Celebrating ASU's iconic landmark
Published on
ASU's State Press presented a feature on the history of Gammage Auditorium, the iconic ASU landmark that continues to make up the cultural bedrock of Tempe.
Grady Gammage, the former ASU president and namesake of the building, had a vision for ASU and enlisted his long-time friend, internationally known architect Frank Lloyd Wright, to bring it to fruition.
For the thousands of students and faculty that traverse ASU’s sprawling campuses every day, the auditorium is more than a point of geographic reference. It hosts a variety of music classes and student performances and is an integral part of the University's functions and identity.
To Grady Gammage Jr., Gammage's son and a senior sustainability scholar for the ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, his father's legacy was to be expected of a man who had wholly given himself to the educational institution.
“It came from such humble beginnings as a normal school and a teachers' college, and he’d seen it through all of that. I think he saw (the auditorium) as the next step in that evolution — he saw this as the next step in making ASU something more than it had been,” he said.
Carrying on in his father’s footsteps, the younger Gammage maintains an active role within the University. Aside from his work at the sustainability institute, he is a senior research fellow for Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a teacher in the W.P. Carey Master of Real Estate Development program and a teacher of land use regulation in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.