The problem of education only cropped up in my life due to the war and when we arrived in the United States with excellent introductions and everything else there was absolutely no building of any kind available and certainly it was not available to somebody who suddenly arrived in the scene like myself. We didn't have any money and we had two small boys so I had to get a job at teaching. We went across the United States after having left our two little boys in the care of Walter and Ise Gropius who welcomed us as we came out of Canada and then we set out to look for the kind of place where we wanted to settle possibly and we crossed the whole of the United States and of course thought that San Francisco particularly Berkeley was a wonderful place. I couldn't get a job in the university but Anne McCann Morley was a director of the Art Institute in San Francisco, was running a series of seminars of all kinds and she gave me an opportunity to give talks which were very well attended by the local architects so I met an awful lot of people. The moment of course that one wants to settle on the West Coast you get a call as I did by meeting a professor in Oregon who we were visiting, another friend, a great art historian from Germany who was in Brooklyn College. He'd been assigned the task of finding a new chairman for the Department of Art which he thought was appalling and after we'd stayed in the same house for about three days chatting about this or that he said would you take this job if you were offered it? And I said yes I think I would. So I went back, was given a full professorship immediately and started redesigning this rather poor and typical kind of college art school. What gave me the taste for teaching really was the fact that New York had a very large Jewish minority and as there were only four colleges and very difficult to get into because everybody wanted to get into these and the Jews of course did very well with them. So the four colleges of New York then had the top one and a half percent of intellectual quality in the whole of the United States. So by pure chance I was suddenly given an opportunity to rub minds at this college level with most excellent students and I was so fascinated by the quality of all this that I did it enthusiastically. So we had a very, very good start. It was not in any way a battle for us although at one point we were in fact down to seven dollars before the pay check.

Then the new Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy in Chicago came into trouble in 1946. Moholy was dying of leukaemia. He knew he was dying, so not much more than three weeks before his death, he came down to visit all his immigrant colleagues in New York for farewells and so on. And he had, in the meantime, given me an awful lot of help at one of his summer sessions, because I really didn't have any technology except the Bauhaus foundation courses, which I took with Moholy. Then the committee of Gropius, Hodnett and other people, Sert, recommended me to Walter Paepcke, a millionaire who had been supporting the Institute of Desire. He immediately asked me to come and see him. His first question was, of course I know all about your profession, but tell me, what are your politics? And I said, I'm a socialist. He said, I don't understand that word. So I got again this freewheeling kind of possibility to experiment, do anything.