It was 4:30 in the afternoon before I met Sven Travis. I sat in a small, grey waiting room next to the water cooler on the 5th floor of the Parsons 66 5th Ave building.
I checked in with the baby faced secretary again around 4:15. After a brief phone conversation, a door opens and a large, tall man emerges to call my name.
This is the man I’ve heard compared to Moses in the world of academic administration. “If a building was falling down he’d know exactly what to do, and he’d be right,” said Charlie Pizzarello, Director of Operations for the School of Art, Media, and Technology. I believe Charlie. He has just the right amount of swagger, accentuated with two gold hoops through his ears.
I’m waved in and ushered into a room with large windows and numerous houseplants populating each table. He immediately excuses himself for a cup of a coffee and I am left alone counting the plants (there’s about ten).
Sven Travis is a busy man to catch. Last week he was in Asia, and although he is back he is never in one place for long. That is to be expected if you are a dean of a school like Parsons.
Travis founded the Design and Technology department in the late 90’s when he was only one of about twenty fulltime faculty members at Parsons. Occupying many positions throughout his 30 year tenure, today he is the dean of the School of Art Media and Technology.
“Perhaps, I was too outspoken about my ideas and they were just like here you do it! I never planned to be here for this long, that’s not how life works,” Travis said, ”It just happened.”
Currently Travis is working on implementing a global design program that would not be centered anywhere specifically but among ten or twelve locations. He is active in China (traveling there a couple times a year), a hopeful contender for the newly developing program. Travis counts, as if on his hand, the many moving parts that constitute his role, “I solve lots of problems, get along with people, I’m really good at initiating new projects, but my biggest job is to be a primary advocate, and be a visionary to a great extent.”
While meeting with NGOs, other universities, and big corporations like the Red Cross and the United Nations in an effort to spearhead the global design program, Travis still manages to find time to teach his classes despite which country he may happen to find himself in. “I was holding a Skype class in Seoul, Korea last week. I didn’t think about it until I realized ‘shit. I have to stay up all night.’ I would be teaching the class 3:30 AM my time.”
The time difference didn’t put a damper on his class as he proceeded to give them a tour of his presidential suite—“I mean what is a presidential suite?”—and tell a joke regarding the time he had been spending in Asia.
“Eyeglasses are cheap in China,” he said. “So I asked my class, ‘You may have been wondering what I have been doing in Asia?’ And then I put on my red [rimmed] glasses!”
Despite his frequent travels to Asia, Travis is still very much the family man. Married for 21 years and living in Brooklyn for 30, Travis is deeply rooted in his adopted home—almost 1000 miles away from his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. Travis never expected to live in Williamsburg especially after being cautioned, “Don’t. Under any circumstances go to Brooklyn.”
Soon after this warning, Travis emerged from the subway station onto the corner of N 7th and Bedford, only to immediately double back for the next train heading back to Manhattan.
“People [were] standing on corners of all backgrounds and races. A very typical Brooklyn street, not what it is now,” said Travis. “‘Oh my god! This is so horrible!’ I remembered [thinking].”
After another day of fruitless apartment hunting in Manhattan, Travis rode the subway again into Brooklyn, and walked the seven blocks to the loft that would become his residence for the next thirty years.
Travis pauses for a moment reflecting on his time Brooklyn and how it corresponds to his time spent working for Parsons. “You got to go with the flow. Got to have confidence in your beliefs. I could be second-guessing myself but I don’t,” he said. “I’m sure I’m wrong a lot, but I think that’s the point is to do what is weird—no, what the weirdest thing possible is—until someone says nu-uuuh.”
Travis hasn’t taken a sip of his coffee yet, it now only wafting faint steam. After a short pause he continues, “There’s a great Talking Heads song that goes ‘If your job isn’t what you love than something isn’t right.’”
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