressed with the conversations that the profession is convening. I came back from the Texas Society of Architects convention—their theme was Democracy. And the Rice Design Alliance fall lecture series theme was Design Activism. There’s a conference happening in the spring at the Harvard GSD called Design Agency. It goes on and on. There’s the Design for the Other 90 % exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, and think of the number of nonprofits that are popping up.

Whether it’s Architecture for Humanity or Public Architecture, there is a groundswell of renewed interest in the social responsibility of our discipline and it’s more than a trend. I try to reflect on what’s happening. Is it a result of not having that call for civic responsibility coming from the highest elected leaders? Maybe there’s a bottom-up demand to fill a void. I think there’s a little bit of that. I believe that our realization is that we are somehow complicit in destroying the planet. If you think about the causes of global warming, we know that our industry has to restructure itself to build differently and develop and settle communities differently.

I think there’s a real sense that we as the design disciplines are simply reflecting what the larger conversation in this country is, and I think the time is so incredibly strategic. Now, having said that, is it central to our mission? Are we serving the other 90 percent? No. We have a long way to go, but I can only believe that as a result of the kind of vigorousness of this conversation, that it is only a matter of time and perseverance when it will become central to how designers identify their work. And that’s all incredibly encouraging.