Profile Up the Up Staircase BySamHeys
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he 23-year odyssey of Georgia Tech Regents' Professor John Templer has been joyously uphill, an ascent up the stairway of time. It started with a phone call in 1970. Someone called Columbia University's school of architecture and asked why so many people fell down the stairs at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York's Lincoln Center. Templer was a 42-year-
old graduate student in architecture at Columbia then. The question piqued his interest. He found little had been written about stairs or stairway safety. When he, his wife and her sister visited the Met, his sister-in-law fell down the steps, and the journey was on. Stairs became the subject of his dissertation. They became a never-ending source of questions and insights, solutions and then more questions. The dissertation became a
The Templer File Born—April 30, 1928 at Oxford, England Education—BS, architecture, I hiversity of Pretoria, 1963; MS, architecture, Columbia University, 1970; PhD, architecture, Columbia University, 1974. Personal—Married for .38 years to Joan Templer, an artist and associate professor of visual communications at Georgia Tech's College of Archilcc ture. father of two grown children, Achievements—Regents Professor, 1983-93; assistant dean of rest-arch. College of Architecture, Georgia Tech 1977-83; president of Architectural Research Center Consortium, 1980; director of doctoral programs. College of Architecture, 198.3-88. < omiook—Templer is a citizen of the world. For the past 20 years, he has used his architectural skills pro bono publico in India, where he has helped design a 300 bed community hospital, a shopping center, restaurant, and visitors center. He is currently working on a library and 1,000seat auditorium. Leisure Interests—Sailing and reading.
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manuscript—rewritten, edited, added to. When the manuscript didn't sell initially, his quest didn't end. It took him to Rome's 300year-old Spanish Steps and all over Europe, searching for the footsteps of mankind imprinted on a stairway. The rewriting and polishing continued. So did the research. In one of the most publicized research projects in Georgia Tech history, subjects—wearing a shoulder harness and a rope tied to the ceiling— were paid to stumble on Templer's booby-trapped mechanical stairs. The manuscript was published last year by MIT Press and is appropriately titled The Staircase. The ripples from its warm reception are still being felt. In June, Templer and his book were the subject of a seven-page article in Smithsonian magazine. The BBC will do a onehour program next spring, and a Belgian TV network crew has also been over for filming. The British newspaper, The Guardian, listed The Staircase as one of its "books of the year" in 1992, and the Los Angeles Times did a two-page spread on the book. Other reviewers include Scientific American, the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times.
The Times said the twovolume book "neatly divides a fascinating subject into its functional and esthetic components." and even praised Templer for being able to say "so much so briefly and so well." "That was a great surprise to me," he says. "I've always hated most scientific writing because it was so boring. I decided that if I was going to write something that I'm interested in, I had to find some way to write it so that it's interesting."
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he recognition of his life's work is a fitting going-away gift f < >r Templer, who retired from Georgia Tech's College of Architecture in September. He leaves behind a legacy of notable research, including work for the U.S. Department of Transportation on the pedestrian needs of the disabled. He has been the principal researcher for a attracts totaling $1.5 million. Templer, 63. arrived at Tech in 1975 upon receiving his doctorate from Columbia. Born in England, he attended high school in Kenya, where his father had been chief f< >rester, and then college in South Africa. He spent two decades in South Africa— studying, teaching and in professional practice—be-