Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Coe came upon his thesis topic while sketching at Boston's Franklin Park
Zoo. Entering the elephant house, he saw three elephants fighting while
restrained by heavy chains. The scene is as vivid for him today as it was at
that moment:
They were trumpeting and flinging themselves at each other. They couldn't really
reach each other because of the chains, but they were really upset, and the feeling
in the air was just terrible. I asked the keeper “Why are they fighting?” He said
“Because they are chained.” I said “Why are they chained?” “Well, because they
fight.”
He knew then that he wanted to explore behavior as a basis for design. His
faculty advisor was not encouraging, saying that one could not make a
career in zoo design and that, in any case, no one on the Harvard faculty
had expertise in that area. Not dissuaded, Coe found a professor of anthro-
pology, Irven DeVore, who provided him with an extensive reading list.
Coe spent the next nine months working on his own and reading exten-
sively. He submitted a seventy-page thesis consisting almost entirely of
quotations from animal behavior experts. In the thesis, he also proposed
organizing zoos by biomes (bioclimatic zones). Although unconventional,
his thesis and other work at Harvard won him respect, and in 1966, along
with his master's degree in landscape architecture, the School of Design
presented him with one of its three top awards: the Jacob Weideman Fel-
lowship for study and travel abroad.
Later in 1966, unable to find a job designing zoos and unwilling to fight
in Vietnam, Coe joined the Peace Corps with his wife. “I believed in
national service,” he says, “but I wanted to be involved in something con-
structive, not something destructive. And at that point in the war, they
allowed deferments for the Peace Corps. So that was the direction I went.”
The couple had hoped to go to Africa to work on housing, but the Peace
Corps had just closed its African training program. Instead, they learned
Portuguese and were sent to Brazil to organize 4-H Clubs. “As soon as we
got there we jumped ship,” Coe recalls, “and we started working on public
housing, which is an area I had some knowledge about. So we moved into
a favela, a slum area. . . and worked with local people, helping rebuild a dam,
design a school, and plan a small city.”They also did the first site survey of
Glass Falls, the world's seventh highest waterfall, in the interior highlands of
Bahia. The Coes gave their data to Diogenes Reboyas, a university profes-
