He started and ended his teaching career at LSU in the Year of the Fire Horse, an event that comes around only every 60 years. Meet landscape architecture professor and LSU alumnus Max Conrad, who Robert Reich hired to help build LSU’s nationally acclaimed landscape architecture program in 1966 and retired from teaching this year. (He plans on keeping his office.)
LSU’s second-longest-serving professor, landscape architect Max Conrad, retired from teaching this year. His long career traces the outlines of an ambitious America since World War II as science shaped a victorious nation toward the beautiful and the bold—and the better, mostly.
Landscape architecture is not the same as landscaping, Conrad is always quick to explain.
“As soon as you get outside the skin of a building, you have landscape architecture,” Conrad said. “Some people think landscape architecture is only decorative, but that’s like referring to interior design as ‘pillow-fluffing.’ Interior designers are not decorators, just like we’re not landscapers. We deal with living materials and plants… Not only for decorative purposes, but to shape spaces and make them useful as well as beautiful.”
Conrad’s story began in New Orleans, Louisiana, and stretched west to California before he returned home to pursue his bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture at LSU between 1957 and 1961. After that, he was off to Harvard Graduate School of Design, receiving his Master of Landscape Architecture in 1963. Next, he joined NASA at the height of the Space Race, where he drew the original master plan for the two-million-square-foot NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, also known as “America’s rocket factory.” Much of this work relies on LSU equipment and support through its National Center for Advanced Manufacturing, or NCAM.
Now, let’s retrace Conrad’s story.
It is 1948. President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan to help post-war Europe rebuild and recover. The first monkey astronaut, Albert I, has been launched, unsuccessfully, toward space from New Mexico. In southeast Louisiana, WDSU airs its first televised broadcast.
“From the time I was a little kid, I was fascinated by flowers. While we lived surrounded by cemeteries near New Orleans City Park, a friend of the family was living out on Metairie Ridge and had a little farm. He was an accomplished amateur horticulturist, and he would take me to his house where he grew roses.”
“I became fascinated with roses. I started growing them and breeding them—saved what little money I had to buy more. I got very good at it… Eventually, in fifth grade, I won a prize for a rose that I grew.”
“That blue ribbon was my deepest, darkest secret because boys didn’t grow roses, right? I always did stuff that wasn’t boy stuff. Just wasn’t interested, and never played sports.”
“Well, they published the winners in the paper. My teacher saw the article and spilled the beans and outed me… ‘I want to tell the class that Max is in the paper... He won a prize for a rose that he grew...’ I’d been exposed. From then on, I was called Rosebud.”
“When I was a kid, I always loved to get mail… One day, a magazine showed up. Never had one prior… On the back cover, there was an upside-down picture, and the title was ‘The School That Is Upside Down.’ It was Cal Poly, near Los Angeles.”
“At the bottom of the page, they described how the students all learned by doing—build stuff and grow flowers. Ah, flowers… I’d watched, on early television, the Rose Parade. The students would design the floats and grow the flowers and put them on the floats. That’s all it took. I got a postcard and wrote off: ‘I’m interested in your school. Could I come study horticulture and learn about growing flowers?’”
It is 1956. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is reelected and signs the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, creating the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The hard disk drive is invented by IBM. An American Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft makes its first flight over the Soviet Union. In Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens, while LSU and Southern University both establish campuses in New Orleans.
“Cal Poly had two campuses at the time. One in San Luis Obispo, where they didn’t have space for me in the dormitories, and one in San Dimas, where there was space.”
“This was a commuter college. Only a few people were left on the campus on the weekend, while everybody else went home, so the cafeteria closed. The people who had money and a car, they’d go off and buy food. I didn’t, I’d arrived with a bicycle. So, what did I do? The campus was in the middle of orange groves and avocado orchards. You can eat only so many oranges in a weekend, and the avocados weren’t ripe yet. It got to where I couldn’t face another orange… But I discovered that if you lie in bed and don’t move, you don’t get too hungry. So, every weekend I starved, and learned to love Monday mornings.”
It is 1957 and the Space Race begins with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and then Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika on board and no technology available to return her to Earth. IBM sells the first compiler for the brand-new FORTRAN programming language. In Louisiana, Hurricane Audrey demolishes Cameron Parish, killing 400 people.
“Somehow, I made it to the end of the year at Cal Poly, but during Christmas break, when I was able to come home, I thought, ‘Maybe I can’t starve another semester. Maybe I’ll go see about LSU.’”
“I looked at the course catalogue, but LSU offered only general horticulture, not ornamental horticulture… But I kept coming across something in the catalogue named landscape design—it wasn’t called landscape architecture yet.”
“I was told to go see this guy; I thought his name was Dr. Riche, not Reich… He just signed me up! He brought me to the studio and showed me the drawings on the wall that looked very much like my idea of California. I thought to myself, ‘This is it—I’m in the right spot! This is just like Cal Poly, but with food.’”
“But I didn’t notice one little detail. I had to take two years of architecture first… Well, all I could see in my brain was the plants, and that overshadowed everything. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll learn how to draw a house…’ That was my idea of architecture at the time.”
“It was a big class. Must have been 120 people. The other students already knew mechanical drafting, while I knew zero… But somehow, I persevered and learned to like it.”
It is 1961. John F. Kennedy is sworn in as president and launches the Apollo program to land a person safely on the Moon and return them to Earth; Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin shocks America by becoming the first human in space, while Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space not even a month later. In New Orleans, the desegregation of public schools continues with Ruby Bridges spending her first year at William Frantz Elementary.
“How did I go to Harvard? That was luck… It was because Doc—or the Wizard of LSU, as I call him, because he would cast his spell and then you did whatever Doc wanted you to do—he wanted me to go to Harvard.”
“I had no desire to go to Harvard. After graduating from LSU, I wanted to travel, and this LSU architecture teacher I liked very much, Bertram Berenson, found out. He tried to help me. He said, ‘You should go to officer candidate school in the Navy because officers get to travel, and when the boat arrives, you can get off and see things.’ That’s all he had to say.”
“Well, the Wizard of LSU discovered this, and he was a pacifist. ‘No!’ he said. ‘You’re not joining the Navy—you’re going to Harvard Graduate School of Design.’ ‘No Doc,’ I said. ‘I already signed the contract.’”
“Next thing, I get a letter from the Commandant of the Navy. It read, ‘Dr. Reich spoke to us, and we would prefer to have you after you graduate from graduate school. Goodbye.’ So, Doc got me out of a contract with the federal government. Wizard, right?”
It is 1963. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The U.S. and the Soviet Union establish the so-called red telephone, a direct communications link between the Pentagon in Washington and the Kremlin in Moscow. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, and NASA launches the world’s first synchronous satellite, which appears to always stay in the same position in the sky.
“When I was at Harvard, so was one of my classmates from LSU, named Terry Schnadelbach. He had graduated a year after me in architecture and we were both from New Orleans. For Christmas, we borrowed a friend’s car and drove home. After Christmas, Terry said, ‘We can stop in Huntsville and spend the night at my brother’s house. He works for NASA.’”
The design team in NASA's Master Planning Office with Conrad on the far right. Photo Courtesy: LSU
“When we got there, Terry’s brother Bert said, ‘My boss wants to meet you.’ His name was Hannes Luehrsen and we saw all these pictures on the wall of rockets launchers… Luehrsen, who was German, said, ‘Ven you graduate, you vant to come vork for me?’”
“When it came time for me to graduate, Bert said, ‘Send your application in.’ Miracle of miracles, they offered me a job!”
“I ended up in Huntsville in the heat of summer, and for the first time in my life, I could go to the Winn-Dixie store and buy whatever I wanted. That was my big day. Finally, I could have food.”
“Everyone thinks, ‘What does a landscape architect do at NASA?’ But remember, spaceflight starts on planet Earth, not up there, and to build and test rockets, you need a lot of space.”
“Michoud was my first job, my very first. It was a truly giant factory. People who worked there had to run around on bicycles; it was so big. So, you had to have a road. You had to have parking. Simple stuff, but it had to be designed. And Michoud is in a very low area of New Orleans, so drainage was an issue. We needed to figure out how to get the water out.”
“Our job was to design a place that could assemble the future Nova rocket. So, I designed a facility on water where they could assemble the rocket, put the pieces and different stages together, and stand it up. That required a special building, and it had to have a lock. You had to float the barge in and then drain the water out so the barge could settle down within the building. Then they’d flood it again to float the barge out."
It is 1964. The second of two Mars flyby attempts by NASA returns the very first photos of another planet from deep space; the launch of the IBM System/360 enables computing for both commercial and scientific applications, defining the basic unit of memory, the byte, as 8 bits.
“After the Michoud project, I really wanted to travel. That’s when I applied for the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, and in early 1964, I won. I got $3,000 for travel in Europe for at least six weeks. I added my Huntsville savings and ended up traveling for nine and a half months. I circumnavigated the globe; I went everywhere.”
“Eventually, I started getting letters from NASA. ‘We want you to come back.’ I’d just said, ‘Adios!’ when I left, and didn’t want to go back… But I’d already stretched the money as far as I could.”
“It was around that time I started getting offers from Dr. Reich to come teach at LSU, which I also had no desire in the world of doing at the time. All I wanted was to travel, but finally, I told Doc I’d come back for one spring semester to help, just temporarily. That was in 1966, and I’m still here.”