Yale Class of '52
Artists & Authors

Roger P. Smith
Yale 1952

"The U.S. Army and I decided we were each irrelevant to the other's plans so I did duty operating a radio for them during the Korean conflict. Then an infant communications medium called television beckoned. CBS took Roger in their Executive Training Program. "William S. Paley's CBS was an enlightened patriarchy. Daily themes at Yale had taught me to hammer out ideas, just what CBS wanted." He was sent all over the United States, England, France and Italy producing TV shows. Subsequently he moved on to educational and public TV in New York, Chicago and Boston. Roger's involvement in hundreds of nonfiction and network TV shows and over twenty films resulted in two Emmys, an Ohio State, a Thomas Alva Edison, a Peabody, a Cine Golden Eagle and other awards.

Public TV and the American Dream (Algora, New York 2002)

“This book isn't just about television, it's really about our adaptations to the shadow of corporate/governmental America in the second half of the twentieth century. What I learned at Yale is important to the presuppositions that underlie this book. My book is part of the legacy of those members of the Yale faculty who gave me my convictions and the means and courage to express them.”

Clovis Heimsath
Yale 1952
M.A. Yale

Clovis completed a tour as a hydrographic survey officer in the Navy before returning to Yale to earn a Masters degree in architecture. Since then he has managed to blend his academic achievements with his business acumen and family responsibilities. In the reunion yearbook he writes:” We have waltzed through raising five great children, a Fulbright year in Italy, publishing two books, becoming a Fellow of the AIA, teaching at Rice, Texas A & M and University of Texas, together (with his wife, Maryann) running a Texas architectural firm for many decades.”

Three areas of his talents as an architect, artist and author are represented in this exhibit.

As an architect, two goals dominate his practice: first to create spiritual places and second to focus on how people use places. He believes that every building form is defined by user-perceptions.

For forty years Clovis has painted the people and places of Fayetteville, Texas, a German-Czech community of 350 in central Texas where his family has a weekend farm. By adding watercolors to oils he has developed a professional outlet for his art. He creates three-dimensional watercolors of all his new buildings, using a wire-frame underlay as a super time-saver from the old way when perspectives were laid out by hand.

Pioneer Texas Buildings- A Geometry Lesson (1968 University of Texas Press). This book was decades ahead of its time, stressing the geometric beauty of simple buildings and barns across central Texas, years before conservation of Texas heritage was in vogue. It was unique in that it was an architectural book with many pictures, diagrams, and sketches with very few words; children loved it!

Behavioral Architecture - Toward An Accountable Design Process (1977 McGraw Hill) Clovis noted that Behavioral Psychologists talked about people in buildings, but seldom communicated with architects. Believing the profession should focus on how buildings are used by those that inhabit them, he turned the design process on its head by starting the design process with people, not with structure, aesthetics or form. Perhaps after twenty-five years, there is belated interest in this concept now that security has become a design parameter.

Geometry in Architecture-Texas Buildings Yesterday and Today (University of Texas Press 2002) This new book republishes the material from the 1968 book then fills out the book in a seamless way with hundreds of photos of current work by 33 Texas architects that continue to explore and develop the simple geometries and materials of the pioneer heritage.

John A. H. Sweeney
Yale 1952
M.A. University of Delaware

Grandeur on the Appoquinimink: The House of William Corbit at Odessa, Delaware (1959 and 1989). This is the first in a series of publications emanating from research studies in the Winterthur program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. The text of this book was the author's master thesis in that program.

The Treasure House of Early American Rooms (1963 The Viking Press) Introduction by Henry Francis Dupont, Photographs by Gilbert Ask.

A Survey of the Winterthur Museum Collections. (The author claims he has decorated 80,000 coffee tables with this book!)