the next big one was the AIA national conference, and that was five or six thousand people. That was wild. That was done for a very conservative, sedate professional group that didn’t really know what they were getting into by asking me to be chairman. And they didn’t read the fine print that the chairman actually had power to run the conference.
What did you do? I had no budget, so I had to raise my money personally, because the chairman was really just an honorary position until I did that conference. I decided there would not be exhibits. We would have none of the meetings in hotels. We would have none of the parties or lunches or dinners or balls in the hotels. I would use the whole city as the conference. I got every friend who ran a company or a bank to give me their boardrooms, and I had meetings all over the city of Philadelphia downtown. I closed the movie theaters in the morning and had a film festival. I shot off fireworks on the top of buildings. I had Eugene Ormandy [then conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra] give a concert. It was a wild scene. About two weeks ago, somebody came for a meeting here who had been vice president of the AIA then — I didn’t know
him. It was a group of five of us, it was a heavy-duty meeting, and he started waxing about this conference. It’s actually the first time that anybody’s spoken to me about the conference in 40 years. I thought they had forgotten about it. He said, “Forget about it? We still talk about it.” I thought they hated me afterwards, because I really screwed with them in a way. He said, “They loved it. They still talk about it. They just knew they couldn’t redo it.”
Was there something about conferences as a medium that was drawing you to them at this point in your career? Well, I could look back on it and make up something. If I look back on it and make up something, it’s probably an egomaniacal bent to be on stage. I feel great comfort on stage. But I don’t know if that’s really it. I mean, I’m an architect; it made somebody who had been scared of giving speeches find great comfort in being an impresario. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the ability it allowed me to meet anybody I wanted in the world. So I guess it was very personally driven. It still is. You looked at the announcement for my [WWW.WWW] Conference; you see who the musical directors are: Yo-Yo Ma,
MAKING A FEDERAL CASE: In 1973, Wur- man chaired the First Federal Design Assembly, held in Washington, D.C. Or- ganized by the Fed- eral Council on the Arts and the Human- ities, which is affili- ated with the Na- tional Endowment for the Arts, the con- ference was “the first and only design assembly that the federal government had.”