Fayetteville preservationist, UA professor dies at 88
Posted on Wednesday, November 19, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Dan Ferritor recalls how his friend Cyrus Arden Sutherland showed yet another surprising personality facet during a 1999 university trip to China.
Sutherland, a University of Arkansas professor emeritus of architecture, and Ferritor, a former UA chancellor, were among a group of Fayetteville campus students and faculty on the journey.
“We climbed the Great Wall of China, which was much more of a climb than I thought,” said Ferritor, who is among those mourning Sutherland this week after his death Saturday at age 88 after a long illness.
Ferritor and Bobby Fussell went up first so they could buy T-shirts to present to the hikers when they reached the top.
They expected to see students emerge first — but instead spied Sutherland, his head bent down, leaning forward and charging his way to the top.
“That was just the way he led his life: He put his head down and charged up the hill,” Ferritor said Tuesday. “And Arkansas architecture is better off because Cy Sutherland charged up that hill.”
Whether it was teaching architecture students or leading efforts to preserve Arkansas ’ historic buildings, Sutherland went after things with a passion, Ferritor said.
For Richard Alexander, Sutherland brings to mind the French phrase for a powerful yet unofficial adviser.
“Cy Sutherland was ‘eminence grise’ for historic architecture,” said Alexander, a developer with Alexander Merry-Ship & Alt Real Estate Group Inc., in Fayetteville.
“If you were doing any project of historic significance, at some point during the project you would talk to Cy Sutherland, either for his opinion or his advice.”
Sutherland taught 32 years at the School of Architecture, achieving the rank of “university professor” before retiring in 1990. He was instrumental in saving and preserving some 40 historically significant buildings in Arkansas, UA officials said, and he also designed homes, churches and libraries in Northwest Arkansas.
Sutherland was born Jan. 6, 1920, in Rogers.
He studied radio broadcasting at UA and the University of Iowa before being drafted; he served at the Air Force Regional Hospital in Lincoln, Neb., throughout World War II and was discharged as a captain. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
While working as an architect in Boston, Sutherland met artist Martha Slocum. They married in 1951.
Cyrus Sutherland took a job at UA in 1958, becoming part of an academic team that helped build the architecture program into an accredited professional school, UA officials said. His courses in ancient architectural history were “enriched” by two sabbaticals spent touring the former Roman empire in a Volkswagen van with his wife and three children. Sutherland taught the Architecture School’s first courses in historic preservation.
Paula Marinoni of Fayetteville got to know Sutherland in 1996 when they worked together on the Citizens to Save Carnall Hall group.
“He was an inspiration, in that his passion for historic structures was unsurpassed,” she said, adding that he was in the early group of people who recognized the importance of historic structures and who knew how to save them. People would call him to come look at buildings.
“He would get them on the National Register of Historic Places himself — which is a lot of work,” Marinoni said. In retirement, Sutherland began traveling throughout Arkansas, interviewing homeowners, taking photographs and writing Buildings of Arkansas, one of 50 volumes in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series, UA officials said. Publication of the volume is expected in 2010. UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart said Sutherland cared about students and helped build the School of Architecture into one of the best in the country.
“We’ve lost an icon of the university in the field of architecture,” Gearhart said. “He was an outstanding teacher, highly respected by everyone who knew him, and a good person. I don’t know of anybody who ever said a bad word about Cy.”
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