In memorium

A page for Loebs to share tributes to Fellows who have passed. If you would like to contribute a remembrance of a Loeb who died either recently or in years past, please send it to Julie Campoli along with a photograph.

Linda Basset ‘89

Florida Girl, she called herself. Linda Bassett, LF 88/89, died in late February in New Brunswick, NJ. Raised on St. Petersburg’s Treasure Island at her parents’ motel on Sunset Beach, Linda brought to the Loeb Fellowship the best of that place. Its sunshine and warmth and natural beauty characterized both her own persona and her professional passions. “Fantasies of Florida”, a local public tv series she conceived and produced for the Tampa station where she worked before heading to Cambridge, to showcase tales of the state’s panoply of architectural styles, fun and idiosyncratic. The subjects ranged from St. Petersburg’s “Pink Palace” by Henry Dupont to Paul Rudolph’s Sarasota School modernism. 

Her recent pandemic projects showed the same passion. The biggest was to remotely furnish and establish herself in her new condo in a tower overlooking downtown St. Pete’s harbor front and the newly redeveloped Pier Park by Rogers Partners and Ken Smith, site of Janet Echelman’s (LF) “Bending Arc” sculpture. The most surprising, for Linda and her friends, was her deep dive into hand-built ceramic wall sculpture, a consequence of visiting the Magazzino Italian Art museum in Cold Spring, NY where a show of Costantino Nivola’s sculptures and murals triggered a till-then undiscovered talent; she thought big, aimed high, learned fast and made beautiful work.

Linda was a double Doebele, residing full-time in the House as a 1988 Fellow. Near the end of the first semester, she was called home when her father died. She returned as a member of the LF 1989 class and created a bridge between her two classes, many of whom remain strongly connected. With her media expertise she reached out to Fellows in the Kennedy School’s Nieman program for journalists, initiating more lasting individual and institutional relationships. 

Rutgers University was lucky to snag her fresh from her Loeb year and to keep her engaged while her impact and vision expanded steadily during her near-30-year tenure. She had long been an inventive visionary – one of a group of recent college grads who invented and developed a public radio station in Tampa that continues to broadcast - when she began to shape, lead, and inspire creative multi-media teams with challenging communications and community relationship missions. Having a lasting impact on a huge public institution requires extraordinary strategic and diplomatic skills informed by an anthropologist’s comprehension of the goals and motivations of many independent actors with strong egos including three presidents, a plate-spinning genius magician who is fun to work with: Linda Bassett was so-equipped.


One of her first projects for Rutgers University Communications & Marketing earned a NY Emmy nomination for “Work V. the Family: Working Solutions” as Executive Producer. By the time Linda retired in 2017, she had conceived missions, organized inter-disciplinary teams, and produced four major, significant, signature programs that drew upon the university’s strengths in ways that engaged the faculty, administration, and students with the broader community, locally and statewide, enhancing the experience of visiting, studying and teaching at Rutgers while simultaneously rendering Rutgers a desirable resource for every individual and in the public’s perception of the University’s relevance and value. 

  • She invented the Rutgers Academic Challenge to attract high-school students to consider Rutgers for their alma mater, involving a wide range of faculty in creating the challenging content - math, logic, physics, humanities and social sciences – that would put many NJ high school teams in a competition to win a statewide title. 

  • Her President’s Faculty Tour took each year’s group of brand-new faculty members long-weekend curated bus tour of special and peculiar places around New Jersey, fascinating places with amazing people telling their stories, providing a unique immersion, and bonding experience of NJ’s nature and potential.

  • Rutgers Day began with the purpose of making the university more well known to and appreciated by state residents whose state legislators provided significant funding to university operations and facilities. This is its 14th year Rutgers will open itself up for a festive day of public inspection and entertainment, introducing hundreds of faculty, staff and students, farm animals, folk music and academic and athletic programs to hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans, making new friends and future applicants of many of them.

  • Linda’s last creative blast for the university was a massive celebration of its 250th anniversary, the year she retired. One of her characteristically inspired brainstorms, a sculpture of the word “RevolUtionary” (three-dimensional letters R and U in red, the rest in white) so large it required a semi-truck chassis to convey it from community to community with events around the state to herald the huge, public 250th anniversary party, to which all were invited. The sculpture is permanently located at the Rutgers Visitor Center on the Piscataway campus.


In the past few years, Linda’s passion for artfully building community and encouraging the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of an institution and the individuals whom it employs and serves focused on Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ), based on her experience over a decade of being a patient there. As a result of Linda’s engagement with CINJ medical staff and administrators and fellow patients, because of her interest in improving the inevitably traumatic experience of being a patient dealing with a life-threatening health crisis, CINJ now has its first Patient and Family Advisory Council. Linda was its first patient advisor in more ways than one.

Still a Florida Girl, Linda became a Jersey Girl as well.

-Rebecca Barnes ‘88


Donations can be made in her name to support the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey or to Rutgers Future Scholars . For further information, contact Laurie Beckelman’88 or Rebecca Barnes LF ’88.

Rifat Chadirji ‘83

Rifat Chadirji was a Loeb Fellow in my class of 1983. He and his wife, Balkis Sharara, became good friends and we saw each other socially both during the Loeb year and afterward, although we have not been in touch for many years.

Rifat had already had a long and distinguished career in Iraq by the time he was a Fellow. I seem to recall that he arrived in Cambridge in good part due to the help of The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Along with the Bauhaus, TAC was a major influence on his work to rebuild and modernize Baghdad.

The whims of the Baath regime had landed Rifat at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison in 1978, and the whims of Saddam Hussein got him out two years later. For much of that time, Balkis didn’t hear from him or know where he was. Finally, Hussein made him his architectural adviser and tasked him with rebuilding Baghdad as a utopian metropolis in time for a major conference in 1982. Rifat had two choices: accept the commission or stay in prison.

After several years of working for Hussein, TAC helped Rifat to get a Loeb Fellowship. He subsequently left Iraq and lived first in Cambridge and later in London and Lebanon, Balkis’s home country. He continued to work, teach, and figure prominently in his field until his death from COVID-19 on April 10, 2020 at the age of 94.

I remember having dinner at Rifat and Balkis’s home with many distinguished architects, professors, and international experts. Our discussions about Iraq led me to learn about that country, going back to the aftermath of World War I when Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, TE Lawrence, and others were remapping the Middle East. In the 1980s, the US was not yet involved in Iraq, and it was still a functioning country. There was hope that it would become a more democratic society.

Rifat’s family had been prominent in Iraq for generations. His father had headed up the Iraq Democratic Party and his family remained there, active in many aspects of the country, well into the 21st century. I remember being impressed that every morning for breakfast, Rifat would eat dates from his garden in Baghdad. At that time he was still able to go back to Iraq safely.

In 1983, the Loeb Fellowship was less than a dozen years old and it was still being shaped and guided by Bill Doebele and each class of Fellows. Rifat participated in the Loeb activities, but he was obviously not a typical Loeb Fellow and I believe he was the first international Fellow. I don’t think many of the other Loebs got to know him well as he was more in the company of the faculty and leading architects in Boston and beyond.

At the time, one of my clients was the International Design Conference in Aspen. The IDCA put on an annual 5-day event in Aspen, Colorado, about ideas in the context of design. Rifat and Balkis came to Aspen at my suggestion. They loved the town and thoroughly enjoyed the conference, where they were treated as special guests. Thinking back, however, I don’t believe that Rifat was asked to make a presentation—a great loss for the IDCA.

I saw them again in Boston and in New York, but gradually we lost touch when they moved to London. After reading “When Saddam’s the Client”—an article about Rifat in The New York Times—I contacted them one more time and learned that Balkis had died. When Rifat’s death was announced, John Peterson, the curator of the Loeb Fellowship, reached out to see if any of the Loeb Fellows had known him and would write something about him. This is a personal recollection and does not cover his life and work, which many in the media have covered beautifully—especially this obituary.”

After a distinguished career in New York City as a consultant in design, transportation and historic preservation, Alexia (Lex) Lalli is retired and divides her time between Hillsdale, NY and New York City. She remains active in historic preservation, parks, and politics on the Trustees Council of the Preservation League of New York State, Friends of Taconic State Park, and the Hillsdale Democratic Committee, and is active in the Loeb Association at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

This remembrance, written by Lex Lalli ‘83, was posted on GSD News, May 11, 2020