Kenyon College Alumni Magazine

Robin E. Osler, New York City, started a new position after putting her own firm, EOA/Elmslie Osler Architect, “into sleep mode,” she updates. “I am a principal and creative director at CallisonRTKL, a global architecture and design firm with offices in Seattle, New York, Miami, Dallas, L.A., Chicago, London and China. The New York office is in the Woolworth Tower, so I work in a completely different part of the city from where I have always been. I continue to teach at the Spitzer School of Architecture at CCNY, so I have a full plate. My husband and I also purchased land in mid-coast Maine, where we will be building a house in the next year or two.”

“One knows one has entered the stage of life called ‘extreme’ old age when the daily obituaries, with rare exceptions, are all of persons younger than oneself. How does it feel to be so old? It feels as if the mass of the earth and with it the pull of gravity were gently but inexorably increasing. In spite of age, however, I’m still exercising the intellectual skills acquired at Kenyon more than 70 years ago, especially the ability, picked up from professors Philip Blair Rice and Virgil C. Aldrich, to analyze a philosophical argument and the ability, acquired in three years of study and practice, to read Greek. Specifically, I’m currently co-editing a Festschrift of papers on Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, honoring the distinguished philosophical career of one of my dissertation students, Fred D. Miller. My own paper in this collection will surely be my swan song. Living into a 10th decade seems to require dumb luck as much as anything else, beginning with the luck of being born with good genes to attentive parents. Another bit of my dumb luck was join-ing the Archon Society and moving from Old Kenyon into the army barracks that initially housed the Society, thus avoiding the terrible fire that destroyed Old Kenyon in the winter of 1949. A good friend, Ernest Ahwajee, remained in Old Kenyon and never woke up the morning of the fire. In thinking of Kenyon I always think of the luck that allowed me to have a long and productive life and cut short the life of my friend.”