ACADEMIA
In academia, Polshek embraced the opportunity to advance architecture as a compelling agent for change. For fifteen years, beginning in 1972, he served as Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Special Adviser to the President for Planning and Design.
Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Polshek led the architecture school’s resurrection, creating a forum for progressive academic discourse: he assembled an ideologically diverse faculty, with whom he developed a socially relevant curriculum; he created degree-granting programs in planning and preservation; and he established the interdisciplinary Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
