For Rick Haldenby

In 1976 Rick Haldenby joined the faculty of the school of architecture of the University of Waterloo. Three years later he founded the Rome Program that, with the Co-op Program, has become its hallmark. In 1988 he became Director of the School, beginning an extraordinary, quarter century long tenure as a leader in North American architectural education, and as a leader of a school, staff, faculty, alumni, and neighbours devoted to the idea that all of us can contribute to make the world into a homeworthy of our highest aspirations, and that this transformation can begin anywhere – not only in the centre, on the forum but also, fuori le mura, outside the walls, in southwest Ontario.

At the occasion of Rick Haldenby’s Silver Jubilee as Director of and institution that knows its centre to be on a periphery that is only bound by a horizon of possibilities, and its periphery at the on and only centre that contains the mundus, the world, a few dozen of his friends have come together to offer him gifts of recollection, reflection, and above all affection.