 It took many of Sauer's fellow practitioners by surprise when he suddenly closed his office in Philadelphia in 1979, giving up a successful private practice and moving on to a full-time academic career as Head of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.Sauer felt strongly about the role of education for shaping future practitioners.He believed that unless architectural schools learned to teach students how to design for increased building performance and to deal with society on realistic economic terms, society would simply deal architects out of the game.