Ting-Li Cho's family have asked Professor Gilmore of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and me (since we are both old family friends) to gather together the activities of Cho's life and to add our sense of that life, and Professor Gilmore and Dean Harris have asked me to read to you this memorial of my friend. Out task has not been easy, since Cho was not given to recording his own accomplishments and since our friendship with him is as hard to define as it was rich.
Cho was born 12 January 1923 on the small island of KU-Lang-Hsu, near Amoy in Fukien province, China. He went to grade school in Amoy, to high school in Peking, and he earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at St. John's College, Shanghai. He began his professional career by practicing architecture and planning for four years in Shanghai. This career was interrupted in Cho's mid twenties, during the civil war in China, when he volunteered and served for several years with the Friends Ambulance Service, working at village rehabilitation and hospital design and construction throughout China. In 1947 the Friends Ambulance Service was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
Travel was thereafter one of Cho's loves; as a single young man and, later, with his family in the small Dodge van he so meticulously planned and equipped, he explored nearly every state in this country. For Cho, travel was an instinctive way of freeing and recreating the spirit. Many of us fondly remember sitting with him after a long, friendly meal and hearing his stories of his years in the Ambulance Service tales full of the customs, the countryside, the sometimes harrowing experiences, and the strange friendships and human encounters to which he was always so open.
In 1949 he came to this country to continue his architectural and planning studies. Intending at first to go to the University of Pennsylvania, he stopped by chance in Eugene and was so taken with the atmosphere and philosophy of the school of architecture that much to the delight of many of you now in this room--he stayed here and, two years later, took his master's degree in architecture. Later, in the 1950's, he did further graduate work at the University of Chicago and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took his Master of City Planning degree. Lewis Mumford, Louis Kahn, Ian McHara, and John Dyckman were his teachers. He stopped by Taliesin East and worked for a short time with Frank Lloyd Wright, was invited to stay on, but other challenges took him elsewhere. During the 1950's Cho practiced architecture and planning with the TVA in Knoxville and with several architectural firms in Philadelphia and in Portland. From 1957-62 he taught architecture at the University of Oregon. Here he met and married Lily Shen and thereafter the two frequently worked on projects together; they particularly delighted in helping their friends build or improve their homes.
In the 1960's Cho was Senior Planner for the Port of Seattle and the Chief of Analysis and Research for the Puget Sound Government Conference. In the 1970's the Chos moved back from Seattle to Eugene, a city they loved, and Cho spent the rest of his professional life at this University, teaching and consulting. As a teacher he was particularly attracted by the educational environment established here by W. R. B. Wilcox, for many years head of architecture. Cho's own teaching philosophy found its most congenial expression working with individuals and small groups engendering by his unique gifts the students' own abilities to formulate and solve for themselves their architectural and planning problems. In these last years Cho did important work on the Capitol Mall in Salem, the Whittaker Neighborhood plan, the NEA Structures of Oregon study, and other projects in the state. It is particularly sad that, at the time of his death, new planning projects in Oregon were opening up for him and arousing his enthusiasm.
Cho was a problem solver and the strength of his imaginative energy did not depend on the scale of the problem. He immersed himself with equal intensity in the TVA, the tri-metro plan for Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, a neighborhood in Eugene, or a problem in a friend's or his own home. When my family lived in Seattle, neighbors of the Cho's, he noticed that a corner by our bookcase was dark; a few days later he appeared with a small adjustable lamp he had built. It lightened that corner and harmonized beautifully with the architecture of our house. When we moved to Eugene, another bookcase corner proved to need exactly that lamp. Each problem, regardless of scale, was a chance for his imagination.
Cho's professional life, his family life, and his friendships were extraordinarily of a piece, each act and thought growing naturally and harmoniously from a character in which wit, intelligence, kindness, and moral integrity were quietly and inseparably joined. The memory of his life and character is a rich and precious legacy left to his family, his colleagues, his students, and his friends.
Cho died of a heart arrest at Sacred Heart Hospital on 7 November 1979. His family has suggested that memorial contributions appropriately be sent to the Indo-China Program of the American Friends Service Committee, in care of the Eugene Friends Meeting at 22nd and Onyx.
Prepared by Donald S. Taylor Professor of English
Mr. Chairman, I move that this memorial of tinfoil Cho be entered into the permanent record of this meeting and copies be sent to the Cho family.
| Web page spun on 23 June 2004 by Peter B Gilkey 202 Deady Hall, Department of Mathematics at the University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1222, U.S.A. Phone 1-541-346-4717 Email:peter.gilkey.cc.67@aya.yale.edu of Deady Spider Enterprises |