“Eyes on the horizon all the time.
Think big. Think 40 years down the road.
That’s why I look vacant most of the time.”

From punter to dean

Greenstreet gets to the heart of architecture

By Sean Ryan

Photography by Ray Guansing

Robert Greenstreet spent too much time falling into English rivers during his freshman year at Oxford Brookes University.

The 18-year-old city boy liked to troll the shallow Thames and Cherwell rivers atop flat-bottomed punts, pushing himself along like a gondolier with a long stick. It was a splashy business since no one taught him the craft in his hometown of London. So while he learned a new talent, his books collected dust.

“You can look incredibly good when you are doing it right, or you can look incredibly bad when you do it wrong and fall off, which happens quite often,” he said. “I almost failed my first-year exams polishing my technique.”

Thirty-six years separate the soggy slacker from the 54-year-old man who sits in the dean’s office at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He says he was a scatterbrain then, and he’s a scatterbrain now. The difference is he now has the work ethic to keep up with his responsibilities.

“I am the kinetic type,” he said. “I’m all over the damn place, and I have no attention to detail — no, really, I don’t. It’s not what I do. I do big picture, random connections. That’s the role.”

Greenstreet is everywhere in Milwaukee’s architecture scene these days. He spent 25 years teaching and 16 years leading the UWM architecture school, and many of the city’s most prominent architects are either university staff or former Greenstreet students.

He is in his second year pulling double duty as Milwaukee’s director of planning and design, where he often finds himself grading building designs by former students.

He also moonlights as an author, professional witness in architectural copyright trials and as an arbiter and mediator in construction disputes.

“I like the idea of seeing people and then sort of knowing that you’ve helped in some small way toward their careers,” Greenstreet said. “You’re seeing it now in the city. Our school is still young, and the oldest of graduates are only just in their mid-50s.

“For the school, I like the idea of the generations that are changing the skylines in the towns and villages in Wisconsin. That to me is a powerful concept.”

That’s a lot of influence from an underachieving boy who rose from the streets of South London to join the top 12 percent of England’s youth to make it into a university.

“I don’t think you want to know about my childhood,” Greenstreet said. “I wasn’t a star student. I actually tried to set up an award at my old grammar school for
C-String No-Hoper Who Makes Good.

“I was the classic South London ADD student. I wasn’t really very interested in academics. I had flashes of creativity that were completely let down by a lack of
ability to do hard work.”

Greenstreet said his transition from a punter to a dean began when he met his wife, Karen, as a young undergrad at Oxford. The two moved a few miles from Oxford’s borders to live together in a countryside cottage. That, he said, was when he learned that a work ethic can be useful.

It’s also when he gave up on building design and realized his real interests were in systems and rules. Greenstreet doesn’t look back on his design work or habits with a very generous eye and only introduces his students to one building he helped design when he was 18 in London. And he only uses it for comedic purposes.

“I designed, you know, the gutters and the skylights, and I went back after 10 years to take a look at it, and they were falling with green slime coming down,” he laughed. “I’ll never go back.”

He remembers flipping through Karen’s notes from law school and, much to his alarm, finding himself fascinated. So, after moving into Oxford’s architecture Ph.D. program in 1976, he started looking at how regulatory structures and laws drive building and urban design.

“Paris was created by royal ordinance; it wasn’t created by designers,” he said. “Those nice, big boulevards weren’t there to allow people to come down; it was to allow the troops to come down and beat the people up if they caused any trouble.

“I’m one of the few people who are interested in the process of getting to the final result. I’ll leave the quality of the product to other people. I like to be part of the team that kind of gets things going but pushes further than what maybe you could’ve done before to get a better building.”

While in Oxford, Greenstreet ruminated on the disconnect between the university and the city. The animosity is notorious, and the most dramatic example was the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot in 1355, when university academics and townies started a rumble in the Swindlestock Tavern that escalated into a conflict that left about 100 people dead.

“Oxford was kind of the classic, you know?” he said. “You’ve got big walls and little doors. Oxford is beautiful and you go in, and you look through these little doors and there’s a courtyard and this lovely sort of scholastic calm.

“What is scholastic calm? It was to keep the people out; the riffraff from getting at the students. So the physical creation of the structures essentially determined the relationship, which is, ‘We’re on this side of the wall, and you’re on that side.’”

Young Greenstreet’s concentration on town-and-gown partnerships and regulations became the cornerstone of his contribution to Milwaukee. He said tapping into city government was one of his first goals when he became a UWM associate professor in 1981 after moving to Milwaukee. That ended a short and less-than-agreeable stint teaching at Kansas State University.

He reached at least one of his goals in Milwaukee. He envisioned a university that wasn’t a cluster of buildings and ivory towers, but instead a collection of people who lend their know-how to every level of society.

He said UWM is collaborating with Milwaukee government, businesses and neighborhoods on about 50 projects.

“When Oxford was established, it was just basically scholars meeting usually in bars — nothing changes — and meeting to discuss ideas,” he said. “The university was the people; it wasn’t the buildings, and I sort of still believe that as the ideal.

“The perfect university isn’t one that is necessarily on a campus, but it is in city hall sitting there talking to the mayor. We can, given the freedom of the academy, raise things that are sometimes uncomfortable to politicians. We are an uncertain force out there. You take a certain risk when you ask an academic his or her opinion, and that takes courage, and that takes a kind of sense of adventurism.”

Although he might be a vague figure to people who live outside Milwaukee, he is something of an icon to those interested in the city’s development. Greenstreet won’t take credit for any of this. He is the consummate collaborator, and he said he doesn’t care if his name becomes a lasting legacy in Milwaukee.

“We’re all just players, without sounding too kind of sickly here,” he said. “When you go into what is essentially public service and education, you’ve got to look beyond that stuff.

“You can’t really point at any one thing and say, ‘I did that,’ because there are too many people involved. It’s a good feeling because you can actually lay claim to being part of a lot of things.”

People might see Greenstreet as a man of importance, but he operates without an ego. Judging from his urge to share credit, it seems he wouldn’t accept recognition for tending his yard without saying fellow countryman Edwin Beard Budding should take a bow for inventing the lawn mower.

His belief is simple: Humans create better things when they work together. It goes back to his decision to abandon solo design work for an academic role teaching people and improving the systems that people muddle through to create buildings.

“As a designer, I was a terrible compromiser,” he said. “I hated compromise.

“But as someone who actually now works to enable good design, I understand and I can tolerate and, in fact, accelerate the emotion of compromise much, much more.”

Greenstreet puts his approach into practice every Thursday for the city when architects informally drop off copies of their building designs and a few days later get a critique back from Greenstreet’s team.

“We don’t want it to be where they bring something in and we say, ‘No,’” he said. “We want to start the discussion early and work with them, give them as much help as we can so there can be a partnership.”

He fits his many roles because his priority is partnership. He said he wants to be remembered for good sportsmanship, not winning.

“If you lose a battle along the way, that’s OK,” he said. “You can’t let the trees interrupt your view. You’ve got to take out the noise basically and focus on big stuff. Otherwise, you don’t get things done. Eyes on the horizon all the time. Think big. Think 40 years down the road.

“That’s why I look vacant most of the time.”