Stoa Magazine: Volume 2

UNIVERSITY of NOTRE DAME SCHOOL of ARCHITECTURE

Volume 02

Student Magazine

Spring 2022

The Stoa Magazine team is especially grateful to the Notre Dame School of Architecture for its continued enthusiasm for and support of our publication. Dean Polyzoides and the rest of the administration remain committed to Stoa’s success and distribution, and have encouraged Team Stoa to continue producing a provocative and elegant magazine for years to come.

Erratum— Stoa Volume I mistakenly printed that Madeline Seago (née Fairman) was the recipient of the RIBA President’s medal; the feature should have instead stated that Madeline was the first entry to the competition from the Notre Dame School of Architecture. Stoa Magazine apologizes for this error.

UNIVERSITY of NOTRE DAME SCHOOL of ARCHITECTURE

Volume 02

Student Magazine

Spring 2022

A Note on Origins Editors’ Note Angelica Ketcham Co-Founder and Executive Editor April 2022

As Team Stoa knows all too well, starting something from scratch isn’t easy. Deciding what our magazine should stand for remains an open conversation. Our first interviews, layouts, and logos were tiny seeds of still-growing strategies, and how they fit into the world of publication let alone the world of architecture is still a question—but one we look forward to answering.

As fledglings entering a complicated world, we have embraced Origin as our keyword for Volume II, and you can see this concept reflected in many of the articles we’re sharing with you this spring. The origin—or re-origin—of a design, of a movement, of a style—can be as small as one simple idea: What if a new leader transformed an architecture school into one that taught Classicism in a time when Modernism was the dominant movement?

What if Notre Dame changed how it thought about its lower-income neighboring city, Gary?

What if students built an affordable house from scratch, instead of wishfully rendering a theoretical project?

What if emerging professionals redefined how to become a licensed architect, beyond the usual internship hours?

What if a New York author reimagined what city planning should prioritize, putting humanity first?

When fellow Stoa founder Xinyuan Samanta Zhuang first contacted me in the summer of 2020, we barely knew each other, but the global pandemic had us both desperate for a new project. Her thought was straightforward, but potent: What if the School of Architecture had a student magazine?

Nearly two years later, this magazine has sprouted into a showcase of unconventional experiences, sage advice, exquisite renderings, academic reflections, and playful lenses through which we’re only too delighted to view the architectural world. Sam was right when she said that this magazine was needed. Origins tend to follow needs, or evolve from gaps, or otherwise find a way of growing in blank space.

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In our second issue, we do not only look backwards, but forwards as well. How does a beginning imply a middle, and ultimately an end? How does a past imply a future?

Stoa’s mission to facilitate new discourse around old values of traditional design demands that we respect our origins while giving them the space to be reinvented: Design principles with an origin in architecture, redefined in the world of furniture.

City planning lessons with an origin in Rome, redefined in Shanghai.

Design rich in organic forms and geometric symbols, redefined in patterns generated by artificial intelligence.

Urbanism with an origin in people-oriented design, redefined in Disneyland.

An old love of creation with an origin in legos and mud, redefined in fantastical cityscapes.

Where we are coming from and where we are going do not belong to two irreconcilable generations, divided by architectural values and design priorities. Our origins and our paths forward are part of the same expanding line: one that connects the ancient architects we study, the Modernists and Classicists who battled before us, the professors that guide us, the alumni that precede us, the new students that look to us, and the future of architecture that we seek to shape.

In this volume, we invite you to be a part of this timeline. Be inspired by the theories and advice of the generation above you. Be proud of the budding design work of the generation below you. Bring your own thoughts to the same table as all of the voices in this magazine, and let’s share a hearty meal.

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Stoa—the student-led, student-designed, and student-edited magazine of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture— serves as a platform for showcasing student experiences, design, research, and writing. By bringing the unique Notre Dame student perspective to broad architectural themes, Stoa acts as a catalyst for mindful exposition and theory for contributors and readers alike. Above all, the magazine cultivates a community for intellectual growth by connecting students, alumni, and faculty, as well as fostering a dialogue with the wider academic and architectural world.

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The Garden

Beyond the School of Architecture

The Garden is a place where the variety of the greater natural world is sampled and carefully arranged to be studied and enjoyed. It is the landscape you wander through on your way in and out of a familiar home, and in this magazine represents opportunities and adventures adjacent to but not directly within the School of Architecture. In this section, we seek to welcome you with a diverse selection of architecture-related experiences in the broader Notre Dame community, academia, and various fields of practice.

Les Ateliers

Studio and Class

The French word for an artist’s studio or workshop, l’atelier is now symbolic of a respect for artisanship, the spirit of group production, and the pursuit of high-quality products in the modern design world. To convey the ambiance of the ateliers, we aim to not only present the thoughtful work produced in studios and classes, but also capture the nurturing, collaborative, and diligent culture present in these spaces.

Le Salon

Interview and Discussion

Le Salon is the place for a cup of tea and a lively conversation. Students, alumni, faculty, professionals, heroes, peers, and neighbors come together around the Stoa table to discuss architecture through the lens of what makes them love it. These meetings are born from and in turn generate the pure joy of sharing thoughts and inspiring intellectual curiosity.

Le Poché

Refined, Structural Writing

Poché in architectural plans and sections refers to the solid space between walls: that structural yet often invisible part that is crucial for understanding an architectural composition. Le Poché unfolds how the solid plans of intellectual spaces are laid out through design research, reexaminations of architectural theories, and intensive studies that look to the past and future.

Il Bosco

Raw, Lively Expressions

The Italian word for the woods, the bosco is the most mysterious and wild part of the villa typology. It is raw, and often unrefined, but is full of fresh air, excitement, and energy—and a strong visual expression. Here, we encourage impulsiveness and creativity in response to any inspiration, no matter how loosely adjacent to the stricter architectural world; we allow new ideas to keep spurring out, like green leaves in the spring.

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This issue of Stoa takes elements from the Erechtheion from the Acropolis of Athens, and composes them as visual highlights throughout the various sections. The original measured drawings come from Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. We hope these elements guide you through the writings and images in this magazine, as their presence in the center of Athens and role in the first expressions of Classicism reflects our theme of Origins.

By digitizing these engravings and incorporating them into our visual design with a youthful twist, we wish to share with you our passion for artisanal quality and the infinite possibilities of architectural details.

Original Text by Xinyuan Samanta Zhuang; Adapted by Angelica Ketcham Digitized by Kalina Jasiak, Joseph Neus and Timothy Tighe

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Contents The Garden Architecture With a Purpose: An Introduction to OBO Finding Your Way: What to Do If You Can’t Find an Internship Health Impacts on the Built Environment: UVA and Hart Howerton Furniture X Architecture

2 6 12 21

Les Ateliers Habitat for Humanity Studio, Class of 2022 COVID, Rome, and the Class of 2023 Professor Mellor’s Graphics II, Class of 2025 Alumni Discuss the China Summer Program Selected Student Theses, Class of 2021

28 36 48 55 62

Le Salon An Interview with Mark Foster Gage In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith An Interview with Anthony Fitheoglou James Steven Curl: An Introduction to the Author

102 116 130 138

Le Poché The Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock Selected Writing from Innovative Tradition How Jane Jacobs Saved New York City Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius Selected Writing from Alternative Modernities

150 164 167 172 188

Il Bosco Lucien Steil’s Capricci Hometown Favorites Rome Dispatch Five-Word Building Reviews Gary, Indiana Architecture Book Recommendations

196 206 210 218 220 236

Acknowledgments

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The Garden Architecture With a Purpose: An Introduction to OBO Finding Your Way: What to Do If You Can’t Find an Internship Health Impacts on the Built Environment: UVA and Hart Howerton Architecture X Furniture

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ARCHITECTURE WITH A PURPOSE

AN INTRODUCTION TO OVERSEAS BUILDING OPERATIONS

by Travis Frame

As we all know, there are a vast amount of opportunities for those who pursue a degree in the field of architecture. Some of which are more direct than others and some may not even know that these opportunities exist. The particular path that I want to highlight is that of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations (OBO) who are in charge of the construction and design of U.S. buildings abroad.

It is a large and multi-faceted branch of the U.S. Department of State that includes people of all professions. Architects, engineers, urban planners, and so many other careers can be found under the OBO umbrella working towards creating projects across the globe. I became aware of this branch of the Department of State through Jason Arnold, Notre Dame faculty member and Managing Director of the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, who had worked with OBO for almost eight years, serving as both a Project Manager and the Director of Architecture.

Within OBO I have worked two different internships with the Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS) internship program, which provides a unique path while still allowing people to follow their love of architecture.

While construction management isn’t for everyone, OBO offers so much more in terms of both internships and careers. OBO is a part of the U.S. Department of State and employs people of all different 2

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educational backgrounds: architects, engineers, and everyone in between can find a home within the organization. However, there are not as many jobs directly under OBO that serve the function of employing traditional architects, and if you want to follow a more traditional design-focused path, you will have to take a slightly different approach. This is not to say that it is impossible; in fact, there are numerous opportunities throughout the country.

OBO and the State Department contract out most of their actual design work to external firms in the United States. These firms present the opportunities for those who want to work within a traditional architecture firm, but maintain the ability to work on projects that service OBO. It may be a secondary connection to the organization, but it has just as much impact and potential.

The work that OBO does is exceptional and the possibilities are endless when it comes to the future of architecture with regards to embassies and other buildings being built abroad.

There are buildings that were built years ago that do nothing to serve or dignify the country they are located within. This generation of architects can work to ensure foreign building projects do not come across as U.S impositions, but rather a safe haven in times of need for those abroad that still respect the surrounding nation and culture. The works of OBO are

also immensely important to the surrounding areas, as they often create a plethora of jobs and can introduce better and more efficient building techniques during the construction period.

These projects are not just symbols for the United States, but are also humanitarian buildings. The work of OBO appeals to me and so many because it is truly architecture with a purpose.

The Garden

LOCATION OF AFFILIATED FIRMS

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Architecture With A Purpose

My internship experience only began to scratch the surface of what OBO has to offer architects.

Due to various clearance levels that exist, some of the deeper information was not available to me or the other students I worked with; nevertheless, the experience was immensely valuable. The first internship with the Bureau over the course of my third year at Notre Dame involved elements of construction scheduling within the New Embassy Compound in Mexico City. The interns worked to evaluate how the pandemic and other unknown factors impacted the predetermined time tables for various elements of the building process,

Interior Perspective, OBO Mexico City

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as well as how we can adjust this in future project management within the organization. There are numerous reasons such as fire sprinkler installation and transportation of materials that can slow down a project. The ability to identify and isolate these issues is essential to ensure the most efficient construction process. In the internship I’m a part of now, during my fourth year, my peers and I have worked to research and evaluate risks associated with various project elements and environmental factors with regards to the Marine Security Guard Housing building being added to the U.S. Embassy complex in Tunis, Tunisia. Through this process

my peers and I determined areas of concern with regards to location, weather, and building use, among many others that would impact design and construction strategies. Both of these projects focused heavily on the construction management and the more technical details of architecture. They have provided excellent exposure to aspects of the real world of architecture such as construction processes and building timelines that we don’t always cover with our studio courses. These internships have also given me a peek into the ocean of opportunities within OBO and their efforts on buildings all over the world.

by Travis Frame

The Garden Above: Section, OBO Mexico City Below: Elevation, OBO Mexico City

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ING YOUR D N WA FI WHAT TO Y: DO I

FY OU

BY KRISTYN AIELLO

CAN ’ T FIN

N A D

IP H INTERNS

Outside of completing a professional degree, the most common career-related concerns of an architecture student are working towards licensure and building a resume with the hopes of eventually getting hired. Traditionally, gaining such experience happens during summer internships within an architecture firm, since at least half of the hours required for licensure must be earned that way. Earning these hours is important, even while still in school, because they may be used toward the completion of the Architectural Experience Program, commonly known as AXP. Completing the program is one of the five steps required for becoming a licensed architect, the others being earning an accredited degree, passing all parts of the Architect Registration Examination (AREs), meeting any additional jurisdictional requirements, which vary between states, and having your NCARB Record transmitted to the jurisdiction where you’d like to be licensed.1 An alternative to the traditional AXP completion process is an AXP Portfolio submission, which requires documented work for at least five years.

There are 3,740 total hours required for completion of the AXP, which are divided among six experience categories: Practice Management (160 hours), Project Management (360 hours), Programming & Analysis (260 hours), Project Planning & Design (1,080 hours), Project Development & Documentation (1,520 hours), and Construction & Evaluation (360 hours). While the majority of these hours will be earned through full-time employment after graduation, gaining experience and earning hours while in school can provide a valuable head start for anyone pursuing licensure. It also makes a student’s resume more competitive when applying for future positions.

However, these opportunities can be notoriously hard to come by. For younger students, it may be difficult to find a firm willing to take on an intern with less experience in design, and often little to no experience in the computer programs that are so integral to most firms’ processes.

Additionally, crises like the 2008 market crash and the recent COVID-19 pandemic can bring extra challenges for students at all levels as firms become cautious about taking on too many employees in an unstable economic environment. Such volatility can result in resumes becoming sparse with some students earning very few hours and the licensing process taking longer. This can be a stressful situation for any student, especially those rapidly approaching their final semesters before graduation.

1 Steps according to the “Earn Your Architecture License” page of NCARB.org. An NCARB Record is where all AXP experience is documented officially.

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by Kristyn Aiello

It’s also important to know that you have options outside of a traditional internship, which can be valuable back-up plans—or even ways to diversify your experience! The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) refers to most of these opportunities as hours gained in Experience Setting O, while hours earned during a traditional internship with an architecture firm in the United States or Canada are gained in Experience Setting A. Experience Setting O can take a variety of forms, and can be used to earn up to half of the total hours required to complete the AXP.2

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So, if you find yourself in this situation, what should you do? First and foremost, do not panic. Your anxiety is valid, but rest assured that you are not the first, nor will you be the last person to have trouble finding an internship for one reason or another.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how some of these alternatives work: OTHER WORK EXPERIENCE UNDER LICENSED PROFESSIONALS: This type of internship can be used to gain up to 1,860 hours towards the completion of the AXP—half of the total required hours! A few different experience formats fall into this category.

The first of these is employment under someone in the United States or Canada who is licensed as an architect in the appropriate jurisdiction, but who is either not practicing architecture, or not working in a typical architecture office. For example, the supervisor could be licensed as an architect but practicing as an interior designer, contractor, or some other field related to architecture. Another example would be working for a supervisor in a university architect’s office. In either case, this supervisor would be responsible for approving your work hours for AXP. The second form this setting can take is experience gained outside the United States or Canada under someone not licensed as an architect in either country, but who lawfully practices architecture in the country where the experience is gained. This situation resembles a traditional internship, but can take place abroad. This is a great opportunity to gain experience while also having a chance to travel to new places—or, for those who are international students, it could be an opportunity to gain AXP hours closer to their hometowns.

The third and final form that this setting takes is employment in the United States or Canada under someone licensed as a landscape architect or engineer. If the latter, the supervisor must be practicing as a structural, civil, mechanical, fire protection, or electrical engineer. Michael Bursch3 gained experience in such a setting, working with a licensed engineer within a concrete company as an engineering detailer. His role involved a deep dive into the technical aspects of concrete construction, including significant CAD work and quality control of concrete assemblies on the manufacturing floor, e.g., measuring cracks and spalling. This experience counted toward his AXP progress and allowed him to showcase a wider range of experiences on his resume. Nevertheless, it presented differently from a traditional internship.

2 Some jurisdictions have additional AXP requirements; check the website to confirm. This is also where hours must be reported within 8 months of completion in order to receive full credit.

3 Michael Bursch is a member of the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s Class of 2022.

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Internship Alternatives DESIGN OR CONSTRUCTION-RELATED EMPLOYMENT A total of 320 hours can be earned toward any of the AXP categories by working in design or construction. The employment must involve some form of the following: • • • • • •

Analysis of existing buildings: Analyzing buildings for code compliance, performance, and more.

Planning: Analyzing and laying out site plans and conditions for a project.

Programming: Determining the types of functions and corresponding spaces required for a building, as well as how they are laid out.

Design of interior space: Interior architecture, including built-in cabinetry and furniture, interior finishes, etc.

Review of technical submissions: Work involving technical specifications for a project.

Management of building construction activities: Construction management and supervision, etc.

For experience in this setting, the supervisor who approves the AXP hours earned does not need to be licensed as an architect, e.g., contractor acting as supervisor. Nonetheless, only hours involving activities that align with the AXP tasks can be counted toward completion of the program.

COMMUNITY-BASED DESIGN CENTER/COLLABORATIVE This setting is one of the few that does not require a paid position for the experience to count towards completion of the AXP. In this environment, a licensure candidate can count up to 320 hours in any of the AXP categories through volunteer service. However, there are several characteristics required of an organization in order for work completed with them to be counted. This includes, but is not limited to, making sure the work is in support of “building design” or “planning” projects. Therefore, it is important to check NCARB’s list of pre-approved organizations to find an eligible group to work with, which can be found on their website.4 One of these organizations is the South Bend Heritage Foundation, whose work is centered on collaborating with various groups (government, other non-profits, financial groups, etc.) to help “enhance the beauty, value, and efficacy of neighborhoods” in a variety of ways, including affordable housing, real estate planning, and property management. Another organization local to Notre Dame is Near Northwest Neighborhood, Inc., which dedicates itself to the preservation and revitalization of local neighborhoods. If your desired organization is not on the pre-approved list, the organization must apply to and be pre-approved by NCARB before any official AXP experience occurs.

CONSTRUCTION SPECIFICATIONS INSTITUTE (CSI) CERTIFICATIONS: CERTIFIED CONSTRUCTION SPECIFIER (CCS) & CERTIFIED CONSTRUCTION CONTRACT ADMINISTRATOR (CCCA) It’s important to note that this setting, i.e., two certifications focused on the construction aspects of the architecture field, applies for AXP hours after: 4 For the complete list, visit: https://www.ncarb.org/gain-axp-experience/experience-require ments/setting-o/cbdc/list

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by Kristyn Aiello

•

Five years of industry experience with two references from industry professionals verifying these years; or Two years of industry experience and the completion of the CDT (Construction Documents Technology) certification.

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•

In short, this is not a setting for gaining initial experience. Nevertheless, the CDT, which is the first step towards earning either of these certifications, can be completed as a college student. In fact, the test registration fee for the CDT is significantly lower for students: $165, rather than a minimum of $375 after graduation. It is also a meaningful certification to have on a resume as it designates that you have “demonstrate[d] knowledge of writing, interpreting, enforcing, and managing construction documents.”5 Lastly, you will be a step closer to completing other certifications for AXP hours, and you’d even have the designation “CDT” after your name before graduation!

Once you qualify through CDT certification and/or experience and references as described above, completing either of the two certifications through the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) earns 40 hours each. The first qualifying certification is the Certified Construction Specifier (CCS), which counts toward the Project Planning & Design category. This indicates a deeper understanding of construction specifications than a CDT, identifying cost-effective and efficient solutions. The second certification is the Certified Construction Contract Administrator (CCCA), which counts toward the Construction & Evaluation category. It indicates a high level of knowledge regarding developing, administering, and enforcing construction documentation.

Though these certifications take longer to achieve, they can be great ways to speed up gaining AXP hours, whether you are working or not.

DESIGN COMPETITIONS Up to 320 hours can be earned toward any of the AXP categories by participating in one or more design competitions. This must be outside of an academic setting or traditional internship environment. The competition submission must be completed under the supervision of a mentor (such as a professor or other trusted advisor with a license to practice in the United States or Canada), and meet the following criteria, per NCARB’s AXP guidelines: • • • • •

Be in alignment with at least one of the AXP tasks Involve a “building” or “planning” project Be a formally structured competition with specified submission requirements Sponsored by a recognized business entity, governmental agency, or professional association Be appropriately credited on the competition entry

While the competition entry is being created, regular check-ins must be completed between the candidate (you) and your mentor. Additionally, the candidate must document the experience through an online system. Then, upon submission, a verification form must also be completed and submitted. Finally, it is important to note that after the submission has been entered and approved by the mentor, all the materials from the entry must be kept on file for at least three years.

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“CDT Overview”, csiresources.org

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Internship Alternatives NCARB’S PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT CE SERIES The NCARB website features a number of Continuum Education (CE) courses online that can be taken for 1.5 hours each in the Practice Management category for a maximum of 10 hours. The courses are free for licensure candidates and members of NCARB,6 and simply entail registration, coursework, and a quiz at the end. Quizzes can be retaken as needed if not passed the first time, however, once the quizzes are passed, credit for the hours are automatically posted to your AXP account. It is important to note that Continuum Education courses taken during the process of completing the AXP cannot be retaken as a CE credit to maintain a license once earned.

SITE VISIT WITH MENTOR This setting is a great opportunity to leverage any chance available to shadow an architect.

This experience involves simply going around with an architect for a day as they visit a site during construction. AXP guidelines recommend taking multiple visits to the same site throughout the construction process, but single visits are also acceptable.

These site visits are not passive experiences for licensure candidates. Instead, mentors and candidates may discuss different aspects of the design process and how specific design challenges were addressed, interact with a variety of people working on the project site (construction workers, contractors, etc.), and generally be able to reconcile construction drawings with their implementation in the field. A total of 40 hours in the Construction & Evaluation category may be earned in this environment.

CONSTRUCTION WORK This setting includes traditional paid roles as well as volunteer work for non-profit organizations. Experience must be overseen by a professional of some variety, e.g., a foreman, project manager, etc.—but this person does not need to be licensed to approve AXP hours. Experience gained by working on a building site for an organization like Habitat for Humanity falls into this category and can be done in most areas of the United States and several locations abroad. For Notre Dame students, taking Professor Mellor’s Building the Affordable House class could be an opportunity to earn AXP hours and credit towards graduation at the same time.7 Michael Bursch, referenced earlier, is one such student who has gained valuable experience in this setting.“I honestly learned more [on the floor],” Bursch stated about his experience. “I feel like I definitely gained a more intimate understanding of how a building is put together, especially about the quality control of the parts and the tolerances of the measurements.

When you’re playing around with stuff at your house, or LEGOs, you don’t think, ‘ok, this.. needs to be accurate within 1/8”, or even 1/16”,’ [like] some of the steel connections. I felt like I really understood, at a higher level, a lot of the building details, especially with the concrete and the steel and the way those welded connections go together, because I’ve held those pieces of rebar and I’ve screwed them into place, and I see where the weld joints go 6 NCARB Membership can be obtained through maintaining an NCARB Record, which is necessary for tracking AXP hours. To get started, visit ncarb.org and click “Start Your NCARB Record.”

7 For more information on this class, see the article in Les Ateliers.

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by Kristyn Aiello

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or where the metal pieces connect for the cranes to lift the precast pieces…I felt like I had a deeper understanding of the more concrete—no pun intended—side of architecture and the building industry.”

BEYOND AXP: STAND OUT ON YOUR RESUME WITH LEED Even though it doesn’t count towards AXP hours, another great addition to any resume is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Associate certification.

Though some people debate the merits and shortcomings of LEED, the fact remains that it’s the current foremost standard for sustainable building focusing on building durably and flexibly to improve the energy consumption of buildings.8 The Notre Dame School of Architecture launched a program this year encouraging students to pursue their certification. They will pay for your study materials and reimburse you for the cost of the exam if you pass. Not only is this certification a great resume-builder in its own right, but it’s also the first step to becoming a specialized LEED AP (Accredited Professional).

This opportunity doesn’t need to wait for summer, though it is recommended to take between 30-60 days to study for the exam and learn the material. However, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the organization that established LEED, does offer a two-week study plan for an additional cost. The test format is 100 multiple choice questions, either taken at a Prometric Testing Center or—at least for the time being—in an at-home, remotelyproctored online setting.

BUILD SKILLS THROUGH ONLINE COURSES If you feel like you don’t have the experience needed for an internship with a firm, especially for the summers after your first couple years of architecture school, you can also work on building skills on your own through online courses. If you’re a Notre Dame student, check out Udemy–you have a free account through the University, and they offer courses helpful for architecture students, including Revit, SketchUp, and more. This is a great way to build your skill set while being able to work at a non-architecture job over the summer!

These are just a few ways to gain experience and build a resume if you aren’t hired for a traditional internship with a firm, or if you’re simply looking for some variety in your AXP experience. Think about what it is you want to learn: do you want to know more about how a building goes together? Try to find work or volunteer opportunities in construction.

Have a passion for sustainability? Start working towards a LEED certification. Want to learn CAD skills early or take your rendering skills to the next level? Try a few online courses.

The sky’s the limit, and there are endless opportunities for you to turn a summer without a (traditional) internship into an advantage on your resume that will make you stand out from the crowd next time you are applying for a job.

8 LEED is the current leading standard for green building design, For more information, visit www.usgbc.org/leed.

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H E A LT H I M PAC T S O F T H E BU I LT E N V I RO N M E N T : A Research Project by UVA & Hart Howerton

by Connor Tinson

BACKGROUND AND DISCUSSION with Tim McCarthy and Jenny Roe:

“90% of your life is spent indoors, whether that’s in a car, in an airplane, or in your house or in your office,” says Tim McCarthy, Managing Principal and Partner at Hart Howerton. The architecture industry has historically primarily focused on the appearance of buildings and, as Notre Dame teaches, Vitruvius’ three principles of firmness, commodity, and delight. Now, we have an opportunity to evolve these principles, concentrating on user-focused performance of the places and buildings we design. The question of how we can use architectural design to improve health outcomes for users has become a major topic of discussion within the architecture field.

In 2012, the University of Virginia Center for Design and Health, in collaboration with the architecture firm Hart Howerton, began studying this topic. The research culminated in a paper: Designing the Healthy Neighborhood: Deriving Principles from the Evidence Base.1 In order to better understand the process of the research, I spoke with Hart Howerton’s Tim McCarthy, the firm’s leader of this team, and UVA’s Professor Jenny Roe, Director of the Center for Design & Health. They explained how Reuben Rainey, another UVA professor, started conversations with the UVA hospital system about ‘healing gardens,’ which evolved in conversations with Hart Howerton’s chairman, David Howerton. This conversation emphasized the relationship “between the built environment and how it impacts both physical and mental well-being,” not just in the medical world but also in day-to-day experiences. When investigating different qualities that may correspond with mental or physical outcomes, the research team read many peer-reviewed journal articles. From this research formulated a list of nine different principles that correlate with improved health outcomes: smart location, integrating nature, mixed uses within a relatively compact area, mixing up a variety of housing types and tenures, circulation alternatives, pride of place, providing access to healthy foods, lifelong learning, and sustainable development.

This research brought both positive results and open questions. Despite not determining causality, the team was able to use peer-reviewed research journals to determine how the built environment impacts health outcomes—impacts that architects can share with clients, hopefully resulting in an accelerated absorption of healthy practices into the marketplace. Historically, clients have paid a premium to experience a location that is considered more healthy. The goal of new research will lead is healthy practices being widespread and the default for all projects, not just for the wealthy and privileged.

An acknowledged “next step” associated with the published research thus far is developing a more direct, succinct formula that will definitively result in improved health benefits. Currently, many of the standards for building quality, such as indoor air quality, have been focused on minimum standards.

1 Bassett, Ellen M., McCarthy II, J. Timothy. “Designing the Healthy Neighborhood: Deriving Principles from the Evidence Base” Harthowerton.com. Hart Howerton Ltd. in collaboration with University of Virginia, October. 2014. Web.

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by Connor Tinson

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With the amount of time spent indoors during one’s life, there is hope that standards will mature, leading to benefits that can “tackle both respiratory illness as well as create other incredibly positive social outcomes for the people who are indoors for most of the day,” including engaging more with nature, which is what our species has evolved to require. McCarthy emphasized that through strategies such as forest bathing—the act of immersion in the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest—we have “the opportunity to reengage with who we are, physiologically how we engage with our environment, and have evolved to engage with our environment. And to now do that in a designed way, I think, is incredibly, incredibly rich and powerful as a thesis for design moving forward.”

Jenny Roe, a professor originally from the United Kingdom, describes herself as being on the “cutting edge of the research on how we design for health and wellbeing,” focusing on the relationship between place and mental health. This is a relationship that is especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which created an increased demand from the public for “better quality of living, both in our own homes and in our outdoor settings, because the outdoors became a stage in which we would socialize safely and meet with our friends and neighbors” and we began to spend even more time in our own homes. Because of this, there is an increase in cities that are changing the physical built environment to promote active transportation and interaction with nature, removing automobiles while maintaining transportation for children, older people, and those unable to walk or bike—such as Paris, France; Oslo, Norway; and Portland, Oregon. We are, as Roe states, “at a very, very interesting time, because we’re on the cusp of a huge change.” Mental health currently lags behind physical health in urban design, this is starting to change as mental health becomes the number one priority moving forward for those at the forefront of healthy and sustainable design. This is a long-needed and awaited change, of which Roe said, “I’m sorry that it took a pandemic to make that realization happen.”

These conversations helped to provide a background of the creators’ hopes for the Hart Howerton and UVA research project and publication. In the remainder of this article, the nine principles the paper outlines will be examined to help answer the question of how we can use architecture to improve health outcomes. From now on, all quotes and references in the following sections are from Designing the Healthy Neighborhood: Deriving Principles from the Evidence Base unless otherwise noted.

P R I N C I P L E 1 : S m a rt L o c at i o n Smart locations “locate new development adjacent to existing development, or close to existing infrastructure, especially transit.”2 These developments are especially helpful in preserving natural habitats and ecosystems, the presence of which translate to positive health impacts. The reduction of dependency on automobiles—in part thanks to more accessible public transit alternatives and sheltered transit shops that are more inviting and well-lit—lowers the amount of undeveloped land converted to blacktop and concrete through roads and parking lots. This has a positive impact on air quality (reducing the rate of respiratory diseases like asthma), protects natural habitats and biodiversity (sustaining microclimates, maintaining mature tree canopies that keep the air cleaner and cooler, and allowing for continued natural filtration of water in wetlands), and promotes physical activity due to increased utilization of walking and riding bicycles (keeping all income groups in the area in shape and helping with successful aging). For older adults, the accessibility to increased transit options can help mitigate the loss of independence, allowing them to be more active and decreasing their chance of health issues, such as depression.

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P R I N C I P L E 2 : I n t e g r at e Nat u r e Conserving natural vistas and sensitive habitats within and near a community is a crucial step to not only protect the environment, but also promote physical and psychological well-being. Integrating trails and open spaces in these natural areas allow for active and passive recreation, allowing for calming experiences while protecting contiguous habitat and wildlife corridors. Additionally, integration of public green spaces for physical activity leads to “numerous health benefits including positive effects on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, depression, and different types of cancer.”3 Green exercise—or activity in the presence of nature, such as gardening, cycling, horse-riding, fishing, boating, and farming—results in “significant improvements in measures of self-esteem and total mood disturbance” for all participating, even in examples of short term exposure.4 People living within a three-kilometer radius of green environments report better perceived health, including being less affected by stressful life events. For these impacts to be most effective, however, there must be a high quality of green space with a wide range of uses. The concentration of plants and birds have been found to have a strong association with positive well-being measures, as have open spaces described as “serene.” Unfortunately, there are inequalities between benefits experienced by people according to characteristics like gender, age, socio-economic status, and place of residence. Studies from the Netherlands suggest that residential green space is more beneficial for the young, the elderly, homemakers, and those of lower socio-economic status. A study from the United Kingdom emphasized a gender difference: women and those who present similarly to women do not experience the same decrease in cardiovascular disease and respiratory mortality as men gain from green urban wards. This disparity is likely due to concerns regarding safety in public parks, which causes them to be “less willing to use green spaces for vigorous activity.”5

P R I N C I P L E 3 : M i x Us e s Providing a mixture of building uses within a relatively compact urban area better serves the daily needs of a community and the wellbeing of residents, this can be achieved through zoning like form-based codes that facilitate engagement and positive health impacts. Generally, the types of mixed uses are residential, commercial and business, and industrial uses in an adjacent area. A combination of these within close proximity decreases travel distances and increases reliance on non-motorized mobility options. A decrease in the number of automobiles not only makes it safer for pedestrians, but also lowers air pollution and improves water quality. Concentration of diverse activities and destinations increase social interaction by people who otherwise may never interact. The increase in “eyes on the street,” as Jane Jacobs describes it,6 improves mental health by decreasing isolation, encouraging feelings of safety, and reducing stress.

Physical health is also improved with increased activity and active transportation. The more sprawl—or decreased mixed use—a location has, the more residents experience small but significant negative “associations with minutes walked, obesity, BMI, and hypertension.”7 Neighborhoods that emphasize walking for transportation are found to have a higher association with positive health impacts than those that emphasize walking as exercise. Measures of mixed land-use have also highlighted that when a combination of more public open space, sporting infrastructure, and rural land uses were included, more recreation and transport walking was reported. Both elderly and young people experience positive impacts from the increase in walkability in their neighborhood. Older adults utilize transport activity more frequently, and older children and adolescents exercise more outside of school in dense urban areas and neighborhoods with higher levels of mixed land uses. The promotion of self-transportation and decreases in safety concerns lead to positive health impacts.

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Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 44 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 45 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 46 See: How Jane Jacobs Saved New York City on page 172 of this issue.

Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 52

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by Connor Tinson

Human health can be enhanced by utilizing a variety of housing types and tenures within residential developments, and encouraging attainable housing for everyone within the community of all backgrounds and ages. Currently, the majority of the United States discourages multifamily housing, such as duplexes and “granny-flats,” through zoning policies banning such residences that were created to increase segregation after the policy of redlining became illegal. The result of these policies was racial and income-segregated communities. This can be changed through methods such as inclusionary zoning, which encourages affordable housing as part of development (with “density bonuses” as an incentive). It also includes allowing secondary housing units within existing neighborhoods which can promote multi-generational living, and adopting a universal design standard in home-building which would lessen obstacles for proactive disabled buyers.

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P R I N C I P L E 4 : M i x I t Up

Increasing affordable housing options in high or mixed income neighborhoods deconcentrates poverty, increasing access to “jobs, educational facilities, social services, and other amenities such as higher quality, safer built environments” that are normally not found in low income communities. Mixing housing types (such as single family, multiple family, duplexes, or studios) and tenures (such as rental or ownership), ensures that incomes within new communities are also mixed, lessening the concentration of poor communities which contribute to poorer health.8 As a part of this, moving to higher opportunity neighborhoods improves mental health. Parents who move to low-poverty areas experience less distress than those remaining in high-poverty areas, while their children, especially boys, report significantly less anxious, depressive, and dependency problems than those in public housing. For adults in general, those who move to low-poverty neighborhoods are “less likely to be exposed to violence and disorder, experience health concerns, or abuse alcohol” than if they were to remain in high-poverty areas.9 Currently, there is an increase in demand for multi-generational housing. Three factors that contribute to this are increased life expectancy, immigration, and differing fertility rates. This has generated an increased diversity, and a change in preferences and social norms, which has in turn led to an increase in advocacy for more flexibility in housing designs and zoning standards that will help older adults to live with, or near, their children and grandchildren. For adults, living within a larger family unit helps increase continuous social contact, reducing isolation and improving their mental health. Additional concerns such as mobility, reliably healthy nutrition, and preventing accidents can be better addressed when living among multiple generations.

Younger generations also see advantages, such as being more easily able to care for older parents, and having their children be taken care of by the elders in the family unit. The combination of these impacts show how mixing up housing types provide physical and mental health benefits for all involved.

P R I N C I P L E 5 : C i r c u l at i o n A lt e r n at i v e s Active transportation, or walking and biking with a utilitarian purpose, has been found to have a positive impact on health, reducing the risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and general mortality. Steps to obtain this include creating obstacle-free, ADA-compliant sidewalks that are a part of a larger mixed use network.

This network must be wide enough for traffic, while providing adequate lighting on walkways and keeping pedestrian pathways separate from vehicular roadways. This separation instills a feeling of safety and accommodates cyclists alongside motorists. Today, as people reach adulthood, particularly in America, they are less interested in lives that revolve around the automobile than previous generations. Instead, many want to live in places where they do not need cars and instead can walk, bike, or take good public transportation to work. To help communities promote walking, studies suggest that sidewalks must be included alongside roads, a practice that disappeared in many car-dependent developments starting in the 1970s.

Studies have shown that having sidewalk-lined streets within one kilometer of home provides small, but still positive, increases in exercise walking. However, sidewalk proximity generally does not lead to an increase 8 9

Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 58 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 58

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Health Impacts on the Built Environment: UVA & Hart Howerton in recreational walking, but instead increases active transportation. These improvements “could potentially improve health and reduce disease burden and health care costs.”10 Additionally, the more amenities, such as benches, shade, and bathrooms, there are along sidewalks, the more people will be willing to use the paths.

For those who prefer to ride bicycles instead of walking, the increase in bicycle infrastructure in American cities has been massively beneficial. The existence of roadside bicycle paths (used primarily for commuting) and off-road bicycle paths (used primarily for recreation) “provide safe and convenient [locations] for individuals to be physically active.”11 The choice of which type of path communities invest in directly impacts who receives the health benefits. Bicycle commuters are overwhelmingly male, while women and children, and other recreational users, benefit more from off-road trails. On-road trails are associated with active commuting and higher levels of fitness in both men and women, resulting in a forty percent decrease in mortality rate for all bikers and lowering health issues in men. Bike lanes are one method which help increase bicycle commuters. To make these routes safer, bike boxes, cycle tracks, and buffered bike lanes can be used.

Increasing bicycle lanes and paths, as well as making on-road ones safer due with barriers and protections such as buffered bike lanes, will help increase positive health effects for all who may ride bikes in a community.

PRINCIPLE 6: Pride of Place The amount of social interaction people have is essential, especially since “people with strong social networks… have mortality half or a third that of people with weak social links.”12 The strength of community gathering spaces and everyday public spaces, such as neighborhood parks, helps to foster social capital, a resource that can literally save lives, as shown in the survival statistics from the 1995 Chicago heat wave, and human health. This can be achieved by designing in a way that enables social interaction within high quality public spaces. This can be promoted further by involving soft programming (such as festivals, fairs, and seasonal attractions) in public spaces that encourage the community to interact on a regular basis. Public plazas and civic squares, as well as neighborhood parks and shopping streets, are examples of community gathering places that are beneficial to health by facilitating physical activity, improving the quality of the local environment, and encouraging social interaction.

The best public spaces are the ones that are well-used by a wide variety of people, generating social capital.

Statistics compiled during the heatwave show that while those who died were disproportionately low-income and minority communities who could not afford air conditioning, people among these groups who had strong social connections (such as living with a large group of people) had much lower death rates than those without strong social capital (such as people who were living alone and who lacked a strong connection to the local community). Smaller parks, urban green spaces, and ad-hoc community gathering spaces have similar benefits—they foster community connections, sparking that crucial social capital. In addition, older users find benefits of “rest and restitution,” making it important for urban designers to include small parks or green belts in their projects.

The quality of parks and public open spaces, frequency and duration of visits, and engagement in social activities in these places have been found to have associations with the extent of a neighborhood’s social ties as well as improvements in wellbeing. Some prefer to be alone in such spaces, while many others prefer the social value’s benefits of alleviating stress and maintaining health and well-being. The two types of social capital—bonding (ties between similar interests and demographics) and bridging (ties between diverse groups)—both lead to a sense of pride and community spirit. When residents are proud of their local community, they have increased levels of volunteering, participation in local civic groups, and shared concern over property investment and upkeep. Additionally, they have the embedded benefits of being able to rely on others for help in times of need. Trust in others and social institutions are critical in the development of these reciprocal relationships. When neighborhoods are cohesive through high social capital, it is easier to lobby against inequities, and fight for better policies and services.

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Hart Howerton: Design Metholodology the University of Virginia’s Pavillions Principle I: Smart Location Preserving habitats and biodiversity, through environment-conscious design, produces positive health impacts. Additionally, promoting safe alternatives to automobile-based transportation —such as be er lit paths for walking and biking or shelters for public transportation—helps to preserve the environment, helps people stay in shape, and increases accessibility.

Principle III: Mix Uses

Principle II: Integrate Nature

Seen frequently in older cities and communities, the concentration of mixed uses within a community be er provides for the daily needs of residents and facilitates positive health impacts.

An important component of this development style is removing or evolving strict usage-based codes to promote “Smart Growth” zoning and a mixture of commercial, recreational, medical, educational, and residential uses within a community.

Proactively utilizing the integration of nature in design, including through diverse landscape experiences and passive and active recreation, promotes be er physical and psychological health at the community scale. Additionally, wildlife and contiguous habitats corridors must be protected through open space systems.

Principle IV: Mix it Up Principle V: Circulation Alternatives Designing a community to support active transportation, or to be bike-able and walkable, has a positive impact on the health of the people that experience that place. Properly lighting and protecting pathways, providing ADA compliant sidewalks as a part of utilitarian and recreational networks, and ensuring roadways accommodate all forms of traffic, motorized and non-motorized, are all methods to accomplish the positive effects of active transportation.

Having a diverse range of housing types, tenures, and incomes in a community helps to increase inclusivity and enhances human health. Ensuring homes are accessible allows disabled residents to have fewer obstacles in purchasing and living in a neighborhood. Additionally, allowing for inclusionary zoning that promotes affordable housing and the ability to develop secondary housing units allows for a greater range of people and generations to live in a community.

Principle VI: Pride of Place Principle VII: Provide Access to Healthy Foods Access to healthy food is essential to wellbeing, especially in places known as “food deserts.”

Those locations require the integration of fresh fruits and vegetables in the built environment, such as through urban agriculture, community or backyard gardens, increasing the number of fruits and vegetables in markets and stores, and city investment strategies.

Public spaces are essential to the social and human health wellbeing of community members.

Designing communities to promote social interaction in high quality spaces and encouraging so programming, such as seasonal a ractions and fairs, encourage community participation and interaction which improves social capital and the health of community members.

Principle VIII: Lifelong Learning Principle IX: Sustainable Development Integrating sustainability in all aspects and scales of development can help human and environmental wellbeing. Using programs such as WELL and LEED as guides are good tools to help measure and enact successful sustainability in both community and individual development.

Lifelong education is important for positive health impacts for people of all ages, especially the youth and the elderly. Integrating educational facilities for multiple age groups in residential development and locating schools in locations accessible through active transportation routes are influential ways to promote positive health impacts.

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Public space-borne social capital is claimed to have linkages to health, but there needs to be more research on this topic. With that being said, studies mentioned in the Hart Howerton and UVA publication note that, in addition to lowered mortality rates for those with high social links, low control at work and low social support have a correlation with coronary heart disease. The positive effects are still being researched, especially to see the differences between key demographics such as gender, race, age, and income.

P R I N C I P L E 7 : P r o v i d e A c c e s s t o H e a lt h y Fo o d s Access to healthy food is essential to wellbeing, especially for communities with poor food access, also known as food deserts. These places require sources of fresh fruits and vegetables to be integrated into the built environment—through food policy councils, land use policies, and city investment strategies and provisions for agriculture. Community gardens offer the opportunity for local residents to gain an agricultural education, grow food for themselves and the neighborhood, and strengthen bonds with their neighbors. These types of gardens also help to combat the heat island effect and absorb water, which can mitigate flooding. Other farm types are now being approved within city limits, with some places even approving livestock production.

These gardens, along with the development of municipal or neighborhood farmers’ markets, are encouraging local spending and helping those in food deserts have improved access to fresh, healthy food. Intriguingly, those who participate in community gardens consume fruits and vegetables at a higher rate than those who have home gardens. The benefits of community gardens do not stop there: they have a strong relation to health benefits, such as increased physical activity and improved mental health. Community gardening in lower income communities has a strong impact on leadership too, leading to other issues in the neighborhood being addressed more so than would occur without gardens or in higher-income communities.

Just being in proximity to neighborhood stores and markets that sell fruits and vegetables, as opposed to fast-food restaurants, has been associated with an improved diet and a lower prevalence of obesity in adolescents and adults. The promotion of healthy food alternatives in corner stores, as well as having additional types of fruits and vegetables available, leads to an increase in sales for healthier products. Those who are a part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are more likely to buy fruits than those who do not receive SNAP, showing that government programs can help ensure healthy eating among all communities, especially people with low incomes or who live in food deserts.

PRINCIPLE 8: Lifelong Learning While many may think of education as something for children and non-senior adults, learning at all ages helps facilitate positive health outcomes. By integrating educational programming into residential areas and facilities and ensuring schools can be safely accessed by active transportation, more people can engage in continued learning. Access to education, particularly lifelong education, has a beneficial impact upon human health. Educational attainment, which is education separate from its relationship to income or occupation, is linked with lower obesity and morbidity rates, lower likelihood of smoking or abusing alcohol, and longer life spans. This is particularly impactful when there is a greater educational advantage in youths, leading to better lifelong health and a decrease in health-induced work limitations. For aging populations, the mental stimulus, social support, and continued employment opportunities that continued education provides play a strong role in what many consider “successful” or “active” aging.

There has been a significant decrease in the number of students who walk or ride bicycles to school within the United States,” going from 48% of children five to fourteen years old in 1969 to 13% of the same age group as of 2009.”13 A large component of this is driven by design decisions of schools and urban planners such as schools being placed towards the periphery of urban areas instead of near residential areas, the removal of bicycle racks at schools, and parental fears over safety and crime along the routes needed to be taken to 13

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by Connor Tinson

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school.14 This decrease in active transportation limits the ability for children to get the amount of exercise they need, especially with the disinvestment-driven decrease in physical education courses in US schools. It is important to note that American rates of active transportation to school are drastically lower than other nations, such as New Zealand—which, according to a 2011 study, has an active transportation rate of at least 42.2%—highlighting a systemic issue that needs to be addressed by architects and urban planners across the country.15 While lifelong and adult education has not been studied as much, connections have been found between continuing education and “feelings of greater self-sufficiency and health.”16 This includes recovery from mental health difficulties and the ability to cope with physical health issues. Community halls and facilities are essential resources for local residents, particularly older adults, which local and federal governments must continue to fund and protect them from disinvestment and decreased programming. Additionally, a great way to help ensure multigenerational and continued education is the development of mixed use communities. They promote the interaction of those of different life stages, backgrounds, careers, and interests, increasing curiosity and learning among all residents.

P R I N C I P L E 9 : S u s ta i n a b l e D e v e l o p m e n t The previous eight principles, when carried out to their full potential, require the usage of sustainable development, such as low-impact development and green building technologies. Recently, with the development of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which spawned the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the field has started to “quantify the rules of green building,” as McCarthy states. These criteria result in positive benefits to both the ecosystem and human health, and can be tracked through USGBC programs such as LEED and WELL. LEED and the USGBC started with a focus on how buildings performed. Over time, they matured into an understanding, an appreciation, and a measurement of statistics from a collection of “green” buildings and how they perform, and now are used to certify the green performance of buildings. While LEED and the USGBC focus on performance of buildings, WELL, the International WELL Building Institute, and their competitor “Fitwel” are encouraging the evolution of these measurements to include the people within the buildings. This recognition of the importance of indoor environments on the health of people and the general population will be crucial in peak sustainable development and design.

Techniques associated with sustainable design and infrastructure, in addition to those mentioned in previous principles, include low impact development techniques for stormwater management, renewable energy, green buildings, passive heating and cooling, using local materials, maximizing daylight, investment in natural systems like street trees, nature-mimicking or enhancing systems such as permeable pavements, and green roofs. A major aspect of health-focused design that sustainable design can contribute to is improving indoor environmental quality (IEQ). When air quality is poor, it can negatively affect occupants’ mental and physical health, resulting in respiratory illnesses, heat effects, depression, and stress.17 Certifications such as LEED are helpful in green design, but at times can become a checklist for places to meet a minimum standard while not truly focusing on occupants’ wellbeing. This includes instances of focusing solely on energy efficiency, sacrificing a focus on health, and resulting in poor ventilation and poor IEQ. People- and nature-focused implementation of LEED and WELL certification guidelines do provide strong positive impacts, reducing absenteeism and improving mental and physical health. Thus, sustainable design is crucial for positive health impacts but also must be implemented in a way that focuses on the people interacting with a location, not just going through a checklist.

14 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 91 15 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 92 16 Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, p. 92 17 Poor IEQ primarily occurs through five pathways - “1) poor air quality, 2) extreme temperatures, 3) excess humidity, 4) insufficient ventilation, and 5) inadequate lighting, acoustics, and ergonomic design” (Designing the Healthy Neighborhood, P. 98)

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C O N C LUS I O N : M o v i n g Fo rwa r d Sustainable and healthy design has evolved rapidly over the past few decades, with research leading the charge to transform the field of architecture. The influence that architecture and the built environment has on the physical and mental wellbeing of its occupants is something that has recently gained more solid data. Researchers and designers have now been able to figure out what steps can be done to design with the wellbeing of others as a priority, such as the nine principles that Hart Howerton and UVA have described.

Today, more and more firms are understanding the importance of sustainable and healthy design, enacting strategies and tools such as biophilia, sustainable systems and materials, renewable energy sources, and a more rigorous adherence to LEED and WELL parameters. As this focus continues to grow over the coming years and decades, the architecture field must make sustainability and positive health impacts a core value, as well as fighting climate change and a history of housing segregation and inequality. Through this, we can ultimately achieve the goal of everyone being able to live, work, and interact in places designed to improve their wellbeing.

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by Jennifer Trzaska

Furniture design is architecture’s sibling; it is based on the same principles, displays the same human proportions, and many times involves the same artistic minds. Throughout all of architectural history, great architects did not limit their designs to only the buildings; they always saw the allied arts as an extension of their vision. Recent architects are no different, many taking up furniture design as an extension of their architectural practice. The links between furniture and architecture are numerous, but each architect pursues furniture design for a different purpose.

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FURNITURE X ARCHITECTURE horizontal lines. The dining room’s table and chairs are similarly styled, reflecting the home’s facade throughout the living space. Wright uses furniture in this way in all of his projects, carrying themes and even materials from each building’s exterior into the interior elements.

Frank Lloyd Wright is known for his unique and progressive style from the early 20th century. His emphasis on contextual and geometric integration separated him from his peers and made him unique among any architects prior to or since. His innovative style did not end with his architecture; he designed each and every element of the finished building to ensure that the project stayed true to his vision. Everything, from the architecture, to the furniture, to the fabrics, to the accessories, was an integral part of the design. Wright went so far as to design the dinnerware in some of his residences.

Wright’s furniture mimics his architectural emphasis on tectonics and building crafts, as well as organic elements that imitate the surrounding landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Hyde Park, Chicago, is characterized by its strong cantilevers and harshly defined vertical and

Dining room chair from the Robie House in Chicago, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Furniture X Architecture

LeCorbusier took a different approach to both architecture and furniture design throughout his career. Focusing mainly on pioneering what is now known as the modernist style, LeCorbusier rewrote many architectural principles. He created his own architecture manifesto, defining what makes a good building, as well as designing a new human-proportional system to base his designs: the Modulor Man. LeCorbusier applied these principles not only to his architectural designs, but also to his furniture collection: LC. One can easily see the correlation between Le Corbusier’s manifesto and his architectural

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and furniture design work. In his chair design, for instance, the legs serve as pilotis, the metal bars wrapping each chair divide it horizontally similar to horizontal strip windows, the even top plane becomes a functioning surface mimicking LeCorbusier’s flat roofs being used as gardening terraces, and the universal design allows the chair to be flexibly used in any room or situation just as the free plan allows flexibility in design.

Less obvious is the relationship between the chair collection and LeCorbusier’s Modulor Man. The Modulor Man, though classically pictured standing with one outstretched arm, was also pictured

by Jennifer Trzaska

The Garden

and proportionately designed in both seated and reclined positions, which were the basis for all of LeCorburier’s furniture designs. Furniture and architectural designs need to be based on the human proportion as they are only successful in their design if they adequately provide for the human need they are to fulfill. If one understands furniture design and can address human needs at that intimate level, they can scale up and understand architectural design as the roots for both designs are the human body.

LC2 armchair designed

by Le Corbusier.

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Furniture X Architecture

RED BLUE CHAIR

Above: Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair.

Right: Exploded axonometric drawing of the Red Blue Chair.

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by Jennifer Trzaska

Rietveld’s architecture uses the same properties as his furniture. His designs retain simplicity with right angles, flat roofs, and only square and rectangular forms. However, they achieve a complex reading due to the layering of elements

and sporadic introduction of color. The extension of elements past their required dimension, like columns and overhangs, adds increased complexity and creates strong axial emphasis. Rietveld’s buildings and furniture pieces are united by their shared proportion and composition roots.

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Gerrit Rietveld is perhaps more well known as a furniture designer than as an architect: his Red Blue Chair is arguably the most famous piece of modern furniture design. His furniture design centered around both abstract and exploded geometries while exploring simplicity in construction. He knew mass assembly would take his furniture success to a new level, so Rietveld created all of his complicated forms using only simple shapes and pieces that could be easily produced and assembled.

He coupled these design features with the use of color to create furniture that was visually exciting to users, in addition to being functional.

Architects today continue to expand their artistic portfolio with furniture creations. While the two subjects do not compare in size or use, the founding principles of architectural and furniture design are very similar. Furniture design gives architects an additional creative outlet and an opportunity to experiment with new styles and ideas. It gives architects the opportunity to complete their full vision of a project, from the smallest to largest detail. And furniture opens the doors to an extended impact architects can have on the world around us.

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Les Ateliers Habitat for Humanity Studio, Class of 2022 COVID, Rome, and the Class of 2023 Professor Mellor’s Graphics II, Class of 2025 Alumni Discuss the China Summer Program Selected Student Theses, Class of 2021

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Habitat for Humanity: Spring 2021 Featuring the Class of 2022

by Hope Halvey, Naomi Hernandez, and Jennifer Trzaska

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by H. Halvey, N. Hernandez, and J. Trzaska process. Professor Mellor, with the help of other faculty in the School of Architecture, paired up with the Mishawaka Chapter of Habitat for Humanity in order to do the “build” part of the studio.

This symbiotic relationship between Habitat for Humanity and the School of Architecture allowed students to gain experience with the entire construction process while contributing their time, effort, and skills to Habitat for Humanity at no cost to the organization.

Les Ateliers

In the Spring of 2021, Professor John Mellor launched the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s design-build studio for fourth-year students. A design-build studio is one in which individual students propose building designs, one of which is then chosen for everyone to take part in building to gain a better understanding of the construction

In this studio, nine students worked independently—and later, as groups—to tackle issues facing the affordable housing industry. Some students focused on minimizing square footage to lower cost, while others focused on changing materiality and design for a more energy-efficient, sustainable house.

By the end of the semester, three houses—each with a full set of construction documents—were presented to leaders of the Mishawaka Chapter of Habitat for Humanity. One of these homes was chosen to be built by Habitat for Humanity in their new neighborhood: The Fields at Highland.

In the Fall of 2021, Professor Mellor initiated the “build” portion of the course through the elective, Building the Affordable House. In this seminar, students from the spring design studio, alongside fifteen others who were interested in affordable housing, took part in a weekly seminar to learn more about the challenges the affordable housing industry faces today, such as inflation rates, zoning laws, and other economic and bureaucratic factors which limit the capabilities of building affordable homes.

As a part of this seminar, students were required to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity in order to gain hands-on building experience. Although delays and setbacks caused the construction of the chosen design to be pushed to Spring of 2022, students were able dive deeper into their understanding of affordable housing and be introduced to the work that Habitat for Humanity does for the people of South Bend and Mishawaka.

The following spreads give insights from Professor Mellor as well as a few students from the Spring studio. Here, they share their opinions, what they have learned, and what they look forward to in the future.

Front Porch Perspective: House design by Hope Halvey, Molly Jorden, and Faith Primozic.

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Interview with Professor John Mellor: Q. How did you have the idea for this course? How did Habitat for Humanity (HFH) come into play?

Professor John Mellor (JM): I had been thinking about trying to get more on-site building experience opportunities for students as part of their undergraduate curriculum. My initial thoughts were to create an elective design-build course for students to take in addition to studio, but this presented a lot of logistical challenges. After a lot of work with Professor Krusche, we landed on the format of a design studio in the spring of fourth year and an elective in the fall semester.

HFH came into the picture largely through the efforts of Jennifer Hoover, the school’s Director of Finance and Operations. Jennifer is a member of the board for HFH, St. Joseph County and was vital in establishing my initial connection to this organization.

HFH turned out to be the ideal partner for this sequence of classes, as they have the means to construct houses and a need for better housing designs that reflect the character of the neighborhoods in our area. Both organizations benefit from our agreement, and I hope it will lead to even better opportunities for the school going forward.

Q. What are your academic goals for the class? Did you see them filling a hole in the curriculum for the students?

JM: I believe that students need opportunities to directly engage in the act of building to better inform their development as designers. The house, in my opinion, is just the right size for a fourth year student to understand

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at a very high level, from concept and design through detailing and construction. My goal for the class, then, is for students to gain a clearer understanding of housing and issues around affordability as well as a deeper understanding of the tectonics of construction—the relationship between ideas on paper and their physical reality.

think I will be in a better position to press our case with HFH for new ideas.

I am anxious to see construction on the first house progress so that the class that designed it has the chance to put it together as well as physically experience the results of their design. It is very cool to walk inside of a building you have designed, and I would like students to experience this before they graduate from Notre Dame.

Q. What direction do you see this course heading in?

Q. What has surprised you about the class so far?

JM: Honestly, I did not anticipate the pandemic and the effect it would have on the construction industry.

Scheduling of construction has been plagued with setbacks and delays that have prevented me from conducting my fall seminar in the way I had hoped. The good news is that the shift in schedule will allow the studio for the second house to participate in construction next semester, an opportunity that the first studio did not have.

I also did not anticipate designing a market-rate house for HFH. I am more interested in helping them come up with new ideas that make their houses better and more affordable, but the real estate market at this time has challenged these efforts. I also hoped HFH might be more open to our suggestions, but some good ideas were lost in editing.

Once the first house is done, I

Finally, I am a little surprised that this course is as popular as it has proven to be. I did not anticipate such a big demand from students to design affordable houses. I hope that the momentum for this continues into future classes.

PM: My goal for the first year of this sequence was to build one house, period, end of sentence.

I needed to figure out if this was really possible, and what obstacles were in my way. Now that I see the path to this goal and understand its potential, I think this studio will grow to be a key player in the broader discussion on housing affordability, both in our area and nation-wide.

I would like to see the University play a larger role in this course, both through land acquisition and financial support. They have the means to make a big difference in our area, and I believe that our school and this studio are the perfect vehicle to see change implemented. I also think that others in the industry, from developers to manufacturers, will start to recognize the value of our work and begin to contribute to our efforts.

Finding meaningful solutions to affordable housing won’t come from the status quo, but from ideas about design, construction, financing, and zoning that are intentionally different from the current approach. I think that Notre Dame has these ideas but needs the opportunity to prove them.

This studio has the chance to accomplish that.

by H. Halvey, N. Hernandez, and J. Trzaska

Les Ateliers

Samples from full set of construction drawings. House design by Julia Bertram, Naomi Hernandez, and Nayun Hong.

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Habitat for Humanity

Samples from full set of construction drawings. House design by Hope Halvey, Molly Jorden, and Faith Primozic.

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Student Responses:

Leighton Douglass (LD): I chose to take Professor Mellor’s studio because affordable housing is a topic that is really important to me and it was something that I wanted to learn more about.

I was aware of the affordable housing crisis in the US, but I did not understand well enough.

I had also worked on mission projects vaguely similar to Habitat, but wanted to learn more about the organization as a whole. I also wanted to get more hands-on experience with home construction and figured this was a great cause with which to do so.

Naomi Hernandez (NH): I decided to take Professor Mellor’s studio last spring to have the opportunity to work directly with affordable housing and to further understand construction details.

While many studio projects are often theoretical exercises, this studio prioritized tangible results that required an understanding of materials and construction methods. The collaboration with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity was also exciting to me, as we were given an opportunity to build the selected house in the field. The studio’s opportunity to use the School of Architecture’s resources to benefit the community was also extremely valuable, given what St. Joseph’s county has offered us.

Maeve Kelley (MK): The biggest reason I chose to take this studio was because it was more realistic than previous projects; we’d get to experience more phases of the project than just the schematic design. I feel like a lot of our school emphasizes design in an abstract sense rather than design

“While many studio projects are often theoretical exercises, this studio prioritized tangible results that required an understanding of materials and construction methods.”

— Naomi Hernandez Class of 2022 with the intention of it being built in the real world. While that is great, I also thought it would be really valuable to have experience on a project that had an idea of a budget, needed to have a full set construction documents, had clients giving feedback on the work, etc before graduating.

This culminated in us getting experience on the Habitat job sites.

Q: What surprised you about the course? Alternatively, what was different about this course compared to previous studios?

LD: I was surprised about how much I actually learned about housing in general. At the beginning of the semester, we each chose a non-Western country to study its housing. I learned a lot about how housing has changed over time, and how housing can be specific to cultural and religious ideologies.

I also learned a lot about home construction. One day I hope to be a homeowner, so this studio directly applied to my life in that way. I am also able to understand the way my parents’ home works and why certain problems arise. I

now know what goes into a wall, floor, and roof, and could give a few reasons why a floor or roof might be leaking.

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Q: Why did you choose to take Professor Mellor’s studio last spring?

NH: I was surprised at the complexity the construction documents required. Compared to other studios, the Habitat studio required a greater degree of coordination among the team members and greater reliance on digital drawings. Our studio carefully studied construction materials and wood framing to guide the design of the house.

While COVID restrictions created challenges, my team was able to persevere and develop a workflow that would allow us to work together safely. We were mindful of each other’s workload and health. As a studio we also adapted to the design changes brought about by code clarifications and digital presentations to present meaningful proposals.

MK: I have a lot more confidence in my ability to draw a technical wall section, both from the experience of drawing one but also understanding how to research it, find reliable resources, and apply new techniques. I feel like I have an advantage heading into the workforce having had this kind of practical experience.

Q: Has this class impacted your academic or professional trajectory in any way? (i.e. influencing you to take any other classes about housing or altering what your future career path may be) LD: This class has actually helped me in internships. I know a lot more about home construction now, because a portion of the class was completing the construction set to build the house. It took away one of the

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Habitat for Humanity

“This project had real zoning codes and a real lot, and every decision I made actually impacted something. You had to work to find the best possible solution, and it was that much more satisfying when everything came together.”

— Maeve Kelley Class of 2022 big learning curves transitioning into the architecture field. I am more aware of what exactly goes into a construction set and how these sets should be organized. I am also now more familiar with AutoCAD when it comes to scales, line weights, and detail-work, which was a big help working at a firm over the summer that specializes in AutoCAD. NH: After taking the Habitat studio, I am considering working professionally in affordable housing and continue volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. This studio and the corresponding fall seminar course along with Professor Cusato’s U.S. Housing and Social Justice course have provided an introduction to literature and writers that I have continued to pursue.

Q: What lessons have you taken away from this course about the practice of architecture?

LD: This studio taught me more about how to design for the human experience. A home is a

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place where people spend most of their time; it is important to think about how a person would actually live in the spaces you design. How do they move through various rooms? What do they see when they first walk in?

What would be the experience of a house guest? These same lessons can be then taken into commercial projects as well.

Designing for a human scale is one thing, but designing for the human experience is another.

NH: Taking these classes in the context of the pandemic has challenged me to consider the responsibilities of an architect in terms of equitable, safe, and affordable housing. The buildings and spaces we create as architects are occupied by real people with real lives. COVID influenced our designs; for example, we considered work and study spaces separated from the bedrooms to create a distinction of functions, and I imagine this will be desirable for more people that have transitioned to working from home. A building’s context goes beyond what a neighborhood looks like, but also reflects the society in which it was built.

MK: I think doing a real world project reassured me that architecture is the field I want to go into. I find architecture the most satisfying when it’s a puzzle that you have to figure out the perfect solution for, and when you’re doing an imaginary design it’s easy to just bend the parameters. This project had real zoning codes and a real lot, and every decision I made actually impacted something. You had to work to find the best possible solution, and it was that much more satisfying when everything came together.

“Designing for a human scale is one thing, but designing for the human experience is another.”

— Leighton Douglass Class of 2022

by H. Halvey, N. Hernandez, and J. Trzaska

Les Ateliers Back Porch Perspective: House design by Julia Bertram, Naomi Hernandez, and Nayun Hong

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COVID, Rome, and the Class of 2023

by Frances Barrera, Travis Frame, and Joan Ngai

Elevation of a Roman Palazzo by Sabrina Lee, Fall 2020

The Fall 2020 Semester If you meet an archie (/ˈärˈkē/ an architecture student) at Notre Dame, your conversation will likely go, “Five years, huh. And Rome?” The Rome Studies Program celebrates 52 years of tradition, and is synonymous with the Third-Year Architectural Studio. Entrenched in the roots of classical design, the year-long study in the Eternal City is essential to the School of Architecture students’ learning progression, as it solidifies a foundation for the remaining two years at ND. With heightened anticipation leading to the year in Rome and so much educational experience relying on its occurrence, it would seem that without the abroad opportunity, our education would be at a standstill; our Class of 2023 proved this theory wrong.

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Albeit, not by choice or foresight. This was an unprecedented year, brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the world, the School and Class had to readjust to the pandemic’s widespread disruptions and imminent consequences, and they did, with resilience, patience, and resourcefulness. For the first time, the highly anticipated Rome curriculum was taught remotely, 4,700 miles away from its intended site.

Rather than convening in the Roman Forum, the Class of 2023 partook in bimonthly meetings in Walsh Family Hall to determine the fate of its Rome-bound destiny. Rather than sketching alongside the streets of Rome, we sat on foldable stools in various locations around the Notre Dame

by F. Barrera, T. Frame, and J. Ngai circumstantial adversity that at first hindered then fortified us. We were fortunate to be on campus after a spring break of record-breaking length—and to be healthy, for the most part. We were blessed to have faculty willing to move from their homes in Rome or to teach over Zoom, and who had the patience to deal with our constant-but-warranted badgering over when we’d be able to get there.

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campus to develop our graphic skills. And rather than attending classes with our third-year faculty in the Global Gateway, the Rome studio professors met us in South Bend. We learned in our familiar studio setting, over Zoom screens, and even through GoPro feedback. What wasn’t immediately evident in these at-times frustrating “Rome consolation classes” were the valuable lessons that our turbulent academic trials would wring out of us.

In an attempt to normalize our less-than-normal situation, the Rome and South Bend faculty worked tirelessly to adapt as best as they could to serve us the Italian experience on a virtual platter, and given the rate at which COVID was ravaging the globe, it was what we had to work with. Soon enough, Google Maps proved to be our greatest studio companion.

From this patchwork course format stemmed a range of unexpected positives. Beginning with the School’s curricular response to the racial injustice and civil unrest that occurred during the summer of 2020, we were asked to design a monument dedicated to any justicedeserving cause. This was the most divergent program we had done, and gave us a dedicated opportunity to think of how architecture can be a compelling force for social justice.

Another opportunity emerged during the process of “figuring out” the semester. Because of the technical difficulties of the semester, the faculty introduced digital platforms, such as Mural, to facilitate traditional in-person reviews. In response, we students took this as an opportunity to hone our Photoshop rendering and CAD skills, which wouldn’t typically happen until later in the curriculum. At surface level, these skills are advantageous in terms of hireability, but they also taught us how to be adaptable and resourceful, expanded our design approach beyond technical drawing and sketching, and reinforced a resilient mindset to persist despite less-than-ideal circumstances. At its core, this is the purpose of college— learning how to learn.

This time period of unprecedented events planted seeds for a fresh take on Notre Dame’s School of Architecture for the Class of 2023. New Dean.

First domestic study abroad program. Novel global pandemic. Adaptation to new teaching methods.

The origin of collective patience, changing attitudes, and resilience took root in a semester of

Section through a Palazzo by Sabrina Lee, Fall 2020

The Piano Terra by Sabrina Lee, Fall 2020

Residential Level by Sabrina Lee, Fall 2020

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COVID, Rome, & the Class of 2023

A Monument to the Victims of the Addis Ababa Massacre, by Sharon Yehnert, Fall 2020

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by F. Barrera, T. Frame, and J. Ngai

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Quad perspective of a school for South Bend, Indiana by Guy Crowley, Mare Gattuso, and Talia Steinwald, Spring 2021

The Spring 2021 Semester ….which unfortunately did not happen during our Spring semester.

The Class of 2023 again experienced the crushing déjà-vu moment of not being able to go abroad, and the SoA faculty sprang to work towards accommodating our feedback from the first semester’s shortcomings to provide a more fulfilling academic experience—most importantly, one with a reduced prescription of required screen time.

While much of the third year was still “Romefocused,”the faculty made a massive adjustment in order to better adjust our studio situation to our location in South Bend, as we were still unable to venture to Rome—an unprecedented academic shift to match unprecedented times. This new project challenged our way of thinking, as it reoriented our focus to a more domestic context. The project—an academic campus placed in the Dean’s Charrette of an urban renewal of downtown—shifted the focus to more personal and meaningful architecture intended to help a community. The project was unlike anything we had done before and resulted in the most diverse set of projects up to that point in our designing career.

The class worked on all types of buildings as small groups crafted their campuses of various kinds.

Some designed a center for the arts in order to revive artistic education in a time when the arts are so often underfunded. Others designed wellness centers and trade schools in order to benefit the South Bend community in a time of economic uncertainty. Some even tackled larger urban interventions to adjust and amend large swatches of land in order to create a more walkable and unified community. All of these projects differed slightly between professors and even within groups in each studio section. However, we all shared a common goal—helping South Bend and its residents.

The Spring semester was again nothing short of unexpected and unpredictable. However, we were able to use the benefit of working together in person and on campus to create proposals for change and positivity. While there was much division and separation in many elements of our education, the opportunity to work together to create projects beyond personal designs was a joyful experience of academic progression and personal development.

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COVID, Rome, & the Class of 2023

Perspective of a School for the Arts in South Bend, Indiana by Rayne Zhu, Spring 2021

Perspective of a School for the Arts in South Bend, Indiana by Maxwell Meuth, Spring 2021

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by F. Barrera, T. Frame, and J. Ngai

Les Ateliers Elevation of a School for the Arts in South Bend, Indiana by Rayne Zhu, Spring 2021

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The Summer in Rome Half a semester abruptly locked down; at-home learning online; a Summer patiently stationed awaiting the good news of Rome; a Fall feverishly improvised trying to bring Rome to the Dome; and a Spring entirely readjusted to prepare for the postponed abroad program: a full year ran its course, and with third-year students seeking to gain career experience during the upcoming summer, the uncertainty of Rome now became a schedule conflict. Tensions built as some landed internships with the awkward contingency of not fulfilling them, while others delayed opportunities to avoid such confrontations.

Then, on a Friday afternoon two weeks before the close of the academic year, Dean Polyzoides made his way to the third-year studio with a bottle of champagne. “Rome is a go!” Pop! For the Class of 2023, the sound marked the end of a year-long saga of uncertainty. It also signaled the beginning of an onslaught of travel preparations, so graciously facilitated by the School administration. After all, in three weeks’ time, the entire class would dramatically—finally—make its long-anticipated journey to Rome, our home for the summer.

To say the least, the summer was like experiencing life at two-times speed. Trying to make up for

nine months in Europe would be outrageous, but our class certainly took advantage of the precious eight-plus weeks we had. In addition to being the first class to “summer” in Rome, we had the exclusive opportunity to be some of the city’s first foreign visitors after intense COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions. Although certain attractions were still closed due to the virus, the lack of tourists permitted many opportunities to sight-see. We waltzed into the Vatican after a five minute wait, and experienced the Sistine Chapel with less than a handful of strangers. We started the first weeks with a nationwide curfew—there’s nothing quite like dashing back to the University Villa after a meal gone too long, in customary Italian fashion—and seeing your classmates funnel into the Villa gates, just minutes before 23:00 strikes. Experiencing the Tiber’s riverside spread of restaurant tents in July was a jubilant convergence of summertime revelry and modern Italian culture, and after a subpar Notre Dame sport year, we rejoiced in Rome’s unexpected victory over England in the Eurocup.

Italy had won—its inhabitants united in euphoria, one’s place of origin a mere postscript amidst the surging crowds.

Of the many differences the condensed summer program entailed—perhaps to our greatest advantage—was the absence of a design studio

Above: Basilica di San Marco in Venice, Italy by Lucas Misra, Summer 2021 Right: A Capriccio in Watercolor by Kiara Gutierrez, Summer 2021

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by F. Barrera, T. Frame, and J. Ngai

Les Ateliers

Piazza del Popolo in Rome, Italy by Guy Crowley, Summer 2021

course. Reaping the rewards of the School’s tireless preemptive planning, the students were able to enjoy their study in Rome with just a two-course load—Graphics IV (Watercolor) and Roman Urbanism II—both of which allowed the students to be out in the city. While the summer fostered nonstop movement, the absence of studio allowed for increased time spent absorbing Rome’s character, the flavor that we missed out on back in South Bend. Our mornings included traipsing the city toting the standard stool-and-sketchbook uniform alongside our professors. Beyond that, the afternoons were ours to explore our new home, whether that involved scaling St. Peter’s dome, snagging the Laurentina line to play soccer at the Borghese gardens, or frantically finishing a last-minute painting before the next wave of assignments rolled out. We carved our own days, and those days sculpted one exquisite summer.

COVID also resulted in an adjusted trip schedule, in which our class split into three travel groups to reduce crowding concerns that rotated locations

every other weekend. Venice, Florence, and Naples comprised our scheduled travels, and remaining weekends were left up to individual planning.

Since various policies limited travel beyond Italy, our class tallied an impressive list of cities, towns, and coastlines visited throughout the bel paese. The split-group system was atypical, but allowed for more personal time with our Rome staff and did not detract from the experience of places as incredible as Tuscany or Bari or Lake Como.

Most poignant was the sequence with which our class prepared for Rome, having spent months analyzing its urban fabric from nearly 5000 miles away prior to arrival. Strolling through random alleys before accidentally encountering your precedent building from eight months ago is a truly odd sensation, as is holding up your sketchbook from early September and matching a detail drawing to the actual, concrete design it belongs to; we learned in reverse, and while challenging in some ways, the unorthodox approach enhanced our experience when we finally did get to see all that Rome has to offer.

Left: A Capriccio in Watercolor by Miranda Cuozzo, Summer 2021

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COVID, Rome, & the Class of 2023

A Capriccio in Watercolor by Claire Egelhoff, Summer 2021

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by F. Barrera, T. Frame, and J. Ngai

Les Ateliers

Fontana del Tritone in Rome, Italy by Maria Maxwell, Summer 2021

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P r ofe s s or Mel lo r ’s Gr a phi cs I I f e a t u r i n g t h e C l a s s o f 2 0 2 5 Edited by Kate Schnitker

As a prerequisite for all studio courses in the School of Architecture, Professor Mellor’s Graphics II class is foundational in teaching architecture students the skills they will need to succeed in their future studio classes.

Students built their drafting skills with many exercises and worksheets throughout the semester. During the spring semester of 2021, hese included a set of orthographics drawings of Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Chapel, a paraline drawing of the Temple of Hera Basilea in Pergamon, and a one-point perspective of the reading room designed by John Russell Pope for the National Archives in Washington D.C. To end the semester, the students completed a final design project to help them prepare for their first studio course sophomore year. The project required the first-years to read a passage from the Bible describing Solomon’s Temple, then to design and draft their interpretation of the building. The students enjoyed this unique project, and Graphics II as a whole, for the fun and challenging ways it taught them the skills they will need for the rest of their time as architects.

Emily Fuchs

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Edited by Kate Schnitker

Les Ateliers

Emily Fuchs Major: Architecture Minor: Resiliency & Sustainability of Engineering Systems Dorm: Badin Hall My favorite part of Professor Mellor’s Graphics II class was learning how to draft in perspective.

As part of the course, I learned the language and vocabulary of architecture as well as how to use all the tools of an architect. My favorite assignment was our final project. I liked how we had the opportunity to apply the skills we learned over the course of the semester as well as begin to design on our own.

My biggest takeaway from this course was that in architecture, you will never do something perfectly on the first try. Architecture requires restarting, redrafting, and constant refinement. It demands discipline and diligence, and Graphics II definitely helped me develop those qualities. My advice to someone taking Graphics II in the future would be to not get frustrated if your work isn’t perfect the first time. Even with an art background, I did not complete the projects perfectly on my first try. Drafting, casting shadows, drawing in perspective, and rendering are all new skills that take practice. It can get aggravating drafting and redrafting over and over again, restarting multiple times, but the outcome is so rewarding. By the time you get to Design I, drafting will feel so natural to you, so stick with it!

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Professor Mellor’s Graphics II

Angela Li Major: Architecture Dorm: Lewis Hall My favorite part about Graphics II was learning how to draft. I had no background in this skill; at first I really disliked how rigid and unforgiving drafting could be. I also did not like sharpening my pencil every five seconds. However, after some practice, I came to appreciate the artistry of good drafting and how much clarity it can add to a rendering. Learning how to construct isometrics, perspectives, and sections helped me strengthen my visualization skills tremendously, especially during the first semester of sophomore year when we started to design rigorously. I am, however, still not great at drafting on vellum. Since a lot of the skills that were taught were so foreign to me, I experienced a lot of frustration early on in the learning process.

My biggest take-away from Graphics II was understanding the importance of learning from mistakes. Having completed one semester of sophomore studio, I can definitively say that the skills which I took the time to understand and correct my mistakes on are now the strongest. It’s better to take the time needed to understand earlier rather than try to play catch up later. You should also utilize the TAs and ask lots of questions! I still worship my past TA, Joe, because he was so knowledgeable and pushed us to instill good habits. I may have bothered my TA too much during the final project, but he had a lot of great ideas that pushed me to create something that I was proud of. Also, definitely do not skimp out on the shades and shadows lesson because it is an absolute headache to try and fudge them when you have a deadline coming up.

My favorite assignment was the final project—designing Solomon’s Temple. I think everyone felt incredibly overwhelmed when the assignment was first introduced because we had never designed anything original in the course, let alone an actual building. It’s still pretty amazing to look back and see how everyone conceptualized solutions that were all unique. It was the first project that led me to spend more time in the studio getting to know the people around me better, and that was the first time I felt close to them in the studio. I really appreciated this because we never got to experience true studio culture our freshman year due to the isolated desks and COVID restrictions.

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Edited by Kate Schnitker

Les Ateliers

Erin Panker Major: Architecture Dorm: Ryan Hall My biggest takeaway from this course was that architecture is an extremely rewarding discipline.

The assignments and projects may be tedious and time consuming, but in the end the quality of the work you produce is really incredible and you feel very proud. My favorite part of the course was being able to see how much progress you can make in just one semester. In a few months you can go from painting a color wheel to designing your own temple. My favorite assignment was the final design project. It was my favorite because it combined all the techniques we learned throughout the course and was also the first project where we were able to come up with our own design for a building. This course really prepared me for the sophomore year design studio and all the skills I learned will definitely be useful going forward. Take advantage of the amount of time you have to complete the assignments for this course because next year your classes will pick up pace. If you don’t set yourself up with good time management habits early on you may have trouble keeping up with work in the future.

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Professor Mellor’s Graphics II

Garrett Nagorzanski Major: Architecture Minor: Energy Studies Dorm: Dillon Hall Graphics II provided a solid foundation for the technical aspects of design (hand drafting, watercolor rendering, etc.) that will stick with me throughout my years in the program. The biggest take-away for me was to draft with hard lines when needed on watercolor paper—not the most profound message, but it is essential to contain the watercolor pigment for neat renderings. I appreciated some of the later assignments in Graphics II, when we were given more creative license with color and design choices. I also think the class setup of Graphics II is a great introduction to studio culture, as we were able to interact with peers and learn from their work. My favorite assignment was the final project, as I enjoyed seeing everyone’s different interpretations of the project requirements.

While a lot of the class focuses on technical consistency, I would advise people to avoid perfectionism. Precision is one of many tools that help to clearly communicate ideas, not the end-all-be-all standard.

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Edited by Kate Schnitker

Les Ateliers

William Smith Majors: Architecture (formerly) & Theology (currently) Dorm: O’Neill Family Hall My favorite part about Graphics II was learning about the technical aspects of architectural drawing.

This opened my eyes to the myriad possibilities of architectural drawing and watercolor. Before taking Graphics II, I thought drawing abilities depended entirely on natural skill; a person is either born a good artist or not. Taking Graphics II, however, revealed to me the technique and method behind graphic design. Before Graphics II, I did not realize there was a method by which to draw three-dimensional representations of objects. Accordingly, my favorite assignment was learning how to construct two-point perspectives. This assignment greatly expanded my understanding of drawing techniques and provided me a way of sharing my ideas in a realistic fashion. As someone with very little drawing experience, this both comforted me and inspired me to dive deeper into the methods we learned.

Graphics II provided an environment for me to develop my time management skills in preparation for future studios. Finding a regular time to work on Graphics II outside of class, front loading work on each assignment, and asking numerous questions all helped me build good habits. The way in which these practices relate to time management and healthy studio habits has been my biggest takeaway from Graphics II. My advice for those taking this class in the future is first, always seek to truly understand the method behind each assignment. This will help you form a foundation upon which to build for years to come. Secondly, take the time to develop good studio habits: find a regular time to work in studio outside of class, start projects soon after they are assigned, predict and resolve issues as early as possible, and ask numerous questions. The studio habits you develop and cultivate during Graphics II will become the habits you begin your first design courses with. Set yourself up for success. The skills I gained in the course have continued to benefit me throughout all of my courses–architecture and non-architecture alike.

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Professor Mellor’s Graphics II

Connor Tinson Major: Architecture Minor: Peace Studies and Real Estate Dorm: Fisher Hall My favorite part of the course had to be the final project—designing Solomon’s Temple.

I was excited to do my first design project and had a fun time doing so, including independently building the model in SketchUp to help design it. I enjoyed the project because it was the first assignment I was able to actually design and put my own style into, and I appreciated that we had the ability to combine the different tools we had learned over the first two semesters to create the final presentation as a watercolor rendering. Additionally, culminating the year with this project allowed me to display my improvements in line weight, lettering, and water coloring in one place. My biggest takeaway from this course was the significance of line weights in final drawings and watercolor paper. Ensuring that line weights for different aspects of drawings are distinct has already helped me in my second-year design courses, as utilizing them properly allows for drawings to be clear and look better. The perspective drawing assignments have also already been incredibly useful in my current classes. Knowing how to construct different types of perspective drawings is incredibly important for displaying your design to others in final presentations, as well as for understanding how the building will actually feel during the design process. I also found myself experiencing the culture of studio outside of class time much more.

Working alongside my peers more frequently was very fun and gave me a taste of what future studio courses would feel like!

I highly recommend for anyone taking this course in the future to remain engaged during the class and to not be afraid of asking their peers, TAs, and professors for questions or assistance. Furthermore, I also suggest saving recordings of any lessons or presentations that seem as if they may be useful in the future, especially the ones on perspective drawings and shadows.

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Les Ateliers

Alumni Discuss the China Summer Program Edited by Stacey Xiong

Marie Acalin As a participant in the 2017 China Summer Program, I spent a month learning about China’s richly layered architectural history.

With the pandemic now placing China at the forefront of our minds, I have found myself frequently reminiscing about my time there four years ago. The isolation of the last two years fills me with even more gratitude for Dean Lykoudis and Professor Anders, who provided an extensive tour of one the world’s oldest building traditions, from Hong Kong to Beijing.

Our journey began in Hong Kong with a view of the sunset at Victoria’s Peak and culminated in a one thousand foot hike up the Great Wall outside of the capital of Beijing. Along the way we visited Macau, Shanghai, the former capital of Nanjing, Pingyao, and the classical gardens of Suzhou, which Marco Polo noted for their beauty and innovation. The program allowed for daily comparison of the Eastern traditional architectural and urban methods to those of the West, in which Notre Dame students are well versed. Each day provided the opportunity to see first-hand how parallel pursuits of traditional urbanism, use of local materials, sustainability, and craftsmanship were employed in China.

One of the most enduring lessons from the trip was the Chinese tradition of continual preservation that results in ancient buildings presented today in impeccable and original form. Their condition serves as a sharp contrast to the state of decay often seen at historic sites in the West. The skills needed to construct such ornately detailed buildings are not lost, but continue to be passed from each generation to the next.

“One of the most enduring lessons from the trip was the Chinese tradition of continual preservation...

The skills needed to construct such ornately detailed buildings are not lost, but continue to be passed from each generation to the next.”

— Marie Acalin M. Arch ‘19

Beyond architecture, the program immersed students in Chinese culture, including daily family-style meals where we tasted the specialties of each city we visited, such as dim sum in Hong Kong, Shanghai-style fish, noodles in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, and Peking duck in Beijing. These meals provided a place for communion at the end of each day to discuss the places we had visited. The warmth and hospitality of the locals, along with the diversity of each region, made me eager to return and explore more of the nation’s rich culture. While traveling to China as an American is currently not possible, the memories and the lessons learned that summer continue to enrich and inform, both personally and professionally.

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Alumni Discuss the China Summer Program

Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Roman Housing Types by Marie Acalin, Summer 2017

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Edited by Stacey Xiong

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Alumni Discuss the China Summer Program

Andrew Califano I traveled to China with the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s ARCHina program during the summer of 2014, just after my fourth year. It was undoubtedly the most unique and formative of the many wonderful travel experiences I was fortunate enough to have during my time at Notre Dame. It was a very small group— just me and one other student, Amy Ding—along with Professor Selena Anders.

It was my first trip to Asia, and arriving in Shanghai after a long day of travel was a revelation. That evening, we walked down Nanjing Road—lit up like Times Square—to the Bund, and saw the remnants of Shanghai’s colonial past: an enfilade of hotels and civic buildings in eclectic western styles reminiscent of Europe’s great riverfronts. We gazed across the Huangpu River at Pudong with its many megatall skyscrapers lit up like a space-age metropolis. It was an amazing baptism into the incredibly rich and diverse culture and architecture of China.

From Shanghai, we traveled on to the traditional canal cities of Tongli and Suzhou. Modernity and tradition collide with magnificent and tranquil 16th century gardens traversing busy city life. It was natural to make the comparison between these classical Chinese gardens and those of high Renaissance villas of Italy we had experienced only a year before—a comparison which became the main focus of our analysis upon our return to campus. I was also deeply impressed by I.M. Pei’s Suzhou Museum, which suffuses a very contemporary building with traditional Chinese architectural forms and materials like local stone and stucco.

We then went to Nanjing, where we got our first glimpses of the architectural glory of Imperial China, with its massive city walls and ornate Ming dynasty tombs. We saw the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, designed by Lu Yanzhi, which bears many formal similarities to western Beaux-Arts buildings, such as Paul Cret’s Pan American Union building in Washington D.C. We also made formal comparisons between these buildings as part of our analytical presentation. It’s hard to describe the vast scale of Tiananmen Square, the unrivaled grandeur of the Forbidden City, or the sheer awe of climbing the Great Wall.

This all contrasted with the compact and humble scale of Pingyao, an eminently walkable and pedestrian-friendly ancient city in the Shanxi Province. Strolling and taking in the historic richness of its well-preserved fabric was as pleasurable as the spicy dry roasted peanuts and delicious noodles we ate there. The question of the city’s scale and density was palpably similar to small European cities of the same period and its planning like that of an ancient Roman Castrum. The last stop was Hong Kong, which is truly like a vision of Manhattan arising from the South China Sea. The entire trip was extremely well-organized, educational, and one of my most cherished personal experiences.

The ARCHina trip offered an important connection between the architectural traditions of both the East and the West, and I think it’s important for Notre Dame students to continue to explore the great richness of traditional architecture beyond the Western canon for years to come.

Kristen Gates The China Summer Program offered my classmates and I the opportunity to compare the lessons learned during our Grand Tour in Rome to another context. We immersed ourselves in Chinese culture and tradition under the guidance of Dean Emeritus Michael Lykoudis, Professor Selena Anders, and our colleagues at Nanjing University School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Traveling extensively throughout different regions, we began to piece together China’s incredibly layered history and building traditions—some of the world’s oldest. We experienced life within ancient and medieval

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Edited by Stacey Xiong

Beginning in Hong Kong and Macau, we witnessed the relationship between the natural and man-made, and how water and topography creates interesting urban patterns. We visited neighborhoods where the traditional built environment was later enveloped in contemporary fabric. Next, in Shanghai, we walked the Bund and the Pudong, experiencing how the Huangpu River allows for a strong visual juxtaposition between the old and new cities. Jin Mao Tower, SOM’s 88-story skyscraper, served as an exemplary model of how vernacular and classical architecture can be adapted to contemporary building needs. The tower draws on traditional Chinese architectural motifs in the form of a tiered pagoda. Having grown up in Los Angeles, a city known for its courtyard housing, a favorite excursion was visiting Shanghai’s shikumen or “stone-gate” courtyard houses.

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walled cities, explored classical gardens, and witnessed the hierarchy that a harmonious network of indoor and outdoor, public and private, and imposed and natural spaces creates when organized in such a way.

In Suzhou and Tongli, we walked through the Lingering Garden and Humble Administrator’s Garden and processed up to Tiger Hill—all renowned UNESCO World Heritage Sites. From there, we made our way to Nanjing to learn more about residential typologies as well as temple architecture, visiting The Ninety-Nine and a Half Houses and the Confucius Temple, respectively. The Mausoleum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing was especially interesting to visit, having been designed by Chinese architect and Cornell University graduate Lü Yanzhi. While Chinese-born and educated in the United States, Lü interestingly spent much of his childhood in Paris. Ascending the series of stone steps to the Mausoleum flanked with ginkgo, pine and cypress trees, it was natural to draw parallels to the grand jardins and boulevards of Paris that provide for a similarly theatrical experience of procession. The Mausoleum’s façade is composed of a three-arch stone paifang flanked by coursed stone buttresses. The placement of a Chinese scroll at the center of the bracket-ornamented “entablature” read like a keystone, leaving us again curious as to how those years in Paris or the U.S. may have impacted Lü’s choice of compositional elements here After a brief visit to Pingyao, where we immersed ourselves in the Qing Dynasty banking district from the ground and above from the intact city wall, we ended our program in Beijing. Arriving at the imperial grounds there, the lessons learned throughout the tour began to come full-circle: the ceremony of the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Earth; the hierarchy emphasized through the placement of the Palace within dense urban fabric; the radiating fabric of secondary space (in this case, the hutongs, or “courtyard houses”); and the man-made idealization of nature at the Summer Palace.

By the end of our tour, my classmates and I had studied these cities at various scales: detail, structure, building typology, block structure, and urban planning. In a culminating studio exercise, my partner, Thomas Boyle, and I chose to take a closer look at Suzhou in comparison to Venice. After all, they are two cities with the same street-canal-bridge elements in their urban networks. These two cities had been famously compared by Marco Polo during his 13th century travels to China along the Silk Road.

In both cities and building traditions, structure can present notions of tectonics or tradition. Building typologies are idealizations of nature. Idealizations come in organic and natural forms—similar to Suzhou’s Tiger Hill—or orthogonal and platonic ones, like those of Venice’s Doge’s Palace. Additionally, gardens play different roles. Building types are separated by walls in Suzhou, but share walls in Venice. Lastly, everyday life happens quite differently in these two cities: in public in Venice, and in private in Suzhou.

While construction details, compositional elements, façade organization, building geometries, and urban fabric have their nuances, in both cases historic models of building types and cities are equally rich resources for creating architecture in the 21st century. While idealization comes in different forms in each city, the notions of beauty and function are no more or less present in either.

I would encourage all current students to jump at each opportunity to travel and capitalize on the opportunities Notre Dame’s School of Architecture offers. It is through travel and understanding the built environment that we are able to contribute to the living language that classical architecture is.

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Suzhou, China at the Urban, Architectural, and Structural Scales

Comparative analysis of Suzhou, China and Venice, Italy by Kristen Gates and Thomas Boyle, Summer 2017

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Venice, Italy at the Urban, Architectural, and Structural Scales Les Ateliers Stoa Magazine

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Selected Student Theses Edited by Valeria Whitmore

Joseph Faccibene The Battery Maritime Terminal Edward Faicco The Juan Trippe International Terminal in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Christian Johnson A New Bridge for Luang Prabang James Lengen The Urban Redevelopment of Berlin’s Fischerinsel Joanna Lindstrom (née Skros) A Proposed Campus Redesign for St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish Esteban Salazar A Proposal for a Coastal New England Hotel Benjamin Shelton The West Chester Market Station Samanta Xinyuan Zhuang l’Accademia Gazometro dell’Arte Gastronomica

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by Joseph Faccibene In 2017, New York City launched its commuter ferry network. The three main goals of the service were to provide affordable and convenient transit for underserved communities, support growing neighborhoods by connecting people to jobs and economic opportunities throughout the city, and improve the resiliency and redundancy of the city’s transportation network. The network is currently centered around the retrofitted Pier 11 at the east end of Wall Street, a facility that has minimal conditioned waiting space and no shelter for commuters. As the network grows into a fully realized asset to the city, the Battery Maritime Terminal will serve as its new nexus.

The terminal is designed as a civic landmark that contributes both to the city’s iconic skyline and to the small moments of the commuters’ day spent moving through it. It acts as an example of the idealized relationship between the city, her residents, and the waterfront by creating usable urban space for pedestrians and enhancing the waterfront experience for all. Its role as a gateway to southern Manhattan is influenced by its complex massing, whose forms are meant to be viewed in the round from the water, and towering light-filled interiors. The Terminal’s intent is to be a physical manifestation of the goals of the network, namely to connect communities across the city in one of its most historic places.

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The Battery Maritime Terminal: A New Hub For New York’s Commuter Ferry Network

The pandemic summer of 2020 leading up to my fifth year gave me a lot of time to figure out what I wanted to do with my thesis. The ten-week internship I had planned ended up only taking place remotely during the last three weeks of break.

On the days when it wasn’t too hot, I would walk the silent streets of the then-abandoned New York to get out of the house. I had always wanted to place my thesis in my hometown as an attempt to contribute to its great catalogue of architecture and provide a resource for its communities. It wasn’t until I was participating in the city’s newest summer tradition—the roof deck joyride down the East River for $2.75—that a feasible idea for a thesis came about. Crafting a home for New York City’s ferries presented a complicated architectural problem that was grounded in reality and meant to serve my nine million neighbors.

In research, the first thing I did was dive into the city’s history as a port and center of immigration.

The New York Waterfront by Kevin Bone helped me greatly in that department. For the architecture, I hardly looked any further than the city itself. Warren & Wetmore, Carrere & Hastings, and McKim, Mead & White presented an incredibly rich body of work that was just the surface of the city’s collection.

Many works were still around for me to experience and measure in person, but a select few—McKim Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station and Warren

Elevation Facing the City

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The Battery Maritime Terminal

Aerial Perspective

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Thesis: Joseph Faccibene

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The Battery Maritime Terminal

Above: Room Section Below: Terminal Floor Plan Right: Section thorugh Concourse and Great Hall

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Thesis: Joseph Faccibene

My favorite part of the thesis semester was the atmosphere in studio. The room was charged by a cohort of over-caffeinated, COVID-crazed individuals who all cared way too much about what they were doing. A room full of people trying to do

their best work created an energy that fed us all. I often found the most clarity in my decisions when talking with my studio-mates. Their focus on other buildings gave them a perspective I could not find on my own. This, coupled with the incredible support base that Prof. Nohelty provided, got me through.

After spending almost a year thinking about my thesis day and night, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The review came and went, I hibernated for two days, and then it was on to the next. Now I get to use the incredible education that the School of Architecture gave me every day at Ferguson & Shamamian Architects, not too far from my thesis site. I can’t wait for what’s to come.

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& Wetmore’s Chelsea Piers—could only be found in drawings and old photographs. I tried to emulate those buildings most, attempting to restore what New York had tragically lost. My thoughts about the project and the building’s role in its greater context were heavily influenced by Henry Hope Reed’s The Golden City, and Leon Krier’s The Architecture of Community.

This project was awarded the Paris, Rome, Athens Prize by the School of Architecture Faculty.

In October 2021 the project was published in the ICAA’s The Classicist No. 18 and was recognized with a Stanford White Award the following December.

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The Juan Trippe International Terminal in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

by Edward Faicco

It all started in February of my fourth year, when I skipped a Friday studio in favor of a weekend trip to Miami with a few friends. Professor Onyango would be happy to hear now that it was a blessing in disguise, as this trip would spark the idea for my thesis project. Upon landing in nearby Fort Lauderdale, I was shocked at how underwhelming and overcrowded the existing Terminal 3 was. While excited to have arrived in sunny South Florida, all I wanted to do was get out of this airport as quickly as possible. There was no regard for a sense of place, no noteworthy architectural features, no warm embrace; I thought to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me, thousands of people come through here every day and THIS is the welcome they get?” This was the moment the lightbulb came on, and I knew that a potential thesis project was on the horizon.

architecture, has laid much of the groundwork.

However, the region’s airport facilities are some of the worst in the country, and their architecture does not allude to the beautiful culture beyond their walls.

Further research confirmed my first impressions; Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) is indeed one of the five worst airports in the country, while also being the largest growing airport in the country by a large margin.

Commercial air travel has always been a hobby of mine, long before I was interested in architecture.

I have a lot of knowledge of the industry, and saw this project as the perfect opportunity to merge two of my biggest interests. My experience in Fort Lauderdale and subsequent investigation made this location the front-runner for the site of my project. My intentions were set on a new international passenger terminal dedicated to establishing a sense of place and breaking the ambiguity of the modern airport.

Professor Sean Nohelty went above and beyond as my advisor. His wide range of knowledge on different architectural types and his experience with large-scale projects was crucial to my success.

He saw my vision from the beginning and did not stop me from going big, even if it was going to be an uphill battle. The biggest challenge was gathering floor plan information for existing airport terminals.

Much of the material I was hoping for is banned from the public eye. However, with my current knowledge of the commercial aviation industry, past experiences in airport terminals, time paying close attention to operations and details, and an advisor who had designed an airport terminal under Professor Lykoudis’s guidance back in school, I was able to have access to all the resources I needed to finish the job.

The work of Addison Mizner in Palm Beach was my driving force. South Florida has great architectural character for which Mizner, the master of playful

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It was important for me to capture the aura of air travel in its early stages. Flying was once a luxury for people—they dressed up nice, everyone was excited, and it was part of the travel experience. Nowadays it’s dreaded—an unnecessary evil from Point A to Point B with minimal desire for the in-between.

Whether you’re in Cancun, Copenhagen, or Cape Town, the airport archetype remains consistently irrespective of climate, culture, and history. You can drop a passenger in any one of today’s glass-andsteel airports and they won’t have a clue as to where they were in the world.

I did just enough research before the start of the semester that I was ready to hit the ground running

Thesis: Edward Faicco

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Top: Front Elevation Bottom: Longitudinal Section

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The Juan Trippe International Terminal

once we returned to school from winter break.

While I didn’t find it crucial to start extensive pre-design material, I would say it was very helpful to do all of the things you will dread once design starts, like creating an informative site plan, making slide layouts, and understanding any site-specific restrictions you may encounter. This way, when the semester starts, you can focus on the good stuff. My advice to current students would be to make sure everything you do is purposeful and geared towards your big picture idea, even as early as the pre-design stages.

I did get to travel again almost a year later to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. I spent five days visiting some of Miami’s biggest architectural attractions, such as the Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District, and the cutting-edge residential towers along the Brickell waterfront. While it was nice to see the architecture of the place, it was also nice to experience Miami for what it is and take advantage of the beautiful beaches and culture that make it so unique. I also spent quite a bit of time at FLL, observing the existing facilities, security sequences, passenger movement through the terminal, and many other details of operations (all while trying to avoid the suspicion of TSA officials). Traveling definitely helped me prepare for the semester ahead and narrow down my design goals, and it is especially beneficial to not just focus on architecture during the trip, but experience the place as a whole to immerse yourself in the spirit of whatever location you may choose. This will go a long way as you begin to design, especially if it is in a location different from where you were born and raised.

Believe it or not, my favorite part was figuring out all of the operations and back-of-house programming for the airport: all of the things that go on beneath your feet as you walk through a terminal. I was able to learn so much about airport operations through this process. From the beginning, a goal of mine was to have a complete terminal. It would be useless to have a beautiful design if airline operations fell flat, and it would also be a disservice to attend all the focus to logistics while abandoning the big vision, so finding a balance was key. My favorite comment from the review was, “It works.” I took the most pride in designing an airport through the traditional lens that can handle all of the modern 70

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Aerial Perspective

Thesis: Edward Faicco

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The Juan Trippe International Terminal

Departures and Arrivals

facilities that 21st-century air travel calls for. It was much appreciated on my end to hear that the jury appreciated the work I had put into these design aspects.

After the review, it was a big weight off the shoulders for sure. I can’t speak for others, but as soon as it was over, I didn’t want to look at any of my work for a long, long time. It was important to step away from the project and focus on enjoying my last moments of senior year! I had to take a flight just 24 hours after presenting, and realized then that I can never again walk around an airport terminal without a scrutinous architect’s eye.

My thesis is definitely something I will remember when I look back on my time at Notre Dame. It represents a lot of progress made throughout my five years. From coming in freshman year and not even being able to paint a color wheel properly, to flushing one of my Graphics II projects down the Keenan Hall toilet because it was so bad, it took a while for me to get on my feet and find my stride in architecture school. As cool as it is to see how far I’ve come, it will be even better to look back on this in twenty or thirty years and realize how much more I still had to learn.

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Thesis: Edward Faicco

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My advice to students working on their thesis is to have fun with it! This is your last semester of college. You should enjoy your last days at this great university and take it all in, because I guarantee you will miss it, just like you miss Rome. It will be miserable if you choose to tackle a thesis project you’re not passionate about. As you go through the pre-design process, don’t tie yourself down to one style of architecture or one particular location.

Figure out what you want to design first, and then where, why, and how. As you get into the nitty gritty, don’t ever lose sight of the big idea. And don’t do your thesis for anyone but yourself. You and your vision are more important than any award, recognition, or praise you’ll receive. The intrinsic value you will get from watching your project come to fruition will be the most rewarding part of your journey.

Interior Perspeptive of Gate

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A New Bridge for Luang Prabang: Balancing Heritage and Comemerce

by Christian Johnson

“Beyond ordinary utility, infrastructure should be an elegant component of the city that supports the local architecture, social infrastructure, and the local urban economy. The contingent architecture, in return, should support the practicality and beauty of the infrastructure. When infrastructure, buildings, and neighborhoods are beautiful and interconnected, they transcend the mundane and signal a place that is loved and worth preserving.”

My sister has lived in Southeast Asia for ten years and I had the opportunity to visit her in the Summer of 2015. It was then that I was captivated by the city of Luang Prabang, Laos and its natural and built beauty and heritage. Because of the pandemic I couldn’t travel to Laos. Not all of my site was available on Google Earth so I relied on maps, surveys, and books for context. Thankfully, my sister was able to visit the site and supplied me with photographs and videos of areas of question.

Luang Prabang is protected by UNESCO, with a fusion of French and Lao architecture and urbanism.

Since becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, tourism has grown rampant, often negatively impacting the city. This includes illegal building that caters to tourists, like hotels and attractions.

Tourism brings money to the local economy but also brings damage to the heritage. The challenge was to create infrastructure that supports both the visitor and the local.

Anything built in a city is an opportunity to respond to and integrate with existing landscape and hardscape, plans of future city development, and heritage and preservation of the place. Context matters, both physically and culturally.

This was the first I had ever designed in an Eastern context. I was pleased to discover overlap in my education in classical architecture and the

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relevant precedent found in Laos and Southeast Asia. I learned of the local and important role of religion (Buddhism) and architecture and urbanism. The proposal took cues from both monastic architecture (which used brick, masonry, and tiles), as well as the domestic architecture of the region (wood). The process revealed what constitutes “traditional” to the local context and how culture is expressed through the built environment and often the preservation of the natural environment.

The process of the bridge design was unlike other architectural projects I have done. The use of a bridge and its support directed my efforts to both functionality and design. The linear nature of a bridge allowed me to explore rhythm and patterns that would speak to the local context and heritage.

It was refreshing to iterate within the boundaries of this type of project.

The proposed bridge acts as a connection between previously disconnected parts of the city and serves as a gateway to those arriving the peninsula (the historic part of the city). The market, boathouse, restaurants, and residences all respond to each other and shape publics spaces that are for the benefit of the city.

The presentation choices were pivotal in the expression of the ensemble of buildings and spaces.

Using sepia monotone with sparing red showcased the natural material, beautiful setting, and form of the architecture. The long plates emphasize the horizontal nature of the project with the literal centerpiece being the bridge.

It was exciting to learn that one of my jurors had been to this city and echoed my sentiments on its natural and built environment. She graciously praised the sensitivity of the proposal.

Thesis: Christian Johnson

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I hope that more students take the opportunity of a thesis to explore an idea and study how architecture can respond to it, rather than the other way around.

I didn’t choose these buildings and then craft my thesis. My interest in the idea of beautiful infrastructure in a city dictated the beginning of my design thoughts and decisions. I encourage students to embrace and explore cultures unknown and learn from their discoveries. Thesis is for exploration.

This project was awarded an Honorable Mention Award for Design Excellence in Architecture from the School of Architecture.

In the Fall 2021, it was recognized with an Acanthus Award from the Chicago chapter of the Institute for Classical Architecture & Art, and the project was published in the ICAA’s The Classicist No. 18

Site Plan

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A New Bridge for Luang Prabang

River Section

Market and Riverfront Elevation

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Thesis: Christian Johnson

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A New Bridge for Luang Prabang

Axonometric View of Site

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Thesis: Christian Johnson

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The Urban Redevelopment of Berlin’s Fischerinsel: A Twenty-First Century Neighborhood in the Heart of Historic Berlin

by James Lengen

The School asked us to begin to generate a thesis project in the summer, but work didn’t begin in earnest until that Spring semester. Even then, many of us were also “TA-ing” and taking other classes. To find a thesis that develops naturally, I recommend finding a project with a clear problem that needs to be solved. After all, problem-solving is at the heart of architecture, especially academic architecture.

The project stemmed from when I did an internship at an interior architecture firm in Berlin and fell in love with the city. I biked to work—and, really, all over town—but there was a stretch of eight-lane highway that always bothered me. That area felt placeless and was not a nice area to cycle, despite bike lanes and wide sidewalks in some parts. An area where the highway met the old city was especially bad, with high-rise concrete panel residential towers set in a landscape isolated from the rest of the city.

As it turned out, that area was the site of one of Berlin’s oldest neighborhoods: the Fischerkiez in Alt-Cölln, which was neglected after World War II and torn down in the 1960s to make way for fashionable and efficient housing. I wanted to restore the neighborhood and heal the city’s fabric of its current placeless void. The project sought to: • • •

Create spatial enclosure in public spaces and semi-private courtyards, Do this at a humane walkable scale (this means a polycentric network of places) and finally Articulate buildings with an appropriate character for the place— something that would feel timeless and durable, and somewhere people could make a home, which is the essence of a neighborhood.

This was a massive urban design project with multiple centers along the highway to design: Leipziger Strasse, Spittelmarkt, the island itself,

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Friedens-Forum: Weltfrieden Denkmal und Institut

and then the Molkenmarkt across the river. Such a big project had to be built in phases. To define the housing typology, I used a flexible courtyard type that has a long history in Berlin, along with a rowhouse type. At the end of the island, the river splits, which provides an ideal site for important public buildings. On one hand, I was spread too thin, but on the other hand, I think it is necessary to

Thesis: James Lengen

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Friedens-Forum: Weltfrieden Denkmal und Institut

Fischerinsel Development Plan: Phase IV

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The Urban Redevelopment of Berlin’s Fischerinsel

Muhlendamm Brucke: Elevation

Friedens-Forum: Rowhouses

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Thesis: James Lengen

The pandemic year was very stressful, and I have rarely struggled like that. The final jury was a little hard to read but very nice; it wasn’t until I started receiving so many nice comments and congratulations that relief started to set in. Try to remember to tell people when you appreciate their work, because sometimes we really need it! I’ve been really grateful, and can hopefully ‘pay it forward’.

In the end, the jury selected the project for the Ferguson & Shamamian Prize, and many professionals took notice. I received congratulations and a few job offers verbally. It was also well received at the School of Architecture here at Notre Dame.

The dean invited me to be an inaugural candidate for a new research position. My research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture and urbanism in Rome, especially Piranesi and the designers he influenced, like architects Gugliemo Calderini and Gino Coppedé. That is what motivates my career: how to build on tradition to make enduring and high-quality places today.

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have an idea of the big picture. Professor Duany is a fantastic “big picture” thinker who helped me stitch the important public buildings, housing types, and centers all together.

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Architecture as Sacred and Sensible for the Twenty-First Century: A Proposed Campus Redesign for St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish

by Joanna Lindstrom (née Skros)

I had had the idea to redesign my home parish church as my thesis for a couple of years. When I found myself at home during the summer of 2020 and living around the corner from the site I would need to study, I decided to go for it. The inspiration really came from over twenty years of involvement in the parish and school. I had a personal connection to the place and its people, and had an understanding of the shortcomings of the preexisting 1980’s-era church building and what might better suit the needs of the community.

Completing pre-design work prior to the spring semester allowed me to focus immediately on the actual design for the site and building, knowing that I already had gathered all of the topographical, historical, and programmatic information necessary to complete a successful project. Our studio, advised by Professor Duncan Stroik, began the semester with a week-long analysis of our precedents and then a 24-hour design esquisse.

Getting our initial design ideas down right away and incorporating our pre-design research got us moving on the design right away.

I drafted my original thesis statement in the Fall of 2020 during pre-design; though the heart of the thesis did not change much during the spring semester, it became easier to articulate my argument for the project as the design developed.

I revisited my thesis statement every few weeks, making edits along the way until it reached its final form.

Once our midterm reviews passed, we brought all of our drawings up to a larger scale and immersed

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ourselves in the details of the design. It was fun for me to start thinking about things such as the design of the altar, liturgical furnishings, and statues, and to sketch some perspectives that brought the project to life.

Completing the final drawings and watercoloring are always one of my favorite parts of any project as well! Work on final drawings began approximately one month before the final submission; I spent a little over two weeks on the drawings (done by hand on vellum), a few days for scanning, editing, plate arrangement and printing, and then a little over one week on watercolor.

For me, this project became a sort of “capstone” and a synthesis of my academic pursuits at Notre Dame.

Obviously, it was the culmination of five years of study in architecture, but it also brought together my other interests in disciplines such as theology, which I minored in.

My advice for thesis students is to do a quick practice rendering at some point around the midterm. It will give you a better understanding of your materials and prevent you from making any major color palette decisions during that last week.

My advice for everyone is to take plenty of breaks on the terrace, and to not get so wrapped up in a project that you forget to enjoy what you’re doing.

Work hard and meet your deadlines, but know that it’s the memories of “unproductive” moments with your friends in studio and conversations with professors that you admire that you will really look back fondly on after graduation.

Thesis: Joanna Lindstrom

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View through Nave

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A Proposed Campus Redesign for St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish

Above: Front Elevation Below: Transverse Section

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Thesis: Joanna Lindstrom

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Developing the Vernacular: A Proposal for a Coastal New England Hotel

by Juan Esteban Salazar

The inspiration for my thesis project came from wanting to learn about New England vernacular architecture and how it developed, to test my hand at developing a New Urbanism in the Northeast, and to explore wood construction methods.

The building that influenced my thesis design the most was the Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Some of my most cherished memories are in and around that building, whether it was a birthday, graduation, anniversary, or just a summer’s day at the beach. The building that sits there now is a reconstructed version—maybe even the third or fourth iteration of a hotel built in that location over the past 200 years. The surrounding community fought to keep the historic hotel, even though it had been in decrepit condition and deemed structurally unsound by the local health and safety department. I still remember that old building from my childhood.

It was a dark, eerie, sandy pitstop after a long day on the beach. Some of you Wes Anderson fans may recall its brief appearance in Moonrise Kingdom. To me, it represents quintessential New England.

Sometime around 2010, the building was completely reconstructed by a firm based in Connecticut: Centerbrook Architects & Planners. They did an amazing job with the project. I called up the firm and was able to have a conversation with one of the project architects, and they actually gave me the complete drawing set. It was enormously helpful for generating the program for the hotel, learning about the type of construction used, and even developing some of the fenestration and ornamental detail.

Admittedly, I spent an enormous amount of energy thinking about my thesis. I outlined a few different possible projects before deciding which direction to go. I interviewed a few architects and historians in the area to try and understand what would be a meaningful project to build on the site. I felt Cotrell Street Elevation

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Thesis: Estaban Salazar

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A Proposal for a Coastal New England Hotel

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Thesis: Esteban Salazar

During the second week of my thesis, I went to play some Catan in a friend’s apartment. I had parked my car on Eddy Street. After the game, I came back to find that my computer, sketchbook, and backpack, which contained the entirety of my thesis prep

work, had been stolen from my car. My buddy was there with me, and he saw everything and knew I would be devastated. At that moment, I was too stunned to speak, and I couldn’t even believe that it had really happened. I kept expecting to find it sitting right where I had left it. The funny thing is, I didn’t even care that my computer had been stolen. To me, all of the thesis prep work I had done was absolutely priceless. I swear some of my best sketches were in that notebook, and I’m still sad that it’s gone. I managed to recover some of my material by digging through emails, but it definitely set me back a week or two. If anything it came like a bucket of cold water, telling me ‘it’s time to get a move on’. To be completely honest, thesis can get pretty gritty. You’re going to have setbacks and times of doubt, but in the end, you can make it through as long as you keep positive, keep your support network close, and take plenty of well-timed coffee (and cigarette) breaks along the way.

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strongly that a thesis should be a firm statement about how I think architecture can improve communities. I received a Fagan grant to complete research in Mystic over winter break, where I spent my time sketching and taking photos of the entirety of the town that I would later use to stitch together to recreate the context. This research allowed me to generate a vernacular lexicon to use in my project. I had a blast with the process. I think the key moment in my thesis preparation was when I watched Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”—it had just snowed four or five feet outside my Airbnb and it was around Christmas time. I decided then and there that I wanted to design a project that could help sustain a small town community.

Site Plan

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The West Chester Market Station

by Benjamin Shelton

Market Street Elevation

Southeast Pennsylvania is full of historic boroughs.

Many of these little market towns have become incredibly popular in recent decades as people have discovered the appeal of living in smaller urban communities accessible to Philadelphia and within the reach of land preserves and local agriculture. My own experience living in West Chester, the county seat of Chester County, revealed the possibility of focusing on one of these communities nestled between the city and the country.

It was important to me to find a project in a region where the history of the place and local expressions of architectural types could play a primary role in the design. That can be a challenge, especially when we are in studios trying to learn a lot about a place with limited local knowledge. The reward of looking closely at Southeast Pennsylvania is that

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I discovered a trove of historic market halls and regional rail stations to document, to study, and to celebrate. My hope is that this appreciation for the place and its history generated a more credible design solution.

To better understand the project, I began a semester of independent study prior to thesis which allowed me to delve into the history of Pennsylvania market architecture and have something to say about that before ever touching a site plan or piece of tracing paper. This study of the architectural type and its history allowed me to be a better judge of my own work as the design process unfolded. Ultimately, I hope my project can be an inspiration to others to think deeply about the places they love and to offer their design intelligence in a way that is visually and intellectually compelling.

Thesis: Benjamin Shelton

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The West Chester Market Station

Aerial Perspective from Market Street

Interior Perspective of Market Hall

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l’Accademia Gazometro dell’Arte Gastronomica

by Samanta Xinyuan Zhuang My inspiration for this thesis project was a happy coincidental combination of many things! I discovered the Garbatella/Testaccio ex-industrial area through the Italian Experience class with Professor Giovanna Lenzi-Sandusky. Then there came my obsession with all the Academies in Rome, and the Netflix show Chef’s Table, which I would listen to while working on repetitive studio tasks.

The Gastronomical Art Academy idea was really an excuse to combine all the things I liked into one building.

I think the modern Italian literature and culture class that I was taking with Professor Charles Leavitt gave me the final motivation to take on the daunting task of doing something to the iconic Gazometro.

Through novels and films, I almost felt as if I were living in the neighborhood through the post-war years, so I desperately wanted the Gazometro to realize its full potential, and architectural design was my way of showing it love.

I made the mistake of looking at way too many buildings at once, but one building that was particularly inspiring was the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. Located on the famous Parisian market, Les Halles, Bourse de Commerce was first built as a place for the storage and sale of wheat, and then converted to a space for stock exchange. During my thesis preparation time, news came that Tadao Ando was commissioned to design a concrete structure inside the existing building to accommodate an art exhibition for the Pinault Collection. It made me think of the life span of one single building and how a building can grow and change. I felt like I was granted permission to add new structures to the existing structure in an unapologetically bold way, as long as they work together aesthetically and there is good reasoning.

I could not travel for thesis precedent study because of COVID-19, but I got enough information thanks to a lot of kind people. The Rome faculty of Professors Anders, Mazzola, and Weatherill sent me pictures of the site and gave me websites for the city planning department. They also shared with me similar projects they have advised in the past, and tirelessly answered my endless questions. Back on campus, our librarians—Jennifer Parker and Morgan Wilson—encouraged me to put in orders for all the Italian books I needed. Professors DiMiao and Vitti came to my desk to look at my mountains of trace when I had no idea where I was heading.

I also reached out to some urban designers and architecture students who worked in the area and posted their work online. They met me via Zoom and helped me understand the character of the place. One of them, Koen Hezemans, walked me through the Lanciani map, and sent me GIS data he found useful. It amazed me to see how people are willing to help total strangers, and how the professors are so supportive and invested in our academic projects.

South Elevation Detail

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l’Accademia Gazometro dell’Arte Gastronomica

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Thesis: Samanta Xinyuan Zhuang

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Section West-East, towards North

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Roof Plan

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Piano Terra

Piano Nobile

Mezzanine

Roof Terrace

Roof Plan

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AN INTERVIEW WITH 102

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An Interview with Mark Foster Gage

Interview: Jennifer Trzaska (JT): Jumping right in, starting at the beginning: why architecture? What made you choose this career?

Mark Foster Gage (MFG): I was the Chair of Admissions at Yale School of Architecture for six years, and at one point I realized that we very, very rarely got applications from Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming or other predominantly rural states. I could never figure it out until I realized that kids from those states had never been exposed to great architecture. I am from Omaha, Nebraska, and there isn’t what we would call a rich tradition of architecture, with perhaps the exception of the State Capital. I realized at a certain point that people just aren’t inspired to pursue architecture if they haven’t seen it. Fortunately for me, in my senior year of high school I had a class, taught by my football coach, called Humanities. We spent a third of the semester on music, a third of the semester on art, and a third of the semester on architecture.

He was giving a slideshow on architecture—which, in retrospect, was super bad, because it was coming from a football coach—but he showed a picture of this art deco building with white marble in Omaha, and even though I lived in this town, I’d never seen it. I saw that building and I was like, “Architecture?

Like, you can do that? Like, as a job? You can make things like that?” So that put the idea in my head.

“I wanted to do contemporary versions of beautiful things.

I wanted to find our next Classicism.”

I applied to colleges and ended up getting into a handful. I chose to go to Notre Dame for a variety of reasons, mainly that it was a great school. I had no idea of its classical focus, but having just been totally inspired by an art deco building, Notre Dame was a pretty good fit. I took my first architecture class and I just never second guessed it. Thirty years later I am still in it.

JT: Following Notre Dame, you worked for a bit and then went to Yale for your masters. Can you talk about why you chose Yale?

MFG: I was hired during the spring break of my fifth year to go work for Robert A. M. Stern, in New York City. I was a part of four competitions when I was at Stern’s, and we won all four. In my team, I focused on looking at the history of the context, the materials, and drawing up facade ideas; I was also doing the watercolor renderings, because this was

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Tower on West 54th Street, New York City

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Desert Resort

pre-computer. Although this was pretty exciting for my first few years out from Notre Dame, I was starting to want to explore the use of the computer in architecture—which was a new idea at the time.

I actually once asked a Notre Dame professor if he thought computers could play any role in architecture, because when I was a student we had just gotten email. And he goes, [points to brain] “this is my computer,” and, [holds up a pencil] “this is my printer, and that is all you will ever need.”

One of the reasons I wanted to move on from Stern’s office was this yearning to do new things.

While I had watched all four of our projects start to get built over a two-year period, which was pretty incredible, I also realized that the computer was kind of becoming a thing. Despite my professor’s sage advice, I had an idea that the computer might change the world and might change architecture.

I applied to several schools with the intent that I would go and really focus on technology. I never wanted to do it to be a Modernist or anything; I wanted to do contemporary versions of beautiful things. I wanted to find our next Classicism. That was something that really plagued me in my education: what’s the next Classicism? Or is it just this bland, pseudo-modernist glass box landscape that we’re stuck with from now until eternity? Or are we stuck designing the same traditional architecture from now until eternity with no innovation?

I was actually planning to go to Harvard, but at that time Stern was the Dean at Yale, and he told me, “If you go to Harvard instead of Yale, you’ll never eat dinner in this town [New York City] again,” like he was going to pollute my reputation, jokingly… but not jokingly. Yale at the time only had two computers shared by about 160 students, so it was a big commitment for me to say, “I want to learn digital technology. I’m going to go to Yale, I’m going to trust you to do what you say you’re going to do and bring the school into the twenty-first century,” because it really was in the nineteenth. So I made that leap of faith and, sure enough, he invested a huge amount of money into upgrading everything as soon as I got there.

As part of this, Stern hired Greg Lynn to teach an advanced studio and Lynn—at the time, and still today—was one of the great pioneers of digital technology in design. Zaha Hadid was teaching, Frank Gehry was teaching, all these much bigger names, but I knew Lynn was the technology guy and no one else really knew who he was, so I got into that studio my first year, which was kind of rare.

Yale has a prize called the Feldman Prize, which goes to the best project of the school in any given year.

I was nominated for that prize for my work in the Lynn studio, and I won, which is rare for a first-year student. I was like, “Oh, wow, like this digital plus classical thing really works.” For the next series of

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An Interview with Mark Foster Gage studios, I also took very digitally-oriented studios.

I am happy to say I was nominated for the Feldman Prize in each of those studios, and I think that’s because of my Notre Dame education. I knew how to make architecture, and the other people didn’t really know how to make architecture as much as they knew how to make concepts of architecture.

The software programs that we were using came out of Hollywood, and the reason we wanted to use them was that they could make more interesting forms than boxes. They could model very voluptuous shapes, and I wanted to use them to make figurative

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forms, because you get that figuration a lot in Classicism. The technology was actually more useful to me, as someone who was interested in Classicism and figuration, than it was for people who just wanted to do modernist boxes which tend to be pure geometry and no figuration. This weird collision of my Notre Dame background has really given me a kind of aesthetic sensibility about what architecture is and can be, and combining that with technology gave me access to new forms of aesthetic expression in architecture. I basically took that combination and used it in school, and opened up my firm the day I graduated.

Edited by Jennifer Trzaska Stern thought that if he paired me with Porphyrios— and called it Digital Dimitri—more students would take the class. I would go on to teach studios with Greg Lynn, Léon Krier, and Frank Gehry, among others—each one of the very best in their respective fields. I was immersed in these two separate worlds: this very small classical world in New York City, and this very small digital world in architecture. My career has really been about stitching those together somehow in my mind, and I’ve always walked that fine line.

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After graduation I started teaching at Yale and Columbia simultaneously; they both offered me a job and I took both, with neither knowing about the other, because I was broke. At the same time, I was also, because I was broke, teaching a design studio at the Institute for Classical Architecture in New York. I was hired to Yale and Columbia because I had digital skills that almost no one else had at the time. As a young faculty member, they don’t really trust you to teach studios, so they assign you people to teach studios with. I started at Yale by assisting Dimitri Porphyrios; nobody at the time wanted to take his studio because he was a Classicist, and Bob

JT: One of the classes you’ve taught recently is on

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An Interview with Mark Foster Gage designing social equality. Can you speak a bit about what that class is? And how do you think that our city design impacts society?

MFG: Architecture right now has no theoretical discourse of aesthetics. The twentieth-century forgot about aesthetics because Modernism was so vehemently against the subject in favor of “form follows function.” My job in the last ten or fifteen years has been to begin to bring back the discourse of aesthetics into architecture. One side of me likes that architecture has this really intense intellectual side in contemporary theory, and one side of me worries that those ideas aren’t always easily translatable into architectural form. Unfortunately, theory and practice are quite separate enterprises today. It’s been very frustrating that architecture has no language for aesthetics, because I have always wanted to address architecture visually, rather than programmatically or conceptually. I’ve done that through editing books, writing books, writing articles—and most of this work has to do with the relationship between architecture and aesthetics, which is a strong social component. This is actually something very current in philosophy— that the aesthetics of architecture forms the backdrop of human reality—yet we don’t talk about the aesthetics of a building, we talk about the “story” of a building. Or someone’s

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like, “I did a really great building, it’s LEED Platinum.” That doesn’t mean it’s good architecture, it just means it’s good at saving energy. Your bird building doesn’t mean it’s good architecture, it just means it looks like a bird. We don’t really have any discourse, especially once you get outside of Notre Dame, about beauty in architecture or aesthetics in architecture, and especially things like identity— how aesthetics create the identity of the places that we live in.

In 2016, the United Nations announced that more people on earth live in cities than in rural environments, for the first time in human history.

That means architecture isn’t just buildings in nature, architecture is literally the background of human reality right now. More humans when they walk outside their front door see cities and architecture than untamed nature on farms. This means that architecture isn’t just the discipline of providing shelter, it is the discipline of telling humans what reality looks like. If we don’t have a language for aesthetics in architecture, how are we supposed to decide what our reality should look like?

I don’t have all the solutions, but I think I am asking the right question. I’ve been all over the world—to just shy of one hundred countries—and I can say that most cities that have been majority-built in the last fifty years are pretty unremarkable. There’s no new New Yorks going up, no new Parises going up, no new Romes going up.

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Above: Penkridge Hall Left: House on Ile Rene Levasseur, Quebec

They’re all these completely unlivable, horribly hideous generic environments, because no one has any way to talk about what it should look like. It’s just all about efficiency. That’s how aesthetics for me is political; that’s why my work is so aesthetically charged, because I’m trying to get people to notice the value of aesthetics.

My work turns aesthetics up to level eleven in order to prompt discussions about the value of aesthetic discourse in architecture. It doesn’t mean I think everything I design should be built; it means that a lot of the work I design won’t be built, but I’m okay with that. My role in architecture has really been a kind of provocateur, to force architects to think about what the aesthetic value is of what they’re producing—not the LEED value, not the narrative value, not the economic value, not the story. What is it we’re producing as the visual framework of human reality? What are we leaving as a legacy for future generations? Everyone talks about sustainability and architecture, and I’m like: “What exactly are you sustaining?”

My peer group is very intellectually oriented, very dedicated to academia, and still very interested in

pushing buttons in practice more than building things. More like runway fashion, less like wearable fashion. That’s what I respond when asked, “What kind of architecture do you do?” I’m like, “Well, you know, the difference between runway clothes and what ends up in the store? My work is the runway stuff. And it kind of ends up in other practices often in a somewhat diluted form.”

JT: Can you walk me through the process of how you do projects with your firm, from finding the clients through the final product, and what you draw inspiration from?

MFG: We had some success as a firm early because we were using these computer programs to do work that no one in the world had ever seen before. We were becoming affiliated with software companies who were giving us computers to use and automotive softwares to do curves. It looked really weird; some of it was beautiful in this weird way. We got a lot of press and a lot of name recognition, even though we hadn’t really built very much, even to this day.

We get clients from all over now; we’re building a small private library in Penkridge [England] for a Stoa Magazine

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An Interview with Mark Foster Gage really interesting guy. He was going to buy this PreRaphaelite piece of art and decided that instead of buying a piece of art, which would just be “taking care of culture,” he wanted to “produce culture.”

He wanted to produce something important in architecture. It’s a historic plot of land that was the site of a twelfth-century Templar Chapel, so there are a lot of historic references we need to make, but I don’t want it to be historic; it’s a fine line. His number one priority was doing something beautiful that he could be proud of—a dream client.

A resort we designed in the Middle East was also an important one for us, because it was the first time we used artificial intelligence to help design architecture. In Islamic cultures, they can’t use the human body representation, so they don’t have a culture of painting human figures, like you would find in the Catholic Church, but they have a really rich aesthetic language in patterns. That project focused on using patterns from different local civilizations from different time periods. How do you do a building like that? How do you do a building that uses history but is not just a little Saudi dome over here and a Nabataean entryway over there?

How do you not end up with some postmodern Frankenstein? We started taking the patterns and blending them together using artificial intelligence to produce these new, deeply layered patterns.

When any new tool comes on the market, I want to know what it can do for architecture. Our goal for that project was to use artificial intelligence to think of new ways to address history, and fuse its DNA into new types of forms and formal languages.

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“First of all, if Lady Gaga asks you to do a dress for her, you say yes.”

JT: You’ve branched out some from the field of architecture, most notably with the dress for Lady Gaga. How did that happen? What inspired you to branch out in that way?

MFG: First of all, if Lady Gaga asks you to do a dress for her, you say yes; that’s just an unwritten rule in New York. It’s interesting, because we became known for doing unusual architectural work. More often than not, our projects have some aesthetic power to them, some haunting or weird beauty.

I’m not egotistical enough to say all our projects are beautiful, but I would say that our work tends to have a quality that’s kind of more unusually beautiful. Some people hate it and some people like it, but there’s an aesthetic ambition in the work. So we get invited to do non-architectural things by clients because they want that weird beauty. We’ve been invited to do things for the Coachella Music Festival, the Biden/Harris Presidential Campaign, MAC Cosmetics, and Google, to name a few. Not all these things end up being built or public per se; sometimes it’s more of design consulting—like designing a next generation shoe for a company and showing them what the shoe of the future might be.

The Lady Gaga project was like that: a question of what you can do with 3D printing now with regards to fashion. The original idea for that dress was that we were going to digitally scan all of the faces of a bunch of her fans and 3D print the faces into this outfit. We ended up just doing this shawl with Gaga’s face and images of fans printed with this new fabric printing technology. It was one of those circumstances where someone comes to us and is like, “Hey, we like your work. It’s kind of interesting.

What would you do with this and that?” I would say maybe like ten or fifteen percent of what we do is just on the margins of what’s architecture and not architecture.

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Tower on West 54th Street, New York City

JT: There’s another article for this issue of Stoa that’s about furniture design, and how it relates to architecture. Have you ever delved deep into furniture design with any of your projects? Or could you see yourself doing that?

MFG: We’ve designed furniture, mostly for specific residential projects we’ve built. I’d be interested in doing more furniture now, because I think technology is making that more possible to build what we want. For the last ten years, you’ve been able to 3D print a coffee cup pretty cheaply; in the next ten years you’ll be able to 3D print a chair pretty easily; ten years after that, maybe a house.

I’m actually not looking forward to the world where everything is 3D printed; I’d rather get things

back to long-lasting materials and not use plastics for everything. I prefer marble and bronze in architecture as opposed to plastics and glass. That’s partially why a lot of our furniture hasn’t been built, because we could 3D print it but then it’d be just plastic. We’re waiting for technology to play catch up. We have started to use robotic carved marble for some projects, but that is still rather pricey.

JT: I saw on your website that MFGA is hoping to switch more towards actually constructible projects in the next ten years. Why are you making that switch?

MFG: We are at the point where the technologies that I would need to build the work that I design

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JT: You’ve been practicing for about twenty years, and you’ve seen the world of architecture change in that time. Do you have any predictions regarding what the world of architecture will be like in twenty years? And how the way we build and design will be changing?

MFG: Twenty years ago, I was part of a generation that discovered how digital technology could help us design more beautiful and complex things, and gave us access to a language of design that architects had never had before. That strain of digital technology has been way, way, way eclipsed by what we have today, like BIM modeling. The promise of technology when I was a student was that it was going to change the way we could design the world, and our world could look very different. The actual use of digital technology has been to make building cheaper and dumber, fit better into supply chains, manage things like warranties, and enable insurance and testing and performance and budgets.

What I’ve seen is that we had this magic tool of digital technology, but then most of that technology got used merely to make things more efficient and more economical—not that efficiency and economics are bad. It has actually made architecture less aesthetically interesting. The computer has made architecture more affordable, but what that really means is the computer has made it possible for the world to spend less on architecture. On the surface, I would say, “Yeah, that’s great, more affordable architecture, how can that be a bad thing?” But it’s a bad thing, when it means that you can build things and spend less and less and less money, which means there’s even less and less and less time invested in discussion about the aesthetics of what we’re producing in the world.

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are just about available to do architecture at full scale—we’re just on the cusp. Ten years ago, much of my work wouldn’t have been buildable; in the next ten years it’s probably, mostly, at least partially buildable. The world of technology has just about caught up and made a lot of the work I’ve been doing for the last twenty years possible. I wouldn’t mind building things, now that I’m getting up there in years, in my forties. You don’t want to do the same thing for too long, like just ‘competition, competition, competition’, ‘book, book, book’, ‘magazine, magazine, magazine’. At a certain point you kind of have a desire to put something in the world more permanently.

Residence in Gace, France

My fear is that artificial intelligence is going to make architecture even more efficient and more economical, and there will be even less room for human creativity. I worry that architectural design is going to become more of a commodity. Corn is a commodity: it doesn’t matter who produces the corn, it’s always the same price. I think architecture is going to become a commodity per square foot; it doesn’t matter if you do the BIM glass box, or I do the BIM glass box, or God forbid some Notre Dame student does the glass box—it just won’t matter.

Instead of being used to enable aesthetics, digital technology has been used to further remove them from the equation, because it’s all about efficiency and sustainability. That’s another reason why my peers and I do the work we do—because it’s like rallying against this tidal wave of digital efficiency that’s just crushing the aesthetic qualities of architecture, the aesthetic qualities of urban spaces, and the aesthetic qualities of cities.

JT: How important was it to have Robert Stern as a mentor and influence in your life, especially as a young architect? And can you think of any other architects that you really look up to?

MFG: I have had four hugely influential mentors in my life. The first was Thomas Gordon Smith.1 I never had him as a studio instructor, but he was on my reviews a lot and we had a kind of rapport. I think it was because I was really interested in figural 1 See: In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith on page 116 of this issue.

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An Interview with Mark Foster Gage ornamentation, and he had a sympathetic eye. He was always very supportive of my work. We kept in touch, he invited me back multiple times to lecture at Notre Dame, he sent me his new books, and I sent him my new books. His work was really incredible; he was also one of the most innovative architects of the Postmodern era. He was my first mentor.

My second mentor was Bob Stern who, because I was working on the competitions when I started out in his office, I got a bit of one-on-one exposure with. We became friends over the course of the last twenty years, and he wrote the foreword to my monograph. Peter Eisenman wrote the afterword, and I like the alpha and the omega aspect of that.

If Robert A. M. Stern didn’t exist, then Mark Foster Gage wouldn’t exist—that’s pretty safe to say. He has always been very encouraging of my work, even though it wasn’t classical; I think he has always been very encouraging of the fact that I was pushing boundaries. Ultimately, he did the same with Postmodernism before he came back to Classicism.

He’s been a huge influence on my life, not only as an architect, but on how to operate as a human.

Then there’s Greg Lynn, who I ended up teaching seven studios with at Yale. I had him as a professor for his first year of teaching at Yale, and he really

just taught me how to navigate the world of digital technology and contemporary architectural theory.

He’s probably been one of my biggest supporters and mentors. He is just an incredible human, beyond architecture.

Finally, Frank Gehry, who—when I was teaching with him—I used to give rides back and forth from New York to New Haven. Just in those conversations, he really taught me how to run a creative practice, how you make sure you’re doing work that always supports your creative vision—and you don’t do work that just pays bills. He showed me how you deal with clients, how you treat people with respect but set up boundaries. He’s very good at saying no, which is something young architects don’t know how to do; they accept every project. He really taught me how to work in the world as a creative individual.

It’s interesting, because my mentors include: Thomas Gordon Smith, a pure Classicist and pure academic; Bob Stern, who has a huge practice and is kind of a pseudo Classicist/pseudo not-Classicist; Greg Lynn, who’s digital, avant garde, but doesn’t build much, and is hugely theoretical; and then Frank Gehry, who’s the most prolific, digital, wacky, avant-garde builder of the last half-century.

I’ve been so fortunate to have those four figures in my life as mentors to help shape how I want to be.

I would say I’m equal parts all those four people, with maybe a couple dashes of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid. Peter Eisenman has been teaching at Yale for the same twenty years I have, and though I’ve never worked for him and never had him as a teacher, we’ve developed a dialogue. He’s shown me how to engage architecture with the world of philosophy and ideas. And Zaha Hadid should probably make the list too. I used to get rides back and forth from New York City to New Haven in her limo, and we developed a friendship over her last fifteen years.

She was wonderful, uncompromising, talented, kind, and charismatic, and is greatly missed.

National Center for Science and Innovation, Lithuania

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Now, I am fortunate enough to have found a certain degree of public and financial success, so I have been able to mentor younger architects who are just starting their own practices. In the same way I have been helped along—from Bob Stern and Frank Gehry to Léon Krier and Zaha Hadid—I hope to one day be able to do the same for the next generation.

Edited by Jennifer Trzaska

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Tower on West 54th Street, New York City

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In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith

Photograph taken of Thomas Gordon Smith at his desk.

in memoriam of

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In June 2021, the Notre Dame School of Architecture lost a vital member of its community in Thomas Gordon Smith. A wonderful leader, networker, artist, architect, chairman, father, husband and person, his impact on Notre Dame and the world of architecture was incredibly significant. His life was a testament to his great character and passion for architecture. He was a mentor to our architecture mentors, and made the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture what it is today.

by Valeria Whitmore

Le Salon

From the age of fourteen, Thomas Gordon Smith wanted to be an architect. He grew up in a small suburban city perched above Berkeley, California called El Cerrito. As a young boy, Thomas would often visit the classical-inspired house of Florence Treadwell Boynton, which was known as the Temple of the Wings. Seeing this house and learning from it inspired him to be an architect. Smith’s mother was a painter, and joining her outdoor painting sessions enabled Smith to begin his journey with art at a young age. In high school, Thomas had the desire to study architecture, but he was deterred by his advisors since “he didn’t have enough math skills.” Smith spent a year at the American College in Paris studying art, where his father, an academic historian, was on sabbatical. Smith then transferred to the University of Berkeley California studying painting and dance, where his architectural interests were temporarily set aside. It was in a modern dance class at Berkeley that Thomas met the love of his life, Marika Wilson, who came to witness Thomas’s love for architecture firsthand. He would spend time with her examining architecture and pointing out interesting details and even read Borromini’s treatise in the library with her as a date. It was in this spare time that Thomas Gordon Smith kept his passion for architecture well-kindled while undertaking his undergraduate degree.

After about a year of dating, Marika and Thomas married. He graduated from Berkeley while Marika finished her undergraduate degree in Social Welfare with minors in Art History and Italian Studies. “He worked for nine months while I was finishing my second year of college. We saved every penny,” Marika recalled. After graduating, Thomas started thinking about pursuing architecture again. For their honeymoon, and for Thomas’s architectural curiosity, the newlyweds took a trip to Europe.

Thomas and Marika Smith dancing at their wedding.

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In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith At the start of their nine-month European honeymoon journey, Thomas applied to architecture schools while they stayed in a monastery in Southern France.

The newlyweds continued to Italy, where Thomas studied Palladio’s buildings onsite and in depth. Marika reminisced, “We found a little apartment to rent in Vicenza for two months. That was very nice. That gave us a chance for him to see every Palladian building and spend a full day, or in some cases more than one day [studying a building].” Thomas also studied the Gothic buildings in the area of Vicenza, the precedents to Palladio.

After Vicenza, the couple spent a week or two in Florence, and then planned to travel to Rome. Thomas was interested in seeing the buildings of the contemporary architect, Paolo Portoghesi who he had heard of through Italian architectural magazines and Portoghesi’s own books on Roman baroque architecture. While in Florence, Marika and Thomas visited the tourist bureau for help in finding two of Portoghesi’s designs. The tourist bureau was not able to locate the buildings, so the tourist office called Portoghesi, who answered and said, “Be sure to tell them to come and see me when they get to Rome.” The Smiths did, and Portoghesi showed them models of his buildings as well as some of his buildings in person. They even ventured to the hills of Rome to visit Portoghesi’s first baroque-inspired house with Portoghesi and his wife.

Marika and Thomas Gordon Smith continued their European adventure to Greece, specifically to the hometown of Marika’s maternal grandparents, Tsouni, near Sparta. “Thomas did some major drawings of several of the village houses, especially one of my great uncle’s,” Marika remembered. At the end of their time in Greece, the traveling couple returned to the U.S. so Thomas could begin his graduate studies.

While in Europe, Smith was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania and Berkeley graduate architecture programs; Smith decided to attend Berkeley. According to Marika, Thomas found professors who were sympathetic to his interest in historical and classical architecture and encouraged him to dive passionately into his work. While at Berkeley, Thomas began organizing a series of lectures. “That was the beginning of his engagement in more public debates about architecture and architecture history,” Marika said. His lecture series alternated between graduate students and professors on topics related to architectural history and design.

While in graduate school, Smith was awarded the Berkeley Branner research prize for his proposal to study early modern buildings in the Netherlands, Hungary and the Czech Republic, as well as to study baroque churches and monasteries in Moravia, Bohemia and Northern Italy. The prize covered a year of architectural travel research after earning a masters degree.

Quonset House, in plan and section.

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Beach site in Guam

After finishing his degree and research, Thomas Gordon Smith worked for various architectural firms for his licensure. During this time, he also taught classical architecture at the San Francisco Architectural Club, thus instilling his interest in classical architecture to his students. Thomas organized an AIA lecture series that showcased architects and architectural historians from all over the country. “He was working for different firms, doing a lecture series and also doing early independent designs, which he was looking to get published. He had a lot of publications of his early work that were what you might call ‘theoretical projects’,” Marika recalled.

While working for an Oakland architecture firm, M.W.M. (McKinley, Whittaker, McNeil) , Thomas spent six months in a subsidiary office in Guam. “Thomas found it very hard to be on a tiny island,” Marika Smith said. So he found a nice site and designed a very hypothetical house there. “He was definitely not thinking that we should live our lives there. But it was a beautiful site looking down on a beach.”

Thomas incorporated some of the local building traditions, as well as many baroque elements into the design of the house. With his design complete, Smith sent fifty copies of his design to various people he knew or wanted to know. This habit of sending hypothetical projects to strangers and friends continued over the years.

A few years after having graduated from Berkeley, Thomas Gordon Smith became a Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome. From 1979 to 1980, Smith and his family lived in Rome. “At that point we had two kids.

We brought the family along and had a wonderful year in Rome,” Marika recalled.

During his time in the Eternal City, Thomas completed measured drawings of Santa Susanna in addition to a number of Borromini buildings. It was this time at the American Academy that Smith developed an interest in Roman baroque architecture.

In true Thomas Gordon Smith fashion and inspired by Roman churches, he began designing a hypothetical church in Rome: a small oratory on a triangular lot along the Via Giulia. The hypothetical client for the project was Fr. George Rutler, who was also a friend of the Smith family, and an American Catholic priest studying in Rome. Fr. Rutler had just written a book about St. John Vianney’s life and thus provided inspiration to dedicate the hypothetical church to St. John Vianney. In addition to Fr. George Rutler, Smith invited architectural historian Joseph Connors, to act as a critic for his design of St. John Vianney Oratory. While in Rome, Smith was selected to compose a facade for the Strada Novissima at the Venice Biennale.

The drawings of the oratory, along with drawings of other early projects and photographs of the recently completed Tuscan House and Laurentian House, were exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

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Thomas Gordon Smith’s rendering of St. John Vianney’s Oratory (Photo: Margot Holbert)

While in Rome, Thomas analyzed Roman buildings, and tried to design in a more fully articulate classical style. His goal was not to duplicate anything, but rather to spatially explore a variety of classical ideas. Marika Smith recalled, “It was a very good time to have this whole year to not be worried about paying the bills, primarily, and just have time to do his own project for a whole year… He had been interested for a long time in what architects were saying, and thinking about their ideas and writing about [these ideas]. Not just what they were writing, but what they were drawing.”

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From his published hypothetical projects, Thomas Gordon Smith began attracting clients: “He was building up his practice, so he would [design] just about anything,” Marika said. At the beginning of his practice, Thomas Gordon Smith worked on many renovations and additions to houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. “The first independent projects were two houses that my parents commissioned for just the purpose of selling them. You know, just to give him a chance to build something,” Marika said. They chose two lots and built these adjacent houses, which he named Tuscan House and Laurentian House. “They have owners who just love them. Both [homeowners] collect articles about their own houses. And those houses must have had 50 or 60 publications,” Marika said.

Marika and Thomas then became a team running his independent firm. The couple came into the business prepared; before Smith began to work independently, he and Marika had taken an entrepreneurship course together at Berkeley. Marika maintained the bookkeeping and business side of the practice. “I was involved from the beginning, and that included our planning, when we were starting to try and have a practice,” Marika said.

While maintaining his independent practice, Thomas also taught. Over the years he taught at the College of Marin, SCI-Arc, UCLA, Yale University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the Yale School of Architecture, in 1986, Thomas Gordon Smith taught a classical studio where he met Duncan Stroik, who was at the time a graduate student and is now a practicing architect, author and Professor of Architecture at Notre Dame. “He taught us a little bit of Vitruvius, he brought in Borromini, and the Baroque,” Stroik said. “Of the many good faculty that I had, he was the first one who really believed that classicism was living and breathing, and he was trying to do it in his own way.”

Smith loved to interpret textual descriptions of architecture, so Stroik’s graduate studio did an interpretation of Philo’s arsenal (description found in various Greek and Roman texts such as: Demostenes, Plutarch, Strabo, Pliny, Val.Maximus and

Tuscan House (Photo: Markia Smith)

Laurentian House (Photo: Markia Smith)

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In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith Vitruvius) and Pliny’s villa (description found in a letter from the wealthy Roman Pliny the Younger to his friend Gallus in the first century AD). For reviews, Thomas Gordon Smith invited scholars and well known architectural practitioners to critique the studio’s designs. “It was very important to him that architects should be in touch with scholars in other fields, especially other fields that might relate to the project that you’re designing,” Stroik recalled, also noting that the final review was done in New York at Robert A. M. Stern’s office with Philip Johnson and other characters. “It was a wild thing for a grad student to do, to go somewhere else for the jury, but also these guys were big shots—Phil Johnson was ancient and very, very famous.”

During his graduate studies, Stroik was inspired by Smith’s passion for teaching classical architecture. “You wouldn’t normally call Thomas a guru, but he had that role as someone who was trying to inspire, trying to direct, trying to create disciples.” Stroik also discovered under Smith that the main goal of designing in the classical tradition was not to fit in. “Classicism was a chance to do the Parthenon, or to do a Palladian Villa, or to do a palace!”

Thomas Gordon Smith took the chance given by Classicism and studied Vitruvius.

This study inspired him. It became a turning point. As Stroik describes, “Thomas started studying Vitruvius, joining everybody else who studied Vitruvius; Alberti, Palladio, Vignola, etc... Thomas is on the mountain with the other architects from the past who have done their own version of Vitruvius. So he was definitely vying with the ancients, vying with the best.” Eventually, his Vitruvian study inspired Thomas Gordon Smith to design his own Vitruvian house when he moved to South Bend to teach at the University of Notre Dame. “I think at a certain point when he got interested in Vitruvius and wanted to do a new edition of Vitruvius, he started working on [the house] at the same time. So this house is essentially in honor of Vitruvius,” Marika said.

Above: Exterior of Thomas Gordon Smith’s Vitruvian House (Photo: Margot Holbert) Above Right: Corinthian Capital sitting in the Vitruvian House’s front yard. (Photo: Margot Holbert)

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The Vitruvian House, where Marika Smith and her family still live today, became Thomas’s contemporary interpretation of Vitruvius’ principles.

The Vitruvian House is nestled in a quiet neighborhood among strikingly tall and beautiful woods. Coming along the main path, one passes by a rather unique garden ornament—a large disembodied column capital from the 1820s LaGrange Terrace building in New York City. In 1906, twothirds of the building was demolished.

Marika said, “It was assumed that all the capitals from the part that was torn down [from the LaGrange building] had been dumped for filler. Around 2008 we got a call from some Monks in New Jersey who had come across the capitals in the back hillside of the property where they were running a boy’s high school. They googled and came upon Thomas’ name, because he had written about it, and they said ‘would you come and look at this’. Thomas arranged that the Met would buy a set of capitals and install them in the American wing which they did. And then they just wanted to give us one of them!”

Passing the capital and winding along the path, one approaches a colossal, yet welcoming pedimented porch in the Ionic order, flanked by two lower wings, in the Doric order, on either side. The frieze of the Doric entablature contains imagery depicting the story of Hercules.

Passing through the porch, one is received into an entry vestibule with the living room beyond. The whole interior is decorated with an array of murals, fine art, books, and classical design pieces. Off the vestibule is the oval shaped dining room with tent-like draping, complete with a mural of the Roman cityscape as seen from the Pantheon. The kitchen is modest, its large windows fill the room with natural light and give a sense of cooking in the woods. From the tour, it is clear that the living room is the center of attention; its lofty ceiling and elaborate murals give a grand feeling to the room. The living room showcases Thomas Gordon Smith’s furniture collection, glass collection and beautiful artifacts and architectural renderings.

The living room ceiling is filled with murals of architects and their patrons. “The whole theme of the [living room] is architects and their patrons. He was intrigued by this kind of difference for architects compared to, say, painters. Architects need clients…[they are] working together to solve physical as well as visual problems,” Marika said. She continued, “On the north-south are ancient architects and their patrons and then in the east-west direction are Renaissance architects and patrons.”

Amongst the architects and patrons and in the center of the living room ceiling is a mural of Hercules, surrounded by personifications of the fields of study architects need. “[Vitruvius] talks about the fields of study that an architect needs to know a little bit about,” Marika said. These personifications include Law, holding a scale of justice and a pile of books, Theology, Poetry, Philosophy, Design, Astronomy, Music and Mathematics, holding a musical instrument.

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Hercules Ceiling Mural at the Vitruvian House (Photo: Margot Holbert)

Along the frieze of the living room reads the following excerpt from Vitruvius: “Architects who have tried to obtain manual skill but no education have never been able to muster an authority equal to the quality of their work. Conversely, those who depend only on calculations and writing seem to have chased after a shadow, not the real thing. But those who have mastered both skills-endowed, if you will, with a full arsenal- these have reached their goal quickly and with authority I-I-II.” 1 In 1989, Thomas Gordon Smith was hired to be the chairman of the School of Architecture at Notre Dame, which at that time was within the College of Engineering. In this role, Smith drastically changed the trajectory of the school to give it its now internationally renowned classical focus. However, this change did not come easily. “It was a radical departure…[and] very controversial,” said Robert Brandt, Sculptor and Furniture Design Professor at the School of Architecture.

Thomas Gordon Smith had a large impact in changing the School of Architecture.

“He put [the School of Architecture] on a new trajectory, and gave it a life that it already had inherently with Rome, with Catholicism, with tradition, and appreciating history. All those things were there, but he gave the spark to make it a fire and to create striking things,” Stroik describes. Smith took an ordinary architecture school and transformed it into a highly-ranked and leading classical architecture school. In the words of Duncan Stroik, “I think that if you look at the last 40 years, 50 years, there were other people that tried to do things like Thomas, but none of them had the guts and the strength to pull it off. That’s why he’s so amazing.”

With the implementation of a classical program and radically changing the curriculum of the School of Architecture, Thomas Gordon Smith received criticism 1

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Translated text from Vitruvius by Professor Ingrid Rowland

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by Valeria Whitmore

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and objection from alumni, students, and even national and international press.

Marika Smith remembered, “Students were upset because it wasn’t what they came for. They were in the middle of their studies, and suddenly had new ideas and new expectations. So there was some controversy.” Stroik, who was hired by Smith a year after his appointment as chair of the department, recalls that the whole school seemed to be in rebellion against Smith.

Despite the opposition, Smith persevered. “There were very few people who saw value in what he was doing. But he just stayed determined and continued on his path,” Robert Brandt said. Smith received many, often angry, letters which he

A Vitruvian Living Room (Photo: Margot Holbert)

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In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith

Sketched studies of “plain” style chairs.

would hang up for everyone to see. “Before Bond Hall was renovated, we had this large bulletin board outside the main office. And as long as the person who sent the letter and criticized him signed their name to it, he would pin it up… He did not hide the fact that people were very critical of him,” Brandt recalled. Smith knew how important the change to a classical program would be for Notre Dame. “This is something he very much believed in, and it was worth it,” Brandt said.

Thomas Gordon Smith implemented a classical program at the University of Notre Dame not so that everyone would become a Classicist, but that students would be exposed to the origins of architecture and understand the principles “... just as, you

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know, pianists always start by learning lots of the traditions within their musical instrument no matter what they choose to play, they’ve all learned to play some Bach and Beethoven before anything else,” Marika Smith said. Few architecture schools study classicism, but in doing so, classical students can discover the richness of history and can be equipped to design any building they want in a proper way.

Stroik added, “If he could only educate you at Notre Dame for five years, most people would fall in love with it…. We found after 30 years that people love [Classicism].”

With time, the majority of opposers began to see the value of classical architecture.

As a result, after ten years of the classical program, the School of Architecture began having its own career fair. Firms began to notice Notre Dame architecture students, and wanted to hire them. In the opinion of Stroik, “Without Notre Dame graduating fifty students every year, over the last thirty years, we wouldn’t have the firms that we have today. And the buildings that have been built wouldn’t be there without the Notre Dame influence.”

As chair of the School of Architecture, Smith also began the furniture design program. The program began with the hiring of Robert Brandt after posting an advertisement for the position in the Chronicle for Higher Education; the two met in Brandt’s interview, which took place at Smith’s newly constructed house in the summer of 1991. “He asked me to bring a couple of my pieces along with me, since I was driving up from Memphis. We sat on a couple of my chairs on his front porch drinking iced tea,” Brandt recalled. “Thomas is the reason I’m here… [he’s] the reason the furniture program exists.”

Thomas Gordon Smith had a great interest in classical furniture design. “He was one of the foremost experts in Duncan Phyfe furniture in the U.S. He was very knowledgeable,” Brandt said. Smith also enjoyed collecting furniture of the 19th century. He looked for furniture that used carved timber as the main decorative element. “Because of his interest in furniture, Thomas was delighted to receive the commission to curate the Classical Galleries in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are focused on early 19th-century American furniture and decorative arts. Thomas was also able to design furniture for a number of his residential projects and liturgical furnishings for some of the churches he designed,” Marika Smith shared.

Smith implemented the furniture design program to give students the opportunity to look at architecture in different scales: urban (cities), residential (buildings), and personal (furniture). The furniture design program also helps architecture students understand how their designs can be constructed in three-dimensions. Brandt described, “He was a strong believer in the saying from Vitruvius that architects need to not only know the scholarly aspects of architecture, but also they have to understand how to build things and how things go together. Because without that, you’re just chasing a myth, a ghost.”

In his nine years of serving as chair of the School of Architecture, Thomas Gordon Smith transformed the school and made a large impact—even creating an independent entity for the school, separate from the College of Engineering.

Eventually, Thomas stepped down from being the Head of the School of Architecture. This gave him more time to enjoy teaching and practicing architecture.

“He enjoyed having that combination [teaching and practicing] and particularly [designing] churches and museum projects. He was able to do several projects at the Met in New York. He was really happy to do those projects,” said Marika Smith.

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In Memoriam of Thomas Gordon Smith

In my interviews with Robert Brandt, Duncan Stroik and Marika Smith, I asked each interviewee to describe Thomas Gordon Smith to someone that did not know him. Many students today, myself included, never met this great man.

However, after hearing his dear friends and wife describe him, I feel as though I have met the man behind classicism at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. I hope these quotes can remind us of our origin and help us to keep Thomas Gordon Smith’s passion for classicism and innovation alive.

— Valeria Whitmore

ROBERT BRANDT on Thomas Gordon Smith: “He was confident and never second guessed what he was doing.

He had every reason to be confident. He was brilliant. He was a wonderful artist. When it came to architecture, he understood what he possessed, but was not rude… He just had that inner confidence that people wanted to buy into.”

“He was a ‘renaissance man’: he played music, he studied dance and painting, and he studied architecture. He mastered all of it.”

“I’ve worked with other architects, but with Thomas, I never thought I was working with an architect. I always thought it was a collaboration with another artist.”

“It’s because he’s an artist and he was very expressive in his work.

The colors that he chose were bold. [His architecture] was art.”

“When we dedicated this building, by that time Thomas was suffering from the effects of dementia. I saw him in the library; his eyes perked up and he stood up straight. He said ‘Robert, I’ve been down to your new furniture studio. It’s fabulous.’.. That shocked me because the time I saw him before… he couldn’t recall my name. He just had that moment of clarity.”

“He was something special and he influenced a lot of people...

He made a lot of people better. He made the world better. He made our school better. He made the University of Notre Dame better.”

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“I think he didn’t mind being eclectic. He wasn’t afraid of the word eclectic.”

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MARIKA SMITH on Thomas Gordon Smith:

“Well, you know, he loved students, he loved teaching, and he loved architecture.”

“On the last visit from the Students for Classical Architecture group, Thomas said, ‘Just try to do everything you want to do. You can’t do everything you want to do, but try to do whatever you want to do.’ He tried to practice and he tried to teach. We also have a family, so we have to put an emphasis on trying to do more than just practice architecture or just teach, but to just try and have a breadth of the gifts we were given.”

DUNCAN STROIK on Thomas Gordon Smith: “He was striking. He was striking in the way he looked with bright white hair and his height, and his thinness. He was striking in the way he dressed… with a bow tie, and often patterned clothing. Now, he was also striking in his presence, and the way he was involved and the way he would talk and the way he would tell stories and argue a point and in his passion… He had an interesting combination of being very 20th Century California—a little open-minded to everything and that everything new is good—and classicism.”

“I think in his life everything was a little bit classical…It was trying to be the full thing, the art, the architecture, the music, the food, the culture, the movies, he liked movies, it was all part and parcel.

It’s all connected for him.”

“He didn’t hide his classicism; he didn’t hide his Catholicism; he didn’t hide his Californian-ism. He was himself.”

“After Thomas’ passing, he forced me to look back on 30 years, and what he accomplished, what we’ve accomplished, what the school accomplished and what the students have accomplished.

And he was so happy about that, because he loved the students.

And he loved the community, and that community going out and impacting the world in a positive way.”

The Journal of the Institute for Sacred Architecture’s Fall 2021 Issue, edited by Duncan Stroik, was dedicated in memory of Thomas Gordon Smith. Visit www.sacredarchitecture.org for more details.

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An Interview with Anthony Fitheoglou Edited by Anna Drechsler

Anthony Fitheoglou is a research-led practitioner who sees value in traditional working methods. Graduating with distinction from the Kingston School of Art in 2020, his final year thesis, The Chambers of Commerce —A New Modern Classical Building for the City of Glasgow, was nominated for the RIBA President’s Silver Medal 2020. The project received growing interest and was shortlisted for the RIBA SWLG Awards and became the winning entry for the Traditional Architecture Group’s Student Design Competition 2020. Most recently, the project was exhibited at the New Glasgow Society—Imagine Glasgow 2021 event during COP26 in Glasgow. In addition to his growing achievements, Anthony has been published internationally within The Classicist. With a strong interest in learning the craft of stonemasonry, Anthony attended a weekend course at London Stone Carving Ltd before being fully enrolled at the Building Crafts College on the Advanced Diploma in Stonemasonry in September 2021. The course includes producing hand-drafted orthographic drawings using geometric techniques, marking out and creating complex stone components to finally cut and work the stone using hand tools. In essence, he is gaining practical experience to complement his existing classical education in architecture.

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Edited by Anna Dreschler

AD (Anna Drechsler): Tell us about your background. What led you to architecture and stonemasonry?

AF (Anthony Fitheoglou): I think it all started when I was at secondary school. One of the core subjects was design technology, which was very craft-based. We made small tables or shelves, and towards the end I made my own desk. After the end of secondary school I had to decide what subjects I wanted to pursue at college. I knew I was always better at art-based subjects, so I was phoning up universities, asking if I needed to have a math A Level to study architecture. They said no, you can choose art-based subjects, at which point I thought, “Great!”

Whilst at college I studied Architecture, Fine Art, History of Art, Graphic Design & Illustration and English Literature. It was a really rich mix of subjects and each one informed the other. I didn’t really learn as much as I thought I would in my architecture lectures about the subject itself and surprisingly learned more in my History of Arts lectures. I was exposed to architects like Mies van der Rohe and Adolf Loos, as well as others who informed my own direction and interest. During my lunch breaks or free periods I would often go into the library to read books about classical architecture.

When I needed to apply to university after finishing college, I visited an exhibition at Somerset House called ‘Skin+Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture’ and I was in awe. I’d never seen architectural models like that before, intricately detailed hand-crafted models, so beautifully made. I got in touch with the model-makers and asked if I could work with them but the only models I had made were whilst at college, so they suggested a one-week

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Ovolo Moundling with Ashlar Stop and Return:

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

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An Interview with Anthony Fitheoglou

Orthographic and Isometric Drawing of a Cyma Recta Moulding Engaged Column Base with Ashlar Stop and Joggle

“...I wanted to go back to school and start from square one: learning about classical orders, how to compose a building, how to understand the rhythm of a building, and how to create space.” model-making course that looked at models from 1:50 scale to a 1:500 topographical scale. I completed that course and then worked with them for ten months before starting my traditional passage into architectural education.

AD: So it sounds like you were led to architecture through an interest in craftsmanship and material.

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AF: Yeah, because I know I’m a detail-oriented person. When I was growing up, I would start finding pieces of wood at home and make these little sets inspired by films like the Lord of the Rings. In undergrad, I started looking at different influences like Japanese joinery and how that could be a little detail within my own projects. Creating a detail and having it 3D printed allowed me to test it physically. It was something tactile and that’s what I’ve always been interested in.

I really enjoyed seeing how my classical education at the Kingston School of Art transitioned into my education at the Building Crafts College— going from understanding the orders to understanding how to work an ovolo or a cavetto. You’re able to physically make it and understand the properties of the material you’re working with.

Edited by Anna Dreschler

AF: Definitely. When I was working in practice, I wanted to go back to school and start from square one: learning about classical orders, how to compose a building, how to understand the rhythm of a building, and how to create space. The other reason I wanted to go to Kingston was because there was a strong emphasis on tectonics. During my undergrad, I always wanted to learn how things fit together, but my tutors would say, “You don’t need to learn about that now, you’ll figure that all out in practice.”

So I went to Kingston and that’s where my architectural knowledge in classicism was complemented quite well by everything that I was doing.

One of the images I sent you shows the foam model of the Tuscan order for a project in Sicily; I was reading Modern Practical Masonry to figure out how to construct the entablature.

AD: Your final year thesis project, The Chambers of Commerce—A New Modern Classical Building for the City of Glasgow, got a lot of attention, including a nomination for the RIBA President’s Silver Medal, first place in the Traditional Architecture Group’s Student Design Competition, and an exhibition at the New Glasgow Society —Imagine Glasgow 2021 event during COP26 in Glasgow. Talk us through your design approach and what you wanted to achieve with the project.

AF: That was the one project that I put absolutely everything into. I wanted my final year masters to be very honest, and our class trips to London, New York, Washington—and then finally our site in Glasgow—encouraged this.

We didn’t know what we were actually designing; all we knew was that we were exploring the idea of the facade and what the facade means within a city context. I had traveled to New York previously, but it was this time

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AD: Did you choose to go to Kingston because it offered a classical curriculum?

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around that everything sort of made sense. I could look at architecture in a completely different way and see buildings designed by McKim, Mead & White, who were one of the major influences on my work. When we went to Washington, D.C. it was at the National Gallery designed by John Russell Pope that I just absolutely fell in love with the vastness of spaces and what that does to you as an individual.

Returning from those trips, I sort of understood what kind of atmosphere I wanted to create because of those building surveying exercises. I’ve got this vernier gauge that I constantly take photos of, looking at how small the mortar is between the joints of masonry and measuring radiated grilles. I was spending my whole time

in New York and Washington just measuring things, figuring out where I could use this or that or why I like the particular detailing on a building.

When we visited our site for the first time in Glasgow, I was heavily influenced by the incredible work of James Miller. He was very thoughtful about where the most value would go into his building, for example in the way that he placed pilasters on the side street and placed projecting, free-standing or engaged columns on the primary street. I was piecing these things together: my own interest from James Miller’s work, the work of John Russell Pope and McKim, Mead & White, and everything that I had explored through detailing my own thesis.

“...I just absolutely fell in love with the vastness of spaces and what that does to you as an individual.”

Ovolo Moundling with Ashlar Stop and Return

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I think one of the roughest models I had ever done was a piece of foam which was to be the entrance vestibule of the building at 1:50 scale. My tutor said to stop drawing and just carve, so I was just hacking into it with a little saw. At one point, I didn’t know what I was actually doing; I just needed to feel it and then something would happen.

As I was going past the roughing stage and moving into the refining stage, I started to notice I was creating these furrows into the foam. That’s when I thought, continue this, and then we can move on to another iteration.

That’s where the 1:1 study in stone came from—by drawing an initial sketch, and then actually producing it in stone.

AD: When did you decide you wanted to go to stonemasonry school?

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I made models for some of the early studies. I had this idea of an aedicule at the bottom, with a strong, almost temple-like base, followed by the shaft of the building with the piano nobile and the continuous floors, and at the top you’d have the attic storey. I was always trying to figure out what I wanted within all of these particular spaces. I’m a perfectionist so I don’t like making rough models. I feel when I make a model, I like to make it nice and complete so then I can think.

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AF: A tutor at Kingston mentioned the Building Crafts College, and after a little research, I found an evening introduction course in Letter Cutting and Carving in stone. After I finished my masters I thought, okay, I’m actually gonna go for this, but I was terrified of starting something new and there was an awful lot of doubt. It’s a huge gamble going from architecture, being on the computer, or working drawings by hand, and then learning a completely new discipline.

AD: Is there a difference between ways of thinking about working stone and designing architecture?

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Orthographic and Isometric Drawing of a Covetto Moundling with Ashlar Stop and Return

“Wouldn’t it be great to understand how to compose a building and understand the material that you’re working with as well?”

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AF: Somewhat. Architecture has its own set of rules just as stonemasonry has its own set of rules. They’re similar, but I feel not the same.

AD: How do these two disciplines work together? What do you see yourself doing in the future?

AF: Ultimately, I’d like to teach architecture and stonemasonry. Whilst doing my masters, I was a teaching assistant and taught the first year students orthographic drawing. It was really rewarding to show them what I had struggled with and teach them all of the tricks I had acquired through drawing and model-making. Quite a lot of my friends have asked me if I’d stopped architecture all of a sudden, and, well, no, because stonemasonry is a form of architecture. It’s one of the main disciplines within architecture.

Wouldn’t it be great to understand

Edited by Anna Dreschler AD: What recent building do you think represents a good relationship between craft and architecture?

AD: Which architects have been particularly influential in your development as an architect?

AF: As part of my coursework I’ve been working on Craig Hamilton’s Goldhammer Mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery. The reason I chose that is because of Hamilton’s relationship with Sandy Stoddart. Stoddart is the sculptor, Hamilton is the architect.

When you look at this building from the outside, it’s modest, but with moments of embellishment. That is where you find the relationship between craft and architecture— where the disciplines merge—like you find the buildings of McKim, Mead & White or John Russell Pope. You notice a sensitivity into the way that these buildings were constructed.

AF: I’d say they change, but each one has led me on to something new.

Back in college I was very interested in Mies van der Rohe, and it was great to see his work when I was in New York. Later on, John Pawson majorly influenced my architectural education. I appreciate his attention to the construction of his buildings.

His architecture is very minimal, I think because he was influenced by places like Japan—you can get that sense of ritual, something very calm.

Austerity is present in Pawson’s work. At Kingston I was exposed to architects like Sir Charles Monck, who designed Belsay Hall, which was one of my inuences for the Delos project.

James Miller in Glasgow and Sigurd Lewerentz in Sweden—he’s another favorite of mine. I’m quite interested in Lewerentz’s early work. His Resurrection Chapel also influenced the Chamber of Commerce project’s entrance vestibule.

AD: What are your thoughts on the relationship between Classicism and Modernism?

AF: I feel there’s so much we can learn from each other. Adolf Loos for instance—when you look at his architecture, it’s very restrained and you wouldn’t necessarily think it’s in a traditional or classical discipline.

You’ve also got Leo von Klenze who designed the Munich Glyptothek, which is very classical, but what he designed is sort of the earliest form of museums, where you’re able to transition between one sequence of space into another. I think there’s something we can learn within a modern discipline from traditional teachings.

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how to compose a building and understand the material that you’re working with as well?

Hamilton and Stoddart both talk about symbolism in their projects.

On the mausoleum itself, you have these really beautiful bronze doors.

They have a beautiful patination, with two scrolls in low relief and pomegranates, which are a symbol of rebirth. I’m pretty sure this was something discussed when they designed the mausoleum, to have these little moments of symbolism in the architecture itself.

AD: Wouldn’t it be so cool if a traditional design firm had something like an artist or craftsperson residency within the office?

AF: I think it should happen. Imagine being in an architectural practice, and as well as having an on-site model-making team, there’s also a stone mason or joiner. So you’re not really looking at an architectural practice as you’d expect, but re-imagining what a practice could be, perhaps something more aligned to the way the École des Beaux-Arts practices were structured. At the end of the day, we’re all working towards the same goal.

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James Ste v e n s Cu r l AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR Written and Edited by Margot Holbert University students everywhere are familiar with the frantic scramble for library books upon receiving the brief for a new project or research assignment. Students at the School of Architecture at Notre Dame head for the Architecture Library here and may end up borrowing one or more books written by the Anglo-Irish architectural historian, James Stevens Curl. With titles relating to very specific, niche topics, such as Funerary Monuments & Memorials in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh (2013), to books exploring broader styles and architectural concepts, such as The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (2015, 2016), students are likely to refer to his years of architectural expertise whilst they undertake their research. A list of some of his publications can be found at the end of this article.

Recently, he released Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (2018), which meticulously lays out the series of events leading to the rise of the Modernist movement,

explaining why such destructive forms of design were upheld by architects and planners of the 20th Century as supposedly necessary replacements for a so-called outdated, traditional system of design. Making Dystopia received lavish praise from those inside and outside the traditional architectural community as an extremely well-researched and scholarly text.

Many established modernist architects and commentators, however, reacted with ‘vulgar abuse’ and ‘almost hysterical hostility’ towards the author following the publication of the book, but ‘made no attempt to counter his meticulous scholarship and arguments in any civilised manner’. Younger students, though, who were studying the standardised, Modernist architectural approach at universities around the world were particularly positive towards and responsive to his work, as it challenged their Modernist education. It gave them a newfound freedom in their architectural design—a

freedom we classically-trained students sometimes take for granted in our architectural education at Notre Dame.

I am a graduate student of architecture at Notre Dame, coming to the program from Adelaide, in Australia, from an undergraduate degree in civil and architectural engineering.

I was exposed to a Modernist architecture program during my undergraduate degree and was expected and encouraged to design and think in a relatively abstract, ‘novel’, asymmetrical, and deconstructed manner, otherwise my designs were labelled unoriginal and inauthentic. I once asked if I could design a classical folly for a landscape design project and was told, ‘we don’t do that here.’

If I wanted classical elements in my design, they had to be completely ironic, or warped in some way. Many of the graduate students at Notre Dame have shared similar stories of feeling boxed in and indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking and designing in their undergraduate degrees, and this is

Right: James Stevens Curl æt. LXXX, seated in a chair designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), with, in the background left, a bust of JSC by Alexander Stoddart, Sculptor-in-Ordinary to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in Scotland. The roundel to the immediate left of the sitter’s head is of Robert Louis Stevenson, also by Stoddart. Portrait in oils by Jeffrey Morgan (2020) (© Collection James Stevens Curl).

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James Stevens Curl

View north over the River Blyth marshes, Suffolk, watercolour by James Stevens Curl, Summer 1976 (© Collection Ingrid Curl)

an ongoing issue with modern architectural education around the world today.

In 2020, in the final year of my engineering degree, I really didn’t know what to do with my career. I loved historic buildings because I knew they were beautiful and long-lasting, and actually functioned as architecture. But architects and engineers who were restoring historic buildings were doing so in a very modernist, structurally and visually destructive, and short-sighted way. There is not much of a classical or New Urbanist ‘scene’ in Australia, or at least not one that I knew of at the time, and so when I asked local architects or professors for advice, they seemed very confused and couldn’t really point me in the right direction: I felt bewildered and isolated.

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and on a whim I emailed him from across the world during the pandemic. This world-renowned architectural historian responded promptly with such support and kindness, and we have been in contact ever since.

His unashamed contempt for modernism and the Modernist movement—something that has grown in him over decades of witnessing the destruction of the built environment caused by modern architecture during the 20th century—was a breath of fresh air to me in my suffocating situation. Not only was he vocal and pulled no punches about his architectural opinions, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but he was also incredibly generous. He introduced me to various architects in the field of new classical and traditional architecture in the UK, and to the very concept of designing classical buildings from scratch. He sent me his new articles, recommended books, sent photos of his little

Dachshund friends Bismarck and Lotte, and eventually encouraged me to come here to the School of Architecture at Notre Dame. Not only did he provide me with a reference for my application to undertake graduate studies here at Notre Dame, but he also supported me in my application for a substantial Australian scholarship to support my studies here, without which I would not have had the opportunity to receive this wonderful classical education.

It is my hope in sharing this conversation with James Stevens Curl that I may provide an introduction to the celebrated author of many of the books that architecture students at Notre Dame will be likely to peruse during their time in architecture school and allow students to get to know something of his life, experiences, and work, as I have done over the last few years of our correspondence.

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Margot Holbert (MH): What was it like, growing up in Belfast in the 1930s and 40s?

James Stevens Curl (JSC): Part of the early years was during the 1939-45 War. I can remember having to get up, night after night, when the Luftwaffe was bombing the place. The destruction was considerable.

One of the most awful raids killed the Belgian horses used for funerals–they were burned to death in their stables.

The smell was terrible. I can remember seeing a bath blown half-way through a wall of a bombed house. Later, I can also remember seeing lorry-loads of prisoners-of-war, and thinking they looked very cheerful, as I suppose one would, when digging potatoes on farms would have been a rather more agreeable experience than

serving on the Russian Front at 40 degrees below zero.

In relation to my early education, there were very few teaching-aids or other facilities, and looking back it was all rather primitive. I suppose I was really saved by my voracious reading habits: I haunted second-hand bookshops, and there were books in both our house and my grandfather’s. My grandfather had visited Germany just after the end of the 1914-18 War, and he had several books on Dresden and other cities. It was in those that I first discovered German Classicism, and became fascinated by the marvellous buildings in Dresden, Berlin, Potsdam, Munich, etc. I also had a large box of pre-1914 German Richter building-blocks, which enabled me to build extraordinary models

James Stevens Curl with Fritz the Dachshund, outside 5 Clifton Terrace, Winchester, Hampshire, in 1979 (© Ingrid Curl)

of architecture featuring arches, columns, etc., so I learned much from those. Thus I was very privileged in having access to wonderful libraries, and owning a set of those marvellous building-blocks.

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THE INTERVIEW:

MH: What was your architectural education like at university?

JSC: I did not start in architecture at all: I did first-year medicine, but decided it was not for me. In the 1950s [architectural education] was not great, but at least the compulsory measured-drawing exercises taught me a lot; how to really look at buildings, details, how materials were used and put together. And there were sketching expeditions, studies of extant buildings (mostly Victorian or early 19th century),

James Stevens Curl with Fritz in the garden of The Pightle, Walberswick, Suffolk, 1976 (© Ingrid Curl)

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Mediæval church of Sts Peter & Paul, Lavenham, Suffolk, from a drawing of 2001, by James Stevens Curl (© James Stevens Curl)

and the discovery of richly robust Victorian pub interiors.

However, my later ‘architectural education’ in England was a misnomer: it was really just a series of hurdles over which one had to jump in order to pander to the prejudices of the Modernist ‘tutors’. I knew that in order to qualify I had to give them what they wanted, and I knew it was all nonsense. It was not ‘education’ at all: it was dreadful. My Doctorate, for which I read several years afterwards, however, gave me great scope to investigate the little-known Victorian architect, Henry Roberts (1803-76), and I left no stone unturned: it was a marvellously liberating journey, and I had the support of two supervisors at University College London who could not have been more encouraging, and who became good friends, now long dead, of course.

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MH: How were you first exposed to classical architecture in particular?

MH: What was your most formative experience in your early career?

JSC: Through devouring histories of architecture, purchasing wonderful old books on architecture in second-hand bookshops (incredibly cheap they were too, and the kernel of what is now my library was collected and built then); measuring and drawing selected buildings (which made me respect great Classical architecture as all the parts fitted beautifully together and made a great deal of sense); and visiting ruined abbeys and other buildings with my father. Those evocative ruins, mouldering amid grey-green nettles in the muttering rain, haunted me, and drew me inevitably to architectural history, which became my life.

JSC: Travels in England, Scotland, and the European Continent.

Seeing great historical buildings was a revelation: mind-blowing. I came to know and love England’s marvellous cathedrals and churches. I became entranced by the glorious Baroque and Rococo churches of Southern Germany: they were, to me, utterly magical, and demonstrated how versatile Classicism could be. And discovering London, most fascinating of great cities, made a huge impact: I began to write about London for journals like Country Life, etc., and later became architectural editor of the Survey of London, in which capacity I contributed to the volumes on the parish of Kensington,

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JSC: By listening, reading, keeping my mind open: it became obvious to me that set texts, such as those of that absurd, egotistical, fascist-sympathising monster, Le Corbusier (I call his cult ‘Corbusianity’), and the ridiculously twisted arguments of Nikolaus Pevsner (pretending the Arts-and-Crafts people were ‘pioneers’ of Modernism—the antithesis of Arts-and-Crafts

ideals—because he peered at everything through Bauhaustinted spectacles), were just plain nonsense, and it amazed me they were uncritically accepted and forced down the throats of students who were brainwashed and bullied into believing them.

I recognised that Received Opinion stultified thought, and meant that students were bullied into not using their eyes, but looking with their ears. I noticed disturbing similarities between the sloganising of Modernism and the dubious ‘certainties’ of Fundamentalism. The tone was

similar, as was the self-righteousness; the ‘anybody who does not accept tenets or beliefs is cast into outer darkness’; the shouted slogans (e.g. Le Corbusier’s stentorian dogmas); the bullying, simplistic attitudes (e.g. in ‘Crits’); ignoring the past; deliberately distorting history; and claiming for itself the only true way. Those are characteristics of exactly how fundamentalist cults operate. Therefore, Modernism is just a cult, but, like all cults, it is a very dangerous, destructive totalitarian illiberal phenomenon, founded, not on history, thought, or sound foundations, but on the sands of prejudice, stupidity, dogmatic assertion, and totalitarian lies.

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MH: In your work, you have described Modernism as a kind of cult. How is it a cult, and how did you develop this opinion?

MH: What does Modernism mean to you?

They are Weighed in the Balance and found Wanting, with respectful apologies to Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) from a drawing by James Stevens Curl, 2004 (© James Stevens Curl)

JSC: It is responsible for untold misery, appalling ugliness, and worldwide destruction. It is used by powerful interests to impose the will to destruction of that which is humane in architecture and town planning.

It is repulsive, alien, cruel, and beyond redemption, and its theorists pump out guff resembling the mating-calls of an air-conditioner. It has also ruined more opera productions than I care to remember: its staging is incompetent, it traduces the past, insulting composers, librettists, and audiences, deforming great works of art through insensitivities and breathtaking ignorance dressed up in bogus

“ T H O S E E V O C AT I V E R U I N S , M O U L D E R I N G A M I D G R E Y- G R E E N N E T T L E S I N T H E M U T T E R I N G R A I N, H AU N T E D M E , A N D D R E W M E I N E V I TA B LY T O A R C H I T E C T U R A L H I S T O R Y, W H I C H B E C A M E M Y L I F E . ” Stoa Magazine

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Tuscan Hill Town. from a watercolour by James Stevens Curl, 1980 (© James Stevens Curl)

intellectual pretensions vulgar generalities.

and

MH: What does classical architecture mean to you?

JSC: It is an infinitely adaptable, wonderfully rich architectural language, capable of creating buildings with emotional power, meaning, and great beauty.

It arouses in us emotional responses, and indeed it speaks to us: it pleases; it moves; it entrances; it fascinates; it is never boring or repellent. Most of all it is civilised, rooted in history, for without history we are adrift, rootless, which is, of course, what Modernism wants of us.

MH: How have Modernist architects and theorists responded to your work?

JSC: By ignoring it, or ridiculing it, or being downright hysterically abusive about me.

Personal abuse rather than reasoned argument is the favourite weapon used against me, because my arguments, based on meticulous research and much thought, cannot be dismissed through argument: just shouted down with hatred because my enemies are all mired in the Vested Interests associated

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“[CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE] I S A N I N F I N I T E LY A D A P TA B L E , W O N D E R F U L LY R I C H A R C H IT E C T U R A L L A N G UA G E , C A PA B L E O F C R E AT I N G B U I L D I N G S W I T H EMOTIONAL POWER, MEANING, A N D G R E AT B E AU T Y. with greed, uglification, insensitivity, and desensitisation.

MH: What have been some of your favourite projects and why?

JSC: I worked with the Wagners at Bayreuth way back in the early 1960s. I learned a great deal about stagecraft, theatre design, acoustics, and much else. Above all, I formed a lasting admiration for, and love of, the music of Richard Wagner and those he influenced, such as Richard Strauss. I also enjoyed working with a small team of traditionalists on the Cathedral of St Edmundsbury, in Suffolk. But most of all, I have especially revelled in my own original investigations into lost London Spas, architecture and sculpture associated with commemoration, Victorian

Ecclesiology, 18th-century architecture, European Gardens of Allusion, Freemasonry and the Enlightenment, and the long-lasting influence of Ancient Egypt on the West (not only in terms of art and design).

MH: Have you seen any changes to the architectural profession which you would say are a direct result of your work?

JSC: Many people have responded positively to my work, including some of the younger people, who have started to realise that Modernist education is a con, and that they need to shed much and start to learn rather than swallow propaganda. But the Vested Interests are too embedded in the ‘professional’ bodies, and especially in ‘education’, so my warnings and work will be

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MH: How has the field of architecture changed in general since the start of your career?

JSC: Computers were unknown when I started out: everything was hand-drawn. Nowadays, I reckon students and architects are completely remote from the actualities of using materials and understanding how they are put together in building

fabric. I blame CAD for this, and the deification of over-rated, conceited, dubious ‘Starchitects’, a term I detest. Moreover, the standard texts of Modernism forced on students, are, for the most part, distorted, lying travesties of real history, written with the leaden grasp of prose usually reserved for the authors of washing-machine instruction booklets.

MH: What are your thoughts on Modernist architectural education today?

JSC: It needs to be cleaned out, lock, stock, and barrel, and rebuilt on sound principles, with lessons from the past an essential part of the curriculum.

IT AROUSES IN US EMOTIONAL RESPONSES, AND INDEED IT SPEAKS TO US: IT PLEASES; IT MOVES; IT ENTRANCES; IT FA S C I N AT E S ; I T I S N E V E R B O R I N G O R R E P E L L E N T. ”

MH: What are some of the best skills for young architects to develop while at school? What advice would you give emerging architects pursuing Classicism?

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ridiculed and ignored until there are major changes, possibly forced through widespread building failures, such as those becoming all-too-apparent in reinforced-concrete structures and cladding which ‘goes on fire’, incinerating the unfortunates who happen to inhabit such death-traps.

JSC: First-hand study of great Classical exemplars is essential.

Many fine fragments can be found in Museums, including the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (one of the best places to study how varied are the Orders of Architecture), the British Museum, and the Glyptothek, Munich. Great Neo-Classical buildings such as those in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Berlin, Potsdam, Paris. London, etc., should be seen, studied, and drawn. Standard published works on Classicism should be acquired, and personal libraries built up. Measuring and drawing exemplars is the best way of getting to understand Classicism. Draw, draw, draw!

Another thing: immersion in Classical music can inform on harmony, beauty, symmetry, structure, and some knowledge of the history and literature of Classical Antiquity all helps to put the architecture in context.

I also think that students should actually make things themselves, to understand how materials are used and perform, because so many ‘designs’ they produce are completely divorced from reality or any understanding of how things actually work MH: What do you hope for the future of architecture and the future of Classicism in architecture?

Proposed winged altarpiece for the chancel of the church of Sts Mary & Nicholas, Spalding, Lincolnshire, by James Stevens Curl, 2019 (© James Stevens Curl)

JSC: I can only hope more people will see the light: some brave souls keep the flame alive, but the moneybags, the uglifiers, and the Vested Interests intent on giving us more and more

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James Stevens Curl bog-standard Modernism all need to be removed from positions of influence and power, and what they have done exposed for the disaster it is and has been.

MH: What are you working on at the moment?

JSC: I have just finished a major book entitled English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith, & Revival which has been delivered to my London publisher, and is due out in the Autumn of 2022. It will have 140 splendid illustrations, most of which will be in colour. [Pictured right] is one of them: the glorious screen in St Petroc Minor, Little Petherick, Cornwall, designed

by J. Ninian Comper from 1898, and something that would be wholly beyond the capabilities of anyone indoctrinated into Modernist Nihilism. Now I am working on a new edition of my Classical Architecture, which has been long out of print, and that will be completed next year. I am also writing regular pieces, reviews, etc. in journals and magazines. But I grow old, I work, I despair for the future.

I love animals, but fear for them in a hostile and cruel world: I used to have dogs, but not now.

My last dog was a Dachshund called Fritz (shown photographed, but long dead): my good friends Bismarck and Lotte belong to someone I know, but I love them very much. I have my books, I have my music, I travel over on the ferry to Scotland and England as often as I can.

Rood-screen and loft by John Ninian Comper—designed from 1898, made by John Parsons of St Teath and decorated under the supervision of H.A. Bernard Smith, with Rood and figures carved by W.D. Gough of London, completed 1908—in the Church of St Petroc Minor, Little Petherick, Cornwall, rebuilt by William White in 1858 ( © James Stevens Curl [2021]).

Bismarck (lying down, warily eyeing the world, pinned down by Lotte, reluctant to go outside on a rainy day (© Robyn Firth [2019])

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1.

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith, & Revival (London: John Hudson, 2022)

2.

St Michael’s Kirkyard, Dumfries: A Presbyterian Valhalla (Holywood: Nerfl Press, 2021)

3.

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

4.

The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture with Susan Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 2016)

5.

The Victorian Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Thanatopsis (London: Heritage EBooks, 2015)

6.

Funerary Monuments & Memorials in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh (Whitstable: Historical Publications, 2013)

7.

Georgian Architecture in the British Isles, 1714-1830 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2011)

8.

Freemasonry & the Enlightenment: Architecture, Symbols, & Influences (London: Historical Publications, 2011)

9.

Spas, Wells, & Pleasure Gardens of London (London: Historical Publications, 2010)

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A List of Publications by James Stevens Curl:

10. Victorian Architecture: Diversity & Invention (Reading: Spire Books, 2007) 11. The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2005) 12. Classical Architecture: An Introduction to Its Vocabulary and Essentials, with a Select Glossary of Terms (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003) 13. Death and Architecture: An Introduction to Funerary and Commemorative Buildings in the Western European Tradition, with Some Consideration of their Settings (Thrupp, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002) 14. Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins & Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824-2001 (edited) (Chichester: Phillimore, 2001) 15. The Honourable The Irish Society and the Plantation of Ulster, 1608-2000: The City of London and the Colonisation of County Londonderry in the Province of Ulster in Ireland.

A History and Critique (Chichester: Phillimore, 2000) 16. Encyclopaedia of Architectural Terms (Wimbledon: Donhead, 1993) 17. The Londonderry Plantation 1609-1914: The History, Architecture, and Planning of the Estates of the City of London and its Livery Companies in Ulster (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986) 18. Life and Work of Henry Roberts, 1803-76, Architect: The Evangelical Conscience and the Campaign for Model Housing and Healthy Nations (London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1983)

Plaster bust of James Stevens Curl, æt LIX, by Alexander Stoddart, 1996 (Collection James Stevens Curl)

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Le Poché The Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock Selected Writing from Innovative Tradition How Jane Jacobs Saved New York City Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius Selected Writing from Alternative Modernities

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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock

by Michael Bursch

The Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are two of the holiest sites for Islam and Christianity. They are both located in the city of Jerusalem, whose complicated history and disagreements about control last even today between factions of all three Abrahamic religions. From building precedent to political overtones to future architectural inspiration, the architecture and the theology of these two sacred buildings are deeply intertwined, including their history, iconography, relationship, and inspiration to future architects and believers.

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The Dome of the Rock Location The Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sakhra, was built during the Umayyad Caliphate of Abd-al-Malik around the year 692 AD.1 It was constructed as a octagon centered on the Rock, the place where Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac and later the location where Muhammad ascended into heaven. Complicating its site, the Dome of the Rock is situated on the Temple Mount, on or near the location of the Jewish Temple (both first and second) in the Old Testament. This layering of history and religion complicates relations between Muslims and Jews as—due to the significant events that happened on the same site—both religions lay claim to the area.

Architectural Form The Dome of the Rock, aptly named after its main architectural feature, is impressively geometric and centralized in form, with no lateral hierarchy to speak of. Its exterior form is octagonal, and the interior has two concentric layers of colonnades: the outer octagonal, and the inner being circular.2 The dome springs from the inner colonnade, which spreads over the recessed area in the center of the structure that contains the Holy Rock.

Textbook of Stone It is very difficult to find the exact events, dates, and philosophies of the early Islamic period, “since genuine contemporaneous documents are entirely lacking.”3 This severe lack of written sources leads to the use of physical sources—sources that are ‘written’ in stone. Art and architecture inevitably reflect the cultures they were created by, and the early Islamic period is no different. The Dome of the Rock is the most important source we can refer to in understanding the architecture of early Islamic Jerusalem.

Triumphal Architecture The octagonal, centralized shape of the Dome of the Rock, often used for Christian martyriums and baptisteries, is an outlier for Islamic architecture. For the designers of the Dome of the Rock, it would have been impossible to develop a monumental religious building without thinking of the greatest martyrium in Christianity: the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “The Dome of the Rock and the Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher [sic] are similar in dimensions and are both centralized buildings.” They would have shared the Byzantine decoration of “marble columns and capitals, marble revetment, and gold and colored mosaics.”4 This clear use of one of the most sacred Christian churches as precedent for a symbol of the Islamic empire was no mistake: Abd-al-Malik wanted to show the “takeover and reconsecration”5 of the site and the city from Christianity.

1 Marcus Milwright, “Dome of the Rock”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2014, https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/dome-of-the-rock-COM_ 26081?s.num=1&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.cluster.Encyclopaedia+of+Islam&s.q=dome+of+the+rock.

2 See Dome of the Rock plan (above right).

3 Oleg Grabar, The Shape of Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 45.

4 Jodi Magness, The Archeology of the Holy Land. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 352.

5 Oleg Grabar, The Dome of the Rock. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 113-114.

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The centralized form of the Dome of the Rock and its lack of useful space for religious gatherings relays the same message. The typology of centralized structures often serves no practical purpose, such as the ancient Roman Temple of Hercules Victor in the Forum Boarium, or the later Renaissance Tempietto by Bramante in Rome. Both of these structures, centuries apart, use the centralized form to create a highly visible object instead of a practical, usable space. The Dome of the Rock, similarly, is an architectural object, “a commemorative building,”6 a symbol, rather than a large space used for gatherings to pray. As a building with no true worship function, standing proud of the Temple Mount in view of the whole city of Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was built as a symbol of victory and religious superiority: “a Muslim statement on religous and political authority within the heartland of both Judaism and Christianity.”7 Another symbol of this triumph is the use of spolia. ‘Spolia’ refers to the use of architectural elements, such as columns, capitals, and marble, from a previous structure for a new one. This often occurred in Rome, ranging from the works of emperors, such as Constantine’s triumphal arch, to Catholic churches, such as San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. Rome was an ideal place to find and use spolia, as the city—once the capital of a Classical Empire—became a medieval backwater heavily reduced in population whose old monuments were ripe for scavenging.

The use of spolia is twofold. First, it is efficient and practical: using pre-carved pieces of stone and marble is much cheaper and easier than cutting and carving new ones. Second, it is often symbolic: spolia can be used by a culture to show the defeat of the society that it is taken from. This is especially seen through the way in which the word ‘spolia’ is directly related to the English word ‘spoils.’ In Rome, Late Antique churches often employed the use of spolia from pagan temples, which “symbolized the triumph of Christianity.”8 Similarly, the Muslims in Jerusalem used spolia to show the triumph of Islam

“The Dome of the Rock is the most important source we can refer to in understanding the architecture of early Islamic Jerusalem.”

Above: Plan of the Dome of the Rock

6 Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, 119.

7 Marcus Milwright, The Dome of the Rock and its Umayyad Mosaic Inscriptions.

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 21.

8 Mark J. Johnson, Anthony Cutler, “Spolia,” The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 2005, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001/ acref-9780195046526-e-5088.

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The Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock over Christianity and Judaism. Using pieces of architecture from both Jewish and Christian ruins,9 the Dome of the Rock incorporates old column capitals as ‘spoils,’ presenting physical manifestations of the triumph of Islam and proclaiming victory over its rival religions.

Reference to the Temple Islam is connected to Judaism in the location of the Dome of the Rock itself. Sitting on the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock is in the approximate location of both Solomon’s Temple and Herod’s Temple. This location was neglected by Christians for years, a physical manifestation of the prophecy of Christ that in the Temple “not a single stone will be left on another which will not be pulled down.”10 For centuries, the area of the Temple Mount had been covered with rubble and refuse until the city was taken by the Caliph Umar around 638 AD, at which point the area began to be cleared. Several decades later, the construction of the Dome of the Rock began, once again putting a structure on the hallowed site of the Temple.

Additionally, some have argued that the floral patterns of the mosaics in the Dome of the Rock were meant to recall the floral motifs in the Temple of Solomon. Grabar writes that this connection was likely a secondary concern of the architects and artists, but still maintains that a secondary theme of the Dome of the Rock was “the brilliance of the Jewish Temple and of the Palace built by Solomon.”11 Indeed, it would be near-impossible to construct a building on the site of the Temple without thinking of and using it, in some form, as precedent. Even if the connection was secondary, this still speaks to the way in which the builders of the Dome of the Rock in the early Islamic period were thinking of their religion’s connections to Judaism, and the religious context and history of such a hallowed city.

Missionary Nature Although the location and floral motifs make reference to the Jewish heritage and history in connection with Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was mainly built with the religion of Christianity in mind. Prior to the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 637 AD, the Christians had banned all Jews from the city and as such, were the majority of the local population. This demographic reality was the reason behind many of the mosaic inscriptions, which are beautifully crafted all around the interior of the Dome of the Rock, on the faces of both the inner circle and colonnaded octagon.

Additional bronze inscriptions grace two of the portals of the building. These inscriptions contain both Qur’anic verses as well as general religious statements, which mainly focus on Muhammad and Jesus.12 Highlighting the importance of the missionary role of early Islam, the inscriptions discuss the main prophet of Islam and his role in evangelization, and address the main competing religion of the day.

Ostensibly, many of the inscriptions talk about Muhammad, his importance, and his role as a prophet, proclaiming Islamic truths such as, “Muhammad is the servant of God and His envoy, whom He sent with guidance and the religion of truth to proclaim it over all religions” (italics belong to Grabar, denoting the Qur’anic text,

9 10 11 12

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Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, 66.

Matthew 24:2, Revised New Jerusalem Bible.

Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, 115-119.

Marcus Milwright, “Dome of the Rock,” Encyclopaedia of Islam.

by Michael Bursch

“One accidental feature of the Dome of the Rock that its builders never expected was that it would be taken as precedent for a whole style of ‘Christian architecture.’ ”

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either Q 9:33 or 61:9).13 They remind the faithful of the example of the Prophet, insinuating that his followers should evangelize as well. Christ is also referenced in the inscriptions, at a frequency that seems disproportionate for an Islamic building.

This over-abundance exists because the designers knew fully well that, at the time, Jerusalem was a majority Christian city. Christianity was their greatest religious rival, and the Christian Byzantine empire a great political one to the Islamic Caliphate as well. The designers of the Dome of the Rock knew that they needed to address the issue of Jesus.

The inscriptions are intriguing in the way they reveal seemingly contrasting views. On one hand, the inscriptions verify the holiness of Jesus and his mother Mary: “indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was an envoy of God.” On the other hand, the inscriptions unequivocally say that Jesus was not the Son of God and not divine: “It is not for God to take a son.”14 These inscriptions were likely not seen

by Christians, but only by the Muslims coming to pray there.15 Not only did they serve as reminders of the importance of evangelizing, especially to the local Christians, but they recalled the evangelical nature of Islam and a call to action. Both the Muhammadian lines which encourage Muslims through the Prophet’s example, and the Christological lines which provide contextual teachings and apologetics, speak to the importance of evangelization in early Islam.

Accidental Christian Precedent One accidental feature of the Dome of the Rock that its builders never expected was that it would be taken as precedent for a whole style of “Christian architecture.”16 Many writers and architectural historians consider Gothic architecture to be Christian architecture, as opposed to classical architecture, which was taken from the Greco-Roman pagan architectural tradition. However, some object that the ‘Gothic architecture’ that we know today was undoubtedly influenced by the Dome of the Rock. This arguably occurred when Crusaders came to Jerusaelm in the 1200s. They saw the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and made the mistaken assumption that it was, in fact, the Jewish Temple. There are various maps and engravings that draw the Dome of the Rock and mistakenly label it as the Temple from this period onward for several centuries,17 perpetuating “the Crusader myth that the Dome of the Rock was

13 Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, 94.

14 Grabar, The Dome of the Rock, 92.

15 Grabar, The Shape of Holy, 68.

16 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).

17 These include a a view of the city in Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Schedelsche Weltchronik and more famously in the Map of the City of Jerusalem, from Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam by Bernhard von Breydenbach, etching by Erhard Reuwich, 1486.

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The Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock Christian.”18 The use of pointed arches and trefoils, first found in the Dome of the Rock, have become “the defining features of Christian Gothic churches and cathedrals.”19 Although Muslims did not invent the pointed arch (it being found in Syria and Persia predating Islam), they were the first to use it widely. The inner colonnade of the Dome of the Rock has pointed arches, and trefoil arches are found in a ring of the dome just above the clerestory windows.20 This is the first monumental use of these details, one seen by thousands of Crusaders and pilgrims in the Middle Ages, who brought these ideas back to Europe with them and incorporated them into countless churches and cathedrals in the Gothic style.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Location The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the holiest site in all of Christianity. Covering the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead, it is central to the Christian faith. Many emperors, nations, and caliphs have fought for control over, built up, and torn down this site. The church that exists today is an amalgamation of architectural buildup from the last 21 centuries, creating an absolutely unique structure with a deep and rich history.

Original Roman Church The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was first built by the Emperor Constantine, and was dedicated in the year 335 AD. While the site of Christ’s Passion had previously been covered with a temple to Venus, built by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 AD,21 it became the site of the Holy Sepulchre after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and his following church-building spree. Begun in 324 AD, the church’s design was intimately connected to common architectural typologies of the Roman Empire, while still uniquely composed of four connected but distinct parts: the atrium, the basilica, the courtyard, and the rotunda.22 The basilican form itself predates all other church forms. Invented by the Romans for secular, governmental functions, a basilica is a long, rectangular building with a nave, typically with two side aisles, and an apse at one end.23 Many Roman emperors built basilicas, such as the Basilicas Aemilia, Julia, and Ulpia; Constantine used this same form for the main worship space of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

18 Diana Darke, Stealing From the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 125.

19 Darke, Stealing From the Saracens, 102.

20 Darke, Stealing From the Saracens, 107-108.

21 Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, An Oxford Archeological Guide, Fifth Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 50.

22 Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 50.

23 Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity, Volume III, The Architecture, Icon, and Music of the Orthodox Church. (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2014), 23-24.

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Constantine also pioneered the combination of a basilica with an atrium in front—not only in the Holy Sepulchre, but also in the original churches of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome. Many Christian churches have been built in the basilican form over the centuries, and use of this form has continued up through today.

The 4th Century Constantinian Church

The Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre is also very connected to traditional, pagan Roman architecture. Round, centralized temples, such as the Temple of Vesta and the Mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome, were used for centuries to house statues of the gods, commemorate important places, and mark the tombs of emperors.

Another Roman mausoleum, this time Christian instead of pagan, was built in the same round, centralized form by Constantine for the tomb of his daughter.24 For the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre, Constantine used this round, centralized form for similar purposes: Instead of the tomb of an emperor or the spot of worship for a god, it centered around the Aedicule: the monument built around the empty tomb of Christ.

Both the centralized rotunda and the basilica plan, which are very Roman in design, reflected the religious make-up of the Holy Sepulchre, as the Roman Catholic/ Latin church was the only branch of Christianity that existed at this point in time.

Although there were already early heresies, no other churches had any amount of standing besides the Latin one. For the first several centuries of its existence, the Holy Sepulchre was entirely run by the Latin church, shown through its entirely Roman architecture.

Late Roman and Crusader Churches The Constantinian church stood peacefully for almost three centuries, until the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614 AD. During this occupation, the church was burned, but not terribly damaged. The church was restored by the patriarch Modestus, who left the church relatively unaltered.25 Surviving through the Muslim conquest of the city by the Caliph Umar around 637 AD, the church’s form remained substantially the same until 1009 AD, when the Fatimid Caliph Hakim 24 Rev. Robert Willis, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, (London: John W. Parker, 1849), 118.

25 Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 52.

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The Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock ordered the destruction of the building.26 The structure was hacked apart, and a fire was set inside the Aedicule around the tomb of Christ. Restoration of the church slowly began in 1010 or 1012 AD by the Byzantine Emperor Michael IV Paphlagon.

However, the destruction was so complete and the funds so few, that the atrium and the basilica were lost to history; only the rotunda and the courtyard remained.27 Three small chapels were built opposite the rotunda across the courtyard, near where the apse of Constantine’s basilica was located. These three chapels were built in the typical Byzantine design of a semi-circular inside and a polygonal outside,28 the first introduction of non-Latin architecture.

This was the state of the Holy Sepulchre when the Crusaders took control of Jerusalem in 1099 AD. The Crusaders began work on the church, adding a roof over the open courtyard to create a nave, thereby connecting the different sites of Christ’s Passion: the locations of his crucifixion and burial. The church took on the form of a typical 12th century European, late Romanesque/early Gothic cruciform church.29 The rotunda became one end of the nave, and three new radiating chapels, in the manner of the cathedrals of Europe,30 were built at the opposite end to replace the earlier Byzantine ones. Transepts were designed and built to fit Calvary inside the southern transept, thus uniting the most important Christological sites. The Crusaders also placed a choir in the center of the church in the nave, between the rotunda and the opposing apse and chapels, again in a typical European form. Although the Greek Orthodox currently hold the choir, now referred to as the Catholicon, the choir stalls and altar are most likely in the same spots the Crusaders intended.31 The European Crusader architecture continued the influence of the Latin Church, which up through the Crusades had architectural domination of the church over other denominations present.

Left: The 11th Century Church Right: The 12th Century Church

26 Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 52.

27 Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 52.

28 Willis, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 81-82.

29 Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land from the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 327.

30 Willis, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 86.

31 Willis, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 89.

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Denominational Control Besides the Roman Catholics, the other denomination with the strongest influence on the architecture of the Holy Sepulchre was the Greek Orthodox Church, due to its early break-off from the Roman Catholic Church at the “Great Schism’’ in the 11th century. To the north of the Catholicon and down a staircase lies the chapel of St. Helena, an expansion of a crypt by the Crusaders in the 12th century.32 Even though it was constructed by the Crusaders, the chapel follows the Byzantine typology of a cross-in-square church form. This typology combines the Latin forms of both a cruciform and centralized church by creating a cross with evenly-sized arms inside a square, with a dome or cupola over the center.33 An apse is added to the square shape for the altar, making the church directional while still mostly symmetrical. The Chapel of St. Helena follows this typology exactly, except for a few small differences due to the site, such as the stair down from the main ambulatory, and the stair continuing down to the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross. Even though the chapel was completed by the Crusaders, it shows the growing influence of the Byzantine style on the West.

Most of the Greek Orthodox influence on what we see today is due to an unfortunate disaster: In 1808, a large fire broke out in the Holy Sepulchre, destroying the wood dome, cracking stone, and creating general destruction. At this point in time, the Greek Orthodox Church had more control over the church by paying the occupying Ottoman Empire. Therefore, when reconstruction began it was designed by Greek architects, leaving a lasting Orthodox influence on the architecture of the building.

The Aedicule of the tomb of Christ was rebuilt after the fire by the Greek architect Nikolaos Kalfa Komnenos in 1810, replacing the Crusader period Aedicule,34 which itself replaced the Constantinian one, none of which bore any semblance to the others. Built in an amalgamation of classical, Romanesque, and Gothic elements, the current Aedicule, topped by a cupola, is a monument of Greek design in the Ottoman-Baroque style.35 The Aedicule is covered in Greek verses about Christ, a not-so-subtle gesture of possession towards the other faith traditions that share it with the Greek Orthodox.

At the center of the church lies the choir, built and laid out in a Latin manner.

However, when the Greeks gained control of the now-Catholicon, they placed a large Iconostasis,36 cutting off the apse of the choir from the choir stalls. Every Eastern Orthodox church has an ‘Iconostasis:’ a large screen with icons (strongly revered stylized images of saints) and doors that separates the main body of a church from the altar. In further Greek influence, the two side walls of the Catholicon are covered in mosaics, no longer reminiscent of their Latin origins. Additionally, the dome over the Catholicon was rebuilt in 1935 after an earthquake in 1927,37 changing the Crusader period dome to a modern Greek one, covered in Byzantinestyle mosaic work.

The Dome over the Aedicule was also rebuilt by Komnenos following the 1808 fire.

32 33 34 35 36 37

Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 59.

Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity, 39.

Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, 56-57.

Martin Biddle, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), 63.

Willis, The Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 89.

Biddle, The Holy Sepulchre, 69.

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The Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock During this rebuilding, the Greeks replaced all of the inscriptions in Greek, instead of their original Latin. Structural issues with the dome meant it had to be rebuilt after three decades. This created a proxy battle between France and Russia on behalf of the Latin and Greek Orthodox churches respectively, with the Ottoman Sultan acting for the Armenians; this dispute was one of the leading instigating events that led to the Crimean War. After being hit by a military shell in 1948, another agreement was created between the three major denominations in 1976 to rebuild the dome,38 lacking in any particular style, but solidifying the split ownership of all three communities.

The Present-Day Church

The Armenian Orthodox Church is the last of the three major denominations that share control of the Holy Sepulchre; however, its architectural impact is disproportionately small to its status as a major denomination. The Armenians control the Chapel of St. Helena, the Station of the Holy Women, and one of the apsidal chapels—fewer spots in the church than the Latin and Greek Orthodox Churches. As mentioned previously, the Chapel of St. Helena is Byzantine in its design, although it has 20th century Armenian mosaic work on the floor. All three of the Armenian shrines have ‘ciboriums:’ freestanding canopies supported by four columns.39 Ciboriums are by no means Armenian, as they can be found in Greek and Latin churches dating back to the time of Constantine. However, the three ciboriums have Armenian character in their simple detailing, combination of Latin, Byzantine, and Persian influence, symmetrical and polygonal canopies,40 and 38 Albert Rock, OFM., “The Great Dome of the Holy Sepulchre,” in The Status Quo in the Holy Places, ed. Raphael Bonanno, OFM. (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1989), 37-52.

39 “Glossary: Terms Used on VirtualANI in Relation to Armenian Architecture, Art, etc.,” VirtualANI, 2003, http://virtualani.org/glossary/index.htm.

40 Armenian Studies Program, “Arts of Armenia-Architecture,” Fresno State

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Minor Denominations The three minor churches at the Holy Sepulchre—the Syrian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Orthodox churches— having little influence—only control small portions of the church. This includes the diminutive Coptic chapel on the back of the Aedicule and the huts of the Ethiopians on the roof of the Chapel of St. Helena. The Holy Sepulchre is much more diverse than it architecturally appears. Throughout the ages, up to as many as twenty-seven recognized Christian churches,42 including the Abyssianians, Georgians, and Maronites, have resided in the Holy Sepulchre. Only some of these churches have actually controlled the Holy Sepulchre, such as the Georgians in the 13th century,43 and even fewer have made an architectural impact. Some have contributed through art, playing a crucial role in the history and experience of the Holy Sepulchre; however, because architecture is longer-lasting, communities that have left architecture created greater impact than those who created art.

Architectural Facsimiles

“The centralized church lived as an ideal form in the minds of Renaissance and Baroque architects, who designed churches including the Tempietto, San Biagio, and San Andrea in Quirinale.”

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inscriptions in classical Armenian. The Armenians, through the proxy of the Ottoman Sultan in the 20th century,41 ultimately cemented their position as a major community through their involvement as one of the three denominations in both reconstructions of the dome that we see today.

As the site of Christ’s death and resurrection, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre drew great attention and led to many copies of the church. Although the centralized form of Roman temples were familiar to early Christians, the Anastasis (rotunda) of the Constantian Holy Sepulchre was the genesis of Christendom’s plethora of centralized churches. The Anastasis was copied both more or less literally across Europe, leading to a springing up of centralized churches, from the literal copy of the Rotonda di San Lorenzo in Mantua, Italy44 to countless marytrion, such as Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome.

This centralized form was also used in countless churches which themselves influenced other churches, such as the Church of the Holy Apostles, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul (which contained many Christogical relics and

University, 2019, http://www.fresnostate.edu/artshum/armenianstudies/resources/ architecture.html.

41 Rock, “The Great Dome” 52.

42 Glenn Bowman, “ ‘In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n’: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 3 (2011): 375.

43 Bowman, “Politics of Possession,” 379.

44 Kathyrn Blair Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 103.

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The Holy Sepulchre & The Dome of the Rock a copy of Christ’s tomb),45 and San Vitale in Ravenna. The centralized church lived as an ideal form in the minds of Renaissance and Baroque architects, who designed churches including the Tempietto, San Biagio, and San Andrea in Quirinale.

Although these architectss did have influence from local, pagan examples (namely the Pantheon), the Anastasis paved the way for Christian centralized churches46 and remained in the imagination of church architects for centuries.

The Aedicule itself was also copied across Europe for devotional purposes. The Cathedral of Konstanz, Germany, holds a copy, though inaccurate, of the Aedicule47 (10th century, 13th century reconstruction), as well as a very different-looking one in San Pancrazio in Florence (1467)48 and one in Eichstatt, Germany (12th century).

These copies and other ‘replicas’ became sites of local pilgrimage, not designed for archeological accuracy but as devotionals for those who would never be able to journey to the Holy Land and see the true tomb of Christ.

Some Christian communities went farther than just the Anastasis or the Aedicule: they re-created the entire Holy Land experience. Santo Stefano in Bologna49 created a mini-pilgrimage in itself with a whole compound of chapels, altars, and courtyards: the church complex has a replica of the Rotunda with a facsimile Aedicule, an imagined courtyard where Pontius Pilate condemned Christ, a chapel of the Crucifix, and a column in recollection of Christ’s flagellation.

Similarly, other groups—particularly Francisans—built ‘Way of the Cross’ chapels, a group of buildings visited in a sequence that mirrored Christ’s Passion and death. Many of them exist in the hills of northern Italy, called “Sacro Monte,” or “sacred mountains.”50 The Sacro Monte, such as the ones in Montaione, Varallo, and Vivaldo,51 have a series of small chapels that connect to different events and places in Jerusalem, such as the place of Christ’s crucifixion, tomb, condemnation

by Pilate, and the wiping of Christ’s face by Veronica. They, too, like Santo Stefano in Bologna, create a place of pilgrimage that directs the mind of the believer to Jerusalem, Christ, and the Holy Sepulchre, if not to exact architectural replication.

45 Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 37.

46 Allen S. Farber, The Romanization of Christianity and the Christianization of Rome: the Early Christian Basilica. (Online: State University of New York College at Oneonta, 2012), http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth212/early_christian_basilica.html.

47 Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 59.

48 Bram de Klerck, “Jerusalem in Renaissance Italy: The Holy Sepulchre on the Sacro Monte of Varallo” The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture. (Boston: Brill, 2014), 227.

49 Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 100-101.

50 Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 14.

51 Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, 211-219; de Klerck, “Jerusalem in Renaissance Italy,” 220-232.

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an Essay by Michael Bursch

Both the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have fascinating architecture and history intertwined in their stones. They have seen centuries of governmental, religious, political, and architectural change, and they reflect that tumultuous history while also persisting to this day. The two buildings stand as testaments of faith to their respective communities, to people who never gave up on their holy sites and continued to express themselves and their theology through art and architecture. The Dome of the Rock tells the story of early Islam, specifically in its interaction with Christianity and Judaism. It took Christian motifs in its architecture, while Christians took motifs from its architecture that were incorporated into generations of Christian churches. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre also tells a story of shifting religions, in this case not between the three major monotheistic religions, but within Christian denominations. The architecture tells this story of control. As the holiest site in Christianity, understandably the Holy Sepulchre was copied in part and in full throughout Christian Europe, resulting in various facsimiles of pilgrim devotions across continents. The Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock are inextricably linked to their religions, histories, and architecture, telling the story of centuries through mosaic, painting, carving, and the silence of the brick and stone.

“Both the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have fascinating architecture and history intertwined in their stones. ”

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Selected Writing from Innovative Tradition: Design Methods of Great 20th-Century Architects Course description provided by Professors David Lewis and Michael Mesko: This course, envisioned as a series, investigates the work of 20th-century architects who demonstrated the vitality of classical and regional design traditions through their adaptation to modern building types, functions, unique contexts and evolving technologies. It focuses on exploring the design approaches of these architects. The intention is that this guided journey will enrich your own design process, opening up access to a wealth of architectural solutions to reference when addressing similar problems of composition in contemporary design.

We will develop and use analysis tools to become acquainted with their work to discover how interpretations of classical and regional architectural languages can be developed and adapted over a range of building types and from the scale of urban context/site plan, to the scale of architectural detail and use of materials.

This first course looks at the work of Edwin Lutyens.

Described by one of his contemporaries as “instinctively more in touch with the essentials of architecture than the rest of us are after a lifetime of study,” his work is at once both classical and modern, both abstract and reflecting a spirit of place. The course explores Lutyens’s unique and multivalent use of the classical language and regional building traditions, with an eye to exploring some of the sophisticated design methods that made his architecture so striking.

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El Guadalperal: A Masterful Synthesis of the Classical with the Vernacular

by Danielle Corbin

In his early country houses in Surrey, the young architect Edwin Lutyens proved that he had a keen understanding of the vernacular architectural language of the English countryside. With astute attention to the use of local building materials consistent with the local expression of walls, roofs, and openings, he was able to express a coherent vernacular language in his famed country houses: with Orchards, Goddards, and Tigbourne Court.

As Lutyens matured as an architect and developed a deep mastery of the classical language, he never lost his meticulous attention to the vernacular vocabulary and the context of his buildings in their surrounding environments. In his unexecuted design of El Guadalperal palace in Spain, Edwin Lutyens effortlessly combined the classical language with the vernacular, adapting to the different needs of both the local climate and patron. Lutyens’ 1917 and 1927 iterations for the design of the palace were separated by his powerful emergence as a Classicist. The evolution of the design of El Guadalperal showcases Lutyens’ consistent ability to draw from local precedent, adapt to the local climate, privilege the local setting, and synthesize the classical language with the local vernacular.

Lutyens’ ability to connect his designs of El Guadalperal to the local context is deeply rooted in his study of vernacular precedents. Accompanying the Albas family on sightseeing tours around Madrid, Lutyens was able to study traditional Spanish architecture, from which he drew great inspiration for the palace. One of the most impactful buildings that he visited was El Escorial: “its simple massing, the nobility of materials and structure, and the ornamental restraint were close to his aesthetic ideal.”1 The alignment of his own aesthetic ideals with the local vernacular greatly impacted the form, massing and ornament of El Guadalperal.

Lutyens also studied the Hospital of Tavera in Toledo, which contains a “simple but very original layout,” with a courtyard surrounded by colonnaded ambulatory. This heavily influenced both iterations of his design, with both featured colonnaded courtyards and loggias similar to those of the Hospital. The Peñaranda del Duero palace served as great precedent for the first iteration of Lutyens’ design, with the carved decoration and circular tympanum serving as precedent for the grand entrance portal. However, Lutyens did exchange “the Ionic entablature for a Doric one, and the monolithic lintel for a voussoired one.” Lutyens did not copy but rather built on a precedent in order to serve the needs of his own architectural expression. Lutyens’ deep analysis of precedent allowed him to capture the essence of the Spanish vernacular in his designs of El Guadalperal.

Lutyens also innovatively adapted to the local environment and climate in his designs of El Guadalperal. In his country houses in Surrey, Lutyens privileged the use of local materials from the English countryside. This practice is not only more sustainable but also contributes to the building’s vernacular character. Lutyens’ colored drawings of El Guadalperal suggest that his desired materials for the palace in his first design were “red tiles for the pitched roof, probably bricks with plaster for the walls, and a grey-stone plinth for the lower part of the facade,” all building materials that were characteristic of the area. In his designs both in Surrey and in Spain, Lutyens lets the building materials speak for themselves to express the vernacular language.

Lutyens also adapts his design of El Guadalperal to the local environment through his organization of spaces.

Like the local climates of his designs in South Africa and New Delhi, the climate in Spain can reach high temperatures. The work of Lutyens’ friend Herbert Baker in South Africa employed a “simple massing, with white walls, projecting roof eaves, verandas to the outside and patios surrounded by colonnades in the centre,” all strategies that Lutyens employs in his design of El Guadalperal. “The presence of empty and 1

All quotes taken from “Edwin Lutyens in Spain: The Palace of El Quadalperal” by Inigo Basarrate.

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Selected Writing from Innovative Tradition apparently useless spaces under the roof in some areas of the house” were derived from a lesson learned in the bungalows in New Delhi. These spaces were necessary in order to create a buffer zone to insulate and cool the most important spaces in the palace. Moreover, the use of arcades that shade the circulation spaces surrounding the courtyard also serve to generate areas of respite from the hot weather. Through the use of local building techniques, Lutyens was able to adapt his design of El Guadalperal to the Mediterranean climate.

The 1917 and 1927 iterations of the design are set in two different locations on the site, both taking advantage of the house’s picturesque setting. Lutyens is no stranger to choosing a site to maximize its benefits. In his country house of Marshcourt, Lutyens optimizes the magnificent views of the Hampshire countryside by taking advantage of the elevational changes of the site. In Castle Drogo, Lutyens selects an imposing stance on the side of a cliff for the fortress. In the palace of El Guadalperal, Lutyens emphasized the palace’s privileged setting in both iterations of his design.

In the 1917 iteration, he placed the site on “high ground, with a commanding view, the difference of level between the patio and terrace being 27 ft.” However, the discovery of the dolmen of Guadalperal, “a large underground prehistoric structure,” forced Luytens to select a new site for the second iteration of his design.

Lutyens selects the top of the hill as his second choice, which still possessed the commanding view but did not possess the elevational changes of the original location. Therefore, this forced Lutyens to entirely redesign the project, producing the second iteration of the design of El Guadalperal. Lutyens’ effort to take advantage of the building site in both iterations of his design further proves his ability to connect his buildings to the local context.

Lutyens synthesizes the classical language with the vernacular in a multitude of ways in both iterations of his design for El Guadalperal. In his 1917 design, he utilizes the language of the Spanish Renaissance palace to adapt to the local character. This style is characterized by a “strong, massive facade, with very few openings, so that the wall surface is dominant over the windows, and a heavily ornamented portal.” He also made the main entrance portal of El Guadalperal the “most richly decorated element of the palace,” which is consistent with the local architectural traditions of the area. Lutyens also combines the classical with the vernacular by synthesizing different classical and vernacular architectural forms. Lutyens’ country houses in Surrey are dominated by a large hipped roof, characteristic of the vernacular language. In his second design for El Guadalperal, Lutyens combines this vernacular roof with a classical facade, generating a welcoming yet monumental architecture.

He articulated the entrance in a grand and classical way in his 1927 design, with “a massive granite ashlar portal, around eight metres wide and eleven high where Lutyens [has] to increase his Mannerist artifices in order to fill the space convincingly.” This relates to the articulation of entrance portals in Spanish Renaissance palaces, while also adding Lutyens’ own classical flare. At the end of the south elevation of his second design, there are two matching pavilions that “have a more intimate character than the rest of the palace.” Lutyens’ ability to synthesize grander scales with more intimate ones is a crucial element in connecting the grand classical style with the humble vernacular style.

Throughout his development as an architect, Lutyens has displayed “a unique capacity to merge the grand manner with the vernacular.” Although he was most famous for accomplishing this synthesis in his designs in New Delhi, El Guadaperal provides yet another example of Lutyens applying his classical vernacular to the setting of Spain in a way that is arguably just as effective. The unbuilt design for the palace of El Guadalperal is “a successful mixture of a Mediterranean country villa and a Spanish Renaissance palace, combined with the Edwardian sensitivity for landscape and garden design.” Through a deep analysis of precedent and a sensitivity for the climate and setting, Lutyens was able to create the unrealized masterpiece of El Guadalperal.

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Jane Jacobs

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by Peyton Gable

Jane Jacobs was an author and activist who believed in the preservation of cities. She saw what cities had to offer during the mid 20th century when officials and urban designers were blindly accepting pseudoscientific theories of Modernism. The Modernist movement was destructive to cities, but disguised itself as advancing and bringing cities into the future. Jane Jacobs began writing at a young age, and after years of writing in various newspapers or publications landed a position as the associate editor of Architectural Forum in 1952.1 While in this position, she observed communities and streets in New York City to understand how they worked. Through her observations, Jane recognized that people make up the city.

She had a willingness to be skeptical––to question the perceived wisdom from the top and to trust her own critical insight instead. Jane’s efforts saved several communities in New York City from being lost forever.

Jane readily opposed the so-called “progessive” Urban Renewal movement, which sought to destroy existing communities and replace it with rows of homogenous tower blocks and highways. The community members were forced to relocate into planned-obsolescent tower blocks that often sat on the outskirts of the cities. They saw their communities and daily lives destroyed, only to end up living in monofunctional areas of despair. Many architects and planners were indoctrinated into the Modernist movement that wanted to bring the United States into the future, and viewed many tenement communities in New York City as slums: a cancerous tissue that needed to be removed from the city. The communities were to be replaced with a design that put the automobile above the pedestrian, thus adding more highways and forcing people out of the city.

1 “People: Jane Jacobs.” New York Preservation Archive Project, https://www.nypap. org/preservation-history/jane-jacobs/.

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A leading contributor to the Urban Renewal Movement in New York City was Robert Moses. He bought into the theories of breaking away from tradition to serve the modern man in the modern world. The existing built environment was a nuisance to Moses; everything had to be new, and everything old had to be removed. The idea was to solve the city’s problems by getting rid of the city altogether. He gained enough support from New York City’s political leaders that he had the power to do whatever he wanted to the city. Moses and many others feeding into the Urban Renewal movement looked at the city from a god-like aerial view in the sky, instead of looking up at what actually makes up the city: people.

In the 1950s, Robert Moses designed a plan to create a roadway through Washington Square Park. Jane Jacobs opposed the design and believed that the roadway would result in more traffic through the park. In 1958, Jane and several others formed the Joint Emergency Committee to close Washington Square Park to existing traffic. She asked the Board of Estimate for a three-month trial to have the park closed to traffic. After the trial period ended, the park never reopened to traffic due to its success and public approval.2 Her influence and capability to articulate her thoughts truly made people question the Urban Renewal Movement and to trust their own eyes to see what is true.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her first book: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book provided an alternative to the destruction of Urban Renewal. She starts by writing, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also and mostly an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and prebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from

“The ubiquitous principle is the need for cities for a most intricate and closed grained diversity of use that gives each other constant mutual support, both economically, and socially.”

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

by Jane Jacobs

2 “People: Jane Jacobs.” New York Preservation Archive Project, https://www.nypap. org/preservation-history/jane-jacobs/.

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Jane Jacobs holds up documentary evidence to save the West Village, 1961

schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women’s magazine.”3 She argues that Urban Renewal not only destroyed existing communities, but created “low income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism, and general hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.”4

3 4

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.

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Jane Jacobs recognized that any type of person must be able to live in a city for it to function. She writes, “The ubiquitous principle is the need for cities for a most intricate and closed grained diversity of use that gives each other constant mutual support, both economically, and socially.” She was a proponent of diversity in communities and recognized the importance of mixed-use buildings. The Death and Life of Great American Cities provided readers with a different perspective and the resources to critique Urban Renewal and modern city planning. She also recognized that cities have to be designed for the pedestrian over the automobile.

Jane Jacobs did not reject the automobile, but saw that designing solely for the automobile will inevitably cause more traffic, which was the problem planners intended to fix by building new highways.

In 1962, Jane Jacobs joined the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York and protested the destruction of the original Penn Station.5 Unfortunately, their attempts to save the historic building failed and Penn Station was destroyed the following year. There was great disappointment within the preservation movements and citizens of New York City over the loss of the monumental structure. One silver lining to the destruction of Penn Station, however, was that it accumulated support for saving historic structures. Years later, in 1968, Moses created a highway proposal that would cut through the southern part of Manhattan. The project was called the Lower Manhattan Expressway and its construction would have destroyed hundreds of structures in the area now known as Soho. After the demolition of Penn Station, many people of New York and preservation groups could not stand for any more demolitions of historic structures.6 After Moses submitted his Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal, the New York State Department of Transportation held a hearing to collect public opinions and Jane Jacobs attended. At the hearing, the crowd chanted, “We want Jane!” Jane went to the microphone, denounced the proposal, and encouraged the protesters to join her on stage. She was then arrested on the grounds of disturbing the hearing.

7 The events at the meeting and Jane’s subsequent arrest changed the direction and opinion surrounding the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Jane’s local fame, public support, and appeal to local representatives led the Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal to fall through by the 1970s.8 Jane believed that the city is an organized chaos and complexity. There should be a balanced and productive mix of different functions within a city to assure it is a

5 “People: Jane Jacobs.” New York Preservation Archive Project, https://www.nypap. org/preservation-history/jane-jacobs/.

6 Carlson, Eric. “How Jane Jacobs Fought Highway Development.” Medium. The Urbanist, May 27, 2020. https://medium.com/modern-city/how-jane-jacobs-foughthighway-development-351a9cebe686.

7 Carlson, Eric. “How Jane Jacobs Fought Highway Development.”

8 Carlson, Eric. “How Jane Jacobs Fought Highway Development.”

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

by Jane Jacobs

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“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when they are created by everybody.”

place for all kinds of people—that there is something for everybody in a city.

Problems arise when planners try to organize the city from above rather than from the street. In an interview, Jane Jacobs says, “Historically solutions to cities’ problems very seldom come from the top. They come from people who either stand the problems first-hand because they are living with them, and who have new and ingenious, and often very offbeat ideas of how to solve them.

The creativity, the concern, and the ideas, down there in city neighborhoods and city communities has to be given a chance; it has to be released. People have to insist on trying things their way.”9 The city is meant to look chaotic and disorderly. People make up the city, and those people are unpredictable. If one truly understands how a city works, then that city is dead.

Jane believed that because people make up the city there is no logic or theory that can be superimposed on it.10 Her efforts in offering a counterpoint to Modernist, destructive urban planning and Urban Renewal made people realize that there is an importance in preserving their communities and that they are responsible to do what is right for their city.

She opposed the destruction being done to the city and her readers and followers learned to advocate for an alternative to Urban Renewals that subsequently saved many parts of New York City from destruction. New York City would have become a very different place without Washington Square Park or Soho.

The lesson from Jane is that designers, architects, and planners have the responsibility to help contribute to a city in which everyone can live safely and nobly.

If a community has an environment that they are able to shape, the community will not only be happier, but they will have a completely different city that is more inclusive, diverse, and sustainable. What the community wants itself to be is far more important than any other perception of the city.

9 Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, 2016. https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-JaneBattle-Marisa-Tomei/dp/B075H2ZNC9.

10 Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.

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WALT DISNEY: A Humble Urban Genius HOW A HOLLYWOOD CARTOONIST HARMONIZED THE TRADITIONAL CITY WITH THE ATOMIC AGE WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED

by SAMUEL USLE “I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this: that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. If you think about Disneyland and think of its performance in relationship to its purpose, it’s meaning to people—more than that, it’s meaning to the process of development—you will find it the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States...”

— James Rouse, keynote speech before the 1963 Urban Design Conference at Harvard University

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G rowing

up in the endless concrete sprawl of Los Angeles, I could always escape to two oases of healthy urbanism and recover a sense of human-scaled urban space. The first was my hometown, Sierra Madre, a historic orchard town once intersected by a trolley that boasts no street lights or buildings over three stories. By the nature of its unique geographic location in the foothills of Southern California, Sierra Madre was able to maintain its edge and identity even as the concrete “landscape” of L.A. county expanded out past it. The second refuge of great urban space in the L.A. basin was Disneyland, U.S.A. From the moment I passed under the train bridge, the promise of the plaque mounted on the keystone of its arch was always fulfilled: “Here you leave the world of today, and enter the world of Yesterday, Fantasy, and Tomorrow.” The change in the quality of space was immediately apparent upon emerging on the other side of the arch. Here was a contained, articulated, human-scaled “Main Street” that caused the 5-Freeway and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to fade into distant memories.

W alt Disney, a Midwest cartoonist turned Hollywood filmmaker,

was an unlikely candidate to become an urban planner in the 20th century. Yet Mickey Mouse’s creator passed away pointing to the St. Joseph Hospital ceiling, indicating to his brother the plan for his “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow”. Had Walt Disney’s life not ended prematurely, Disney World would be known as one of the most important Urban Experiments of the 20th Century. It is likely that much of the century’s modernist elite would have looked on Walt Disney’s EPCOT with skepticism, but Walt had his finger on the pulse of people and culture, and I believe his community of tomorrow would have successfully connected with the public. Perhaps it may have even accomplished its stated goal: to fix the emerging ills of the mid-century city by providing a place for companies to experiment with urban ideas in a living test chamber, with visitors then taking those lessons back to their own hometowns.

A Quick Note on Terminology: E.P.C.O.T. Walt’s Progress City vs EPCOT Center: the 1982 Theme Park For the purposes of this essay, EPCOT henceforth will always refer to the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” that Walt Disney had in mind before his passing, not the current Theme Park of the same name designed after his death, unless otherwise directly specified.

W alt Disney would often enthusiastically point out a single small

bench on the top terrace of the preliminary EPCOT model, saying, “…and this is where Lilly 1 and I will sit and watch people!” Mr. Disney would walk his theme park in two personas: one in a suit 1

Lillian “Lilly” Disney was Walt Disney’s Wife.

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Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius as “Uncle Walt,” drawing attention and writing autographs, and the other as a slightly scruffy man standing in lines, picking up trash, and overhearing unfiltered guest feedback. It was in this casually undercover way that he discovered guest dissatisfaction with the original serious version of the Jungle Cruise attraction, causing him to bring in studio animator Marc Davis to give the ride its now famous comedic charm.

Disney also used his creation as a space for his own family. He built them a private apartment over the Town Square Firehouse and would often take the Milk Car out for a spin down Main Street at 7am, before the park opened. Many Cast Members 2 recall in the days before Disneyland’s opening Disney looking about his empty park saying with anticipation “Just wait until it’s filled with people…”.

For Walt, a picture of his creation without people was a nightmare.

A Figure-Ground Drawing of Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.

The humble, people-curious nature of the man who would create the EPCOT masterplan would have had everything to do with its long-term success or failure. So many of the failures of 20th Century Modernism proceeded from the blind march of ideological conformism and ego, and while Walt Disney’s EPCOT is often mischaracterized as utopianism, its motto was: “whatever works is kept, whatever fails to meet the public need is replaced…”. In his last on-screen appearance promotional video for EPCOT, Disney admits that “[He didn’t] claim to have all the answers…”, and was counting on American companies using EPCOT as a place to safely experiment with ways to best meet the public need. It would rely on the direct feedback of the people living in and visiting EPCOT; he assumed that it would make mistakes. Disney wasn’t interested in idealistic utopianism, he just wanted to fix things.

A Life of Urban Lessons

W hile

Disney had no training in urbanism, he had developed an intuitive sense of humane urban space by the end of his life. The urban funnel through which all park traffic must travel through at Disneyland is an inspired recreation of Walt’s childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri. Walt Disney and his Imagineers 3 captured the urbanity of the classic American “main street” typology and even made it better. Disneyland’s Main Street, just like its precedent, is designed to the scale of the pedestrian and horse, and while automobiles had just made their appearance on stage in this street frozen in time, Disney’s street is clearly designed to reflect an urbanity from before the automobile instigated the death of the walkable American city. However, unlike Marceline, Disney’s Main Street fixes the problem of the American grid. Disneyland’s Main Street 2 “Cast Members” is the term Disney uses to refer to the Employees that work in their Theme Parks.

3 The artists and engineers Disney tasked with designing and building Disneyland.

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Disney’s early life granted him a lot of exposure to good urban space.

After convincing his mother to lie about his age on a recruitment form, an adolescent Walt Disney traveled to Europe at the end of World War I and became an ambulance driver. Much of Walt’s driving kept him behind the devastated frontlines, which meant that he was mostly chaperoning Officers and the wounded between chateaus and villages of Northern France. Disney therefore experienced European urbanity of all scales firsthand at a very impressionable age. Disney’s first test in designing urban space came when, after the success of the first full length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he decided to build a new Movie Studio in Burbank, where Disney Pictures remains to this day. The original “Disney Brothers” studio on Hyperion Avenue had become too small for the operation of the growing film animation enterprise. Walt was directly involved in every aspect of the design of his new animation studio, going so far as to personally design the window shades on his animators’ offices, as well as the iconic Animator’s Desk, which has become the most influential furniture piece of the animation profession.

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is terminated by a castle landmark, which visually draws all traffic towards it. Additionally, the side streets are angled to inflect and disappear away from the guest’s eyes, ensuring that they perceive a fully contained & measurable space. The Imagineers were not trained as traditional urbanists, but they were film set designers who designed to the demands of visual culture. Filmmakers by necessity had preserved what the architects had forgotten—that any visually compelling street-scene needs three planes: a foreground, middle ground, and a background. The classic American grid often leaves out the third plane, letting streets fade into uncontained space.

Above: Disneyland is designed to activate Foreground, Middle Ground and Background as you pass through the parks. This follows the same logic as the Multiplane Camera, an invention of Disney Animation wherein each visual plane is drawn separately, and shifts with the camera’s movement to create the illusion of depth.

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Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius Disney made a few crucial errors, though, in the planning of his new studio—errors that would have consequences rather quickly. Inspired by the industrial tycoons and assembly lines of his time, Disney laid out the Burbank Studio in mono-functional zones with structures for the specialization of each task in the animation process. No longer did the Senior Animator sit across from the “Ink and Paint” painter and down the hall from his “In-Betweener” like they would do in the Hyperion Studio. The Hyperion Studio had been a messy and small yet mixed, integrated, and therefore cooperative space. The structure of seniority quickly became much more apparent at the new studio, as senior animators had access to their own private lounges while the other staff were relegated to their own assembly line-like stations and buildings. Unfortunately, Walt Disney was no longer seen daily by all members of his organization. While he still made the rounds and was personally involved with his animators, the segregated nature of the buildings meant that most of the studio was no longer personally interacting with their leader on a day to day basis.

Tensions began to rise at the studio as employees felt increasingly distant from Disney, and also began to resent their long hours and what they saw as poor wages. This boiled over in an infamous, prolonged Disney Studio Strike in the 1930s, which severed much of the studio’s comradery and relationship to Walt Disney himself. Disney felt personally betrayed by the strike. In his mind, his employees had ungratefully turned their backs on him after all he had done to build them a new modern studio. However, when Disney founded a new company independent from the movie studio, WED [Walter Elias Disney] Enterprises, to design and build Disneyland, he did not attempt to replicate the assembly-line specialized zoning of the Burbank studio. Rather, he left the “Imagineers” in a few integrated model shops and workspaces that resembled the mixed disciplines and integration of the Hyperion Studio. WED, Walt would say, is where he would go on his work day to “have fun.”

Disneyland U.S.A: The Urban Precedent for EPCOT The touchstone of Disneyland’s success has been its concern for people: a whole-hearted dedication to the happiness of the people who visit here. Today Disneyland has established standards of performance unsurpassed in all the world. Yet in the planning and building there were no standards to follow; whatever worked became the code.

Whatever failed to meet the public need was changed, replaced by a better idea.

— EPCOT Presentation Film, Walt’s Last Appearance on Screen

T he

impetus for Disneyland began when Walt Disney was sitting alone on a bench eating peanuts in Griffith Park. While he watched from a distance his daughters riding the park carousel without him, he thought that there should be something built—some sort of amusement place—where parents and their children could have fun together. From the outset, Disneyland was never meant to be purely a “kiddie park.” It was meant to be both fun for children and intellectually stimulating for adults. This is strictly evident in the dedication plaque at Disneyland, which reads in part: “…Here age relives fond

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memories of the past…And here youth may savor the promise and challenge of the future…”. This thoughtful intent for Disneyland is clear in many of its early attractions, elevated architecture, and spatial planning that departed from the cheap & seedy carnivals and amusement parks of the entertainment of the time. In the same way that the original Jungle Cruise ride was meant to be a serious adventure into the Congo, and the Rocket to the Moon was meant to be an actual preview of a future Moon Landing advised on by famous rocket scientist Werner Von Braun himself, so too was the Architecture of Disneyland meant to be as true an urban space as a theme park could achieve. In designing Disneyland, the Imagineers drew upon their experience from a golden age of film set design, but they also had to make the park more real and lasting than any temporary film set had ever been.

Structures could not simply be raised out of Hollywood or Broadway flats—they had to be perceived in all three dimensions, not just from a single camera viewpoint.

“...the castle is the ‘sacred space’ in which the essence of Fairyland is symbolized, and from which all the urbanity of a Disney Park emanates.”

Disney described the core vision for Disneyland to his illustrator Herbie Ryman as they pulled an all-nighter completing the first true birdseye drawing of this Magic Kingdom for their skeptical bankers: “I want it to have a castle at the center, and for it to be surrounded by a train.” In this one intuitive move, Disney gave Disneyland the clear parameters of traditional urbanism: a clearly defined center and a clearly defined edge. The Disneyland Railroad, elevated on a dirt hill that Imagineers termed “the berm,” would form an impassable, defined edge around Disneyland like the walls and ramparts of an old city. This edge would be perforated only by a single main gate, on which the aforementioned “Here you leave the world of today…” marker is located.

When Disneyland was first built in 1955, it was sited in the barren Orange Groves of Anaheim, which meant that the gateway was the threshold between agriculture and urbanism. As Disneyland became successful and Anaheim grew along Disneyland’s edge, the berm grew taller and greener to create a visual barrier between the cheap, commercial sprawl of Harbor Boulevard and the immersive figural space and thematic character of Disneyland. The Disneyland Castle was built to draw all traffic towards it at the center of the park, much like a traditional city pulls its major streets towards its public and sacred spaces. Though it was one of the tallest structures in the park on opening day 1955, the castle quickly began to be dwarfed by Disneyland’s famous mountain-range rollercoasters and the adjacent maturing foliage. Later Disney castle-parks would rectify this loss of hierarchy by building the center castle tallest and visible from all corners of the theme park. It did not matter that a French castle had no business from a story perspective in the landscape of the Mississippi River or a futuristic metropolis; the castle is the “sacred space” in which the essence of Fairyland is symbolized, and from which all the urbanity of a Disney Park emanates. From a figure-ground perspective, the castle is also open to public traffic moving straight through it—it is not ticketed and does not require a queue line to enter, thereby allowing it to function as a public structure.

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Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius There is a key spatial distinction between an amusement park typology and a theme park typology. The amusement park traces its origins back to the carnivals and circuses which built their temporary cacophonies of entertainment outside the city’s walls. Some carnivals, such as Venice’s Carnivale, did inhabit the urban piazzas and streets of their urban environments and, as a result, incorporated the figural weave of the city into its entertainment. However, a modern amusement park bears much more relation to carnivals; they are zoned in “entertainment districts” and anti-spatial suburban parcels of land. In fact, the amusement park does not look so out of place in the broken modern context—it fits right in with the “Ducks” and “Decorated Sheds” of famous architect Robert Venturi’s observation. The cheap chain restaurant-lined avenues of The United States urban sprawl, with their clashing colors, competing signage, and discordant character, are not too dissimilar from the midways of the carnival typology.

Conversely, the theme park has its roots in the immersive set design of the urban theaters of Rome and the Renaissance, applying many of the forced perspective techniques found in Roman Monuments, Baroque Estates, and of course stage sets. The theme park creates “fictional space,” the dimensional recreation of a historic, futurist, or fantasy world. This is, of course, an illusion, but one that relies upon the same demands of visual culture that the great urban spaces of the rest of the world exemplify.

Every time the Disney Company or another competitor has attempted to build a theme park in which the spatial and thematic rigor of the park is sacrificed for a lean budget, the project has been a commercial failure. Disney’s California Adventure Park, which was built cheaply and allowed guests to see the fake backsides of facades, is just one example. The Disney Company has since poured billions of dollars into California Adventure, successfully improving it with an urban recreation of 1920’s Los Angeles, and a charming route 66 town from the film “Cars”. Time and time again, corporate suits prioritizing a limited budget have mistaken their theme parks for overdressed carnivals of amusement and have thus pushed cheaper amusement projects masquerading as theme parks. These projects inevitably fail to sell tickets and, conversely, the more rigorous parks designed to the true theme park typology have justified their increased investment.

Consider Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter, where for the first time in their company history they abandoned carnival aesthetics and ironic fake movie sets for a completely believable Diagon Alley inspired by English Market Streets, and Hogsmeade Village . Wizarding World has been so popular that it provided the first real competition to Disneyland and Disney World in years; not just because of the “Potter” name, but because these fictional streets convincingly apply every urban rule of a rural English village. Potter applied the lessons of Disney, and the public has flocked to these cobbled streets of Hogsmeade in droves.

In his seminal work “Space and Anti-space,” Steven Peterson made the argument that there is a crucial distinction between modern and pre-modern architecture not merely in aesthetic character, but in modernism’s intentional rejection of discernibly shaped and contained positive and negative space. In fact, to springboard off

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his thinking, it seems that the main typological difference between theme park and amusement park is not whether such a park claims a “theme,” but whether it is built as figural space or anti-space. A skeletal rollercoaster may call itself “The Batman” and paint all its rails a moonlit black, but it does not in any way immerse its guests into the time and space of Gotham.

A drawing illustrating the spatial & typological difference between amusement park attractions and theme park attractions.

A theme park, on the other hand, from its streets to its attractions, relies on the convincing illusion of figural space. This illusion, in order to be successful, implements the same principles of forced perspective first discovered by classical artists and rediscovered in the Renaissance. The use of forced perspective in architecture to evoke a narrative is not at all uncommon in classical architectural history.

Likewise, thematic space is categorically different from the space of mere amusement. Even the rollercoasters of the theme park typology must exemplify the rules of dimensional figural space. This is why Disney broke amusement park trends and built immersive coasters— to give guests the impression of “earth” and discernable space to move through while on a ride [See above diagram]. The anti-spatial bare skeletal coasters of amusement parks are reminiscent of Corbusier’s pilotis—systems of bare steel not defining any space, but relying solely on the exertion of extraordinary G-forces to thrill their riders.

The coasters of theme parks can move slower and exert fewer G’s, yet still thrill guests because they move through dimensional space: through caves and tunnels, over bridges, and behind waterfalls. Guests of Disneyland may be surprised to realize that they will move faster on the 5-Freeway to get to Disneyland (L.A. traffic not considered…) than they will move on any thrill coaster in the Theme Park. There are a few notable exceptions to this rule like Space Mountain, which yet still improve upon a typical pilotis coaster, turning off the lights and giving the impression of pure empty anti-space. Disneyland is typologically a figural theme park with a few exceptions, and it is from this typology that EPCOT would take its cue for merging tradition with futurism.

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the left is a map of Disneyland circa 1966 (Walt’s Death) drawn as a figure-ground document. It illustrates that the on-stage urbanism of Disneyland functions essentially like a series of linked urban sequences of an old traditional city. The qualifier “on-stage” is important, however, as once the pedestrian moves off-stage to the “Cast Member Only” spaces of the park, the urbanism falls apart and the illusion becomes clear.

Like seeing a magic trick from behind, the spell of the illusion is broken when moving through Disneyland as a Cast Member. I can speak to this first-hand as a former Disney Cast Member who has both operated attractions at Disneyland and been part of Imagineering teams that visit the park in its off-hours to study and measure it.

Having grown up in Disney Parks my whole life only imagining what lay behind the curtain, I was shocked upon becoming a Cast Member at how moving backstage not only changed my perception of Disneyland’s off-stage spaces, but the on-stage ones as well. I didn’t understand the phenomenon at the time, but I realize now that this was due to my inhabiting the Poche behind the illusion—areas purely functional, often anti-spatial and not figuraly composed.

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Figure Ground of Disnayland circa 1966

As a guest guided through the illusion, one does not perceive the background spaces, and therefore can perceive it nearly as solid a poche as the structures of urban villages. The On-Stage spaces of Disneyland are a carefully designed and curated procession of urban sequences, and those sequences are utterly broken when one sees behind the facades. The lack of a tectonic and urban honesty through On-Stage and Off-Stage is perhaps one of the biggest factors keeping Disneyland from being perceived as a “Real” Place. It is for this reason that it is proper to understand theme park as what I call “Fictional Space” and not real space. However, my qualifier of “Fictional” should not dismiss the theme park as a serious urban creation any more than it dismisses the literature of the “Fiction” section of the bookstore. Great fiction offers us relief from reality, and ultimately the recovery of it. Fiction only becomes problematic when it is confused as reality; we may enter Fairyland but we must not remain. Though we cannot live in it, Walt Disney’s fictional mimetic urban space has helped thousands across the world, including myself, to recall in an age of broken modernist urbanism what humane urbanism looked and felt like in days gone by.

The various “Lands” of Disneyland function much like the distinctive quarters of a traditional city, wherein the character is heightened to reflect a specific culture of people and narrative. It is distinct in that these quarters

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A Figure Ground of New Orleans Square circa 1966

are meant to be wholly immersive—not merely variations on a theme, but a distinct theme in and of themselves. However, as Disneyland and the other Castle-Parks have matured over time, these lands have bled into each other’s edges, and often the most fascinating of Disneyland’s spaces exist at its transitions. New Orleans Square was designed at one of these transitions in the mid 1960’s, while Walt was also working on EPCOT, and it is one of the most—if not the most—sophisticated and successful urban spaces in any Disney park.

Designed at the junction between the jungle outpost of Adventureland and the Wild West Frontierland, New Orleans Square not only lives up to its real world precedent, but improves upon it by breaking its grid and restoring its historic relationship to the waterfront.

After growing up visiting Disney’s New Orleans Square, I found myself disappointed upon visiting the real French Quarter in New Orleans when I found that its gridded streets did not possess the same charm as Disney’s New Orleans’ inflected alleys. Unlike Main Street, which has a nearly uninhabited second story in forced perspective, New Orleans Square manages to program its second floor with an elite club and even boutique rooms without breaking its cinematic scale. It is the smallest land in the whole park and also the most dense, and intersects attraction and commercial programs, yet does not lose its walkability. New Orleans Square is one of the best examples of

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what the “World Showcase”’ urban quarter of EPCOT could have been. More importantly, it accomplishes something almost utterly unheard of in urbanism past or present: a harmonious and symbiotic intersection of man and machine (or guests & attraction vehicles).

It is this relationship between traditional urbanism and machines that would have been a keystone of EPCOT’s success if it had been built. Disneyland through all its figural narrative space remained meaningful—a physical embodiment of the American Mid-Century mythology. EPCOT could have accomplished the same.

EPCOT: Traditional City & the Machine in Harmony “Here the pedestrian will be king, free to walk and browse without fear of motorized vehicles. Only electric powered vehicles will travel above the streets of E.P.C.O.T’s central city…”

— EPCOT Presentation Film, Walt’s Last Appearance on Screen

A fter

a decade of improving Disneyland so that it sustained its commercial success, Walt Disney did not turn his mind to building another theme park as one might expect. Instead, he began to ask himself if he could take the lessons of Disneyland to build a place that was real. Disney had the privilege of living in his Disneyland over the firehouse, but nobody else did. Ultimately all the other second floors of Main Street that Disney would have seen out his window were uninhabited illusions. I believe that he felt it was time to take the next step and make a Disneyland that wasn’t ultimately an illusion, but a real place where people worked and lived. This would have been EPCOT’s greatest strength, its roots in its Disneyland DNA, which this article has so far shown is the DNA of traditional urbanity and visual culture. EPCOT’s potentially greatest weakness and largest hurdle however, was that it was clearly intended to be a “modern” city, fully integrating the automobile and latest technologies of the atomic age. This emphasis on “modernity” in mid-century modernist urban planning is the root of much of the evisceration of walkable humane city fabrics in the 20th century. However, there is evidence to suggest that Walt Disney may have been able to succeed in integrating the modern age into cities, while most of his contemporary celebrated architectural planners failed.

In

our academic discussions about urbanism here at Notre Dame, often the debate about man and the automobile is framed as a zero sum game. Either the automobile will continue its reign and doom our urban fabrics to evisceration in favor of suburban anti-space forever; or the pedestrian will prevail and retake traditional urbanity from the tyranny of the combustion engine. Walt Disney loved old cities, but he also loved the machine. An avid backyard railroader, he built live steam engines in his free time that traveled underneath and around his wife’s flower garden, and also famously became an advocate for the emerging technology of the Monorail. The first thing guests view upon entering Disneyland is not the castle but a train station, usually with a beautiful Victorian Steam Locomotive pulling

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Walt Disney: A Humble Urban Genius in with bells clanging and smoke puffing. The other attraction guests will initially see upon entering the Disney Property, the only one that is allowed to leave the berm of the park and connect to the park’s hotel, is the Disneyland Monorail. Disney’s Main Street recreates a specific date and time of American Urbanism, when the horse drawn trolley was first giving way to the automobile, the gas lamp giving way to the electric lamp. Tomorrowland, one of Disneyland’s original main “realms,” or quarters, was entirely premised as a kinetic “World on the Move” powered by emerging technology. Walt had one foot in the past, but he also had one foot in the future, and he tried to build a place in Disneyland where both could live in harmony. The amazing thing was, it worked. Thus EPCOT, following Disneyland’s example, would have become the world’s most important experiment in making the machine work for traditional urbanism.

Let us return our focus to New Orleans Square, that small section of Disneyland that boasts the best urbanity. Consider all the machines that intersect this charming traditional fabric: New Orleans Square is situated on the Rivers of America, where a sternwheeler riverboat, a ship of sail, rafts, canoes, and even keelboats all pass by and make port. The Disneyland Railroad forms its opposite edge, where a steam locomotive must pass through safely to drop off and pick up passengers every 15-30 minutes. Situated inside New Orleans Square’s tight building fabric is an epic water ride: The Pirates of the Caribbean, a ride so iconic that it would inspire its own blockbuster film franchise 40 years after its completion. Guests load onto this ride’s boats every minute and are whisked away past an indoor restaurant, underneath New Orleans Square, and back up again. At night, the whole land is transformed as mechanical show lights rise out of buildings and pavement to set the stage for the “Fantasmic,” an evening spectacular. This is not to mention the many minor machines which make up the restaurants, elite club, elevators, and audio-animatronic characters that flesh out New Orleans Square’s interiors.

All of these machines exist in this charming traditional corridor and, rather than impeding the pedestrian experience, they actually improve it. All of these machines bring a kinetic life and energy to the space that activates it as a place of fun and excitement, while maintaining its urban integrity.

Walt Disney realized quickly that his machines of attraction could be put to use in a real urban context, and developed several of the ride systems at Disneyland for exactly that reason. After passing an experimental monorail on a highway in Germany, Walt Disney developed one at Disneyland to be the forerunner of rapid transit of the future. The key innovation of the monorail system was that it could be elevated above pedestrian traffic with minimal effort and massing, allowing it to traverse the park as a “train” without causing the impediment to ground traffic that typical trains bring with them.

Walt did not build his monorail as another ride in the park—he built it as an actual transportation system that connected Tomorrowland to the Disneyland Hotel, safely transporting guests in and out of the park all day as an alternative to walking to the main gate. Walt also developed a second elevated transportation system intended to empower the pedestrian, the Peoplemover. The Peoplemover was a

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EPCOT as it was planned at the time of Walt Disney’s death, was meant to be a radial city that bears striking similarities to the hypothetical Garden Cities of Sir Ebenezer Howard in the 19th century. Disney had already applied a radial wheel plan to Disneyland, with each “land” radiating out from the central hub, and it had been a resounding success at organizing guest traffic through his theme park. The plan of EPCOT was essentially based on a literal napkin sketch that Disney gave his Imagineers who were tasked with planning the new city. The sketch reflected a radial city connected to outside smaller satellite complexes via the transportation spine of a Monorail. A major highway leading in and out was also included,

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never-static train of elevated cabs that a pedestrian could easily walk up to and ride to another node of his intended destination. Rather than requiring the pedestrian to get into their car and then find a parking spot, the Peoplemover, much like light rail, could work with the flow of pedestrian traffic. Walt built this system intersecting Tomorrowland, passing through all of its shops, restaurants and attractions, completely safely and efficiently with minimal staffing.

They were attractions he built to be serious examples to the world of future technologies that could empower cities, and they would become the lifeblood of his technological plan for EPCOT.

A cutaway section drawing of progress city. Note the linear elevated Peoplemover systems that intersect the city and the main core, creating an almost theme park ride-like alternative to automobiles.

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A portion of Walt Disney’s plan for E.P.C.O.T.

but Walt insisted that it was only to be used for traffic entering and leaving the city, not for daily commute. Instead for daily commute, different quarters of Epcot which arced in a radial pattern around the city, would be connected to the city center via the aforementioned Peoplemover system, which was already functioning safely at Disneyland as a ride that could pass through shops and attractions. At the center of EPCOT was its “World Showcase” of traditional urban quarters, the area of the city most alike to Disneyland and traditional urbanity. However much of the rest of EPCOT reflected Mid-Century Modern aesthetic and planning at the time of Walt’s Disney’s death.

If EPCOT had been built to the specifications of the infant stage of development it was in at the time of Disney’s passing, I think there is good reason to believe that it would have suffered from the same ills of many modernist urban planning schemes. However, I think that there is good reason to believe that with more development time, EPCOT would have begun to integrate more of the DNA of Disneyland and the traditional city, not less. As more and more of the talented artists of the Disney company would have dug into planning the details of its urban streets and corridors, it is highly likely that they would have applied their expertise in set design and an urbanity of visual culture to its fabric. Additionally, EPCOT was designed and meant to evolve with its mistakes, scraping what doesn’t work in favor of what does. Undoubtedly the traditional fabrics of EPCOT’s World Showcase would have been the most successful and sought after spaces for visitors to live, which would have encouraged their expansion across the city. In the current Theme Park called EPCOT in Walt Disney World, it is exactly the World Showcase Lagoon that frequently has the most guest traffic, and the Corbusian and anti-spatial land of Future World that makes up the other half of the park that is left the most barren of guests.

There is strong evidence to suggest that EPCOT would have adopted New Urbanism as a planning philosophy, as the Disney company did just that in the early 1990s building the New Urbanist town of Celebration, Florida. This community was built on the Disney World

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property just south of where EPCOT the city was meant to be. Even without the guiding hand of Walt Disney, the company was still interested in promoting the latest and best in urban planning. One can imagine that the Disney company would have eagerly picked up on New Urbanism even sooner as a means of fixing the more unpopular and unsuccessful urban quarter’s of EPCOT’s mid-century fabric.

However, if the best and most innovative aspects of EPCOT’s transportation machines would have remained, such as the Peoplemover and Monorail, perhaps EPCOT could have in turn influenced New Urbanism. The integration of the machine, combined with the artistic hands of Disney artists, could have had a profound impact on the re-emergence of traditional urban planning. It could even have provided a most invaluable service, and being a living test chamber for fixing broken mid-century urban fabrics.

I have lived in some of the most fast-paced modern metropolises of machines in the world, and I have had the pleasure of visiting some of the most meaningful traditional urban fabrics of the world— spaces preserved out of a pre-modern time. Of all the places I have been, only the theme park combines traditional urbanism with the modern machine. I believe strongly in the necessity of recovering our traditional fabrics from the tyranny of the automobile, but what if we could recover meaningful space in our urban fabric without becoming luddites and returning to medieval transportation systems? What if Walt Disney provided a road map for us to live symbiotically with the machine? Walt Disney’s EPCOT would have been at the forefront of solving these issues. If you look at Walt Disney’s life, you’ll see a man who didn’t just capture the public imagination, but was more in tune with public need than any of the celebrated and sophisticated designers of his time. He was in tune with them because he never ceased to be one of them—he never let his success or ideology blind his own taste. He used and enjoyed the products that he built, and he listened and reacted to feedback, both favorable and negative.

To dismiss Walt Disney and his creations in the grand dialogue of Western urbanism, because people don’t live there permanently or because they are entertainment, ignores a key turning point of urban history in the public imagination. EPCOT should be studied and remarked upon as one of the great “what-ifs” of mid-century urbanism, but its precedent, Disneyland, should also be regarded as a deeply original and serious contribution to American urbanism in the mid-century modernist anti-spatial culture.

Finally, as we endeavor to build the future of our cities of fact, perhaps we should look to our cities of fiction.As traditional urbanists we have for a long time been attempting to recover the lost genius of the past, but perhaps we have not spent enough time looking to what we can introduce that is yet new. As C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas observed, reason rests upon the imagination. As we reason to recover what was lost, let us not forget to use our imaginations too. Perhaps like the Greeks and Romans, we should build our new polis on the muses of our common myths. Maybe Walt Disney knew something all of us well-educated architects and urbanists have nearly forgotten: that to humankind, the most meaningful buildings are not made of stones, but of stories.

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Selected Writing from Alternative Modernities: The Theories Behind the Architecture of Our Age Course description provided by former Professor David Lewis: As you develop your own practice of architecture, you will need to be able to explain your position, to defend yourself against criticism, and to develop a well-informed understanding of how your work relates to broader cultural concerns. No matter where you stand with regards to classicism, being able to place your work in relation to broader ideas about what it means to be a modern architect will give your work intellectual heft. This course will introduce you to the various ideas about modernity that were developed during the twentieth century. Some of these ideas thrived and others faded out, but they all left a legacy for the way we build today.

By reading a selection of excerpts you will gain exposure to the key texts of modern architectural theory. We will test them against the architectural production they inspired. You will learn to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these various arguments and to reason out your own opinions.

By the end of the course, you will know what’s out there and where to go in the future when want more information on an idea. You will know how to dodge faulty logic and make a strong architectural argument. You will learn what good architectural writing looks like. You will begin to be able to script your own opinion and to stand your ground against architectural opponents.

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On A Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander: Pioneer or Happy Fool?

by Juan Esteban Salazar

Introduction When I first encountered and bought A Timeless Way of Building (TWB) as a freshman in architecture, I was very intimidated by the seeming weight of its contents. It would sit on my night table, gathering dust, for three years, as most night stand bibles do, before an analytical paper assignment in David Lewis’ Alternative Modernities Course gave me an excuse to read it. In retrospect, all these years later, I must say that it has fundamentally changed the way I think about architecture. When I first submitted this paper, I mentioned something along the lines of, “I felt like a mechanic has entered his hands into my mind and toyed with its innerworkings.” Take from that what you’d like, and please enjoy the following exploration of his work.

Since this essay was written, Christopher Alexander has passed away, and architects from all walks of life and schools mourn his loss. The essay compares Christopher Alexander’s writing with essays written by influential authors of early 20th-century Architecture.

A New or Old South Wales?

I would like to sort out what Alexander’s contribution actually was in light of the other architectural theorists in the early 20th century. To this end, consider this completely unrelated passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool…His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man, I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?…What could be more glorious than to brace oneself up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.

To what extent was Christopher Alexander a pioneer of new territory in architecture theory when he wrote TWB. When it was written, did this book represent a new island discovered south of Wales? To know the answer, we must travel back to the discussion of early modern architecture and the arts and crafts movement in the early 20th century, and their social and philosophical underpinnings. To help the reader follow along this journey, this paper will be organized along the Alexanders chapter’s in TWB. These include the following: 1) The Quality Without a Name, 2) The Gate, 3) The Way, and 4) The Kernel of The Way. Each paragraph begins with a phrase in italics, which summarizes the main argument of that respective chapter, and is explored through various essays on architecture.

1. The Quality Without a Name, Organic and Living Art There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness.

This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.1 To what extent is Christopher Alexander’s conception of A Quality Without a Name representative of the idea of organic architecture?

Alexander states that there is a central quality of living things that we should foster in our built environment.

Alexander argues that our built environment can only support this central quality of life if it is of the same 1

Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.9

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Selected Writing from Alternative Modernities constitution. Alexander explains, at length, that words do not offer a precise enough definition of this quality.

We can use analogous terms such as ‘alive,’ ‘organic,’ ‘natural,’ to give meaning to this quality. However, the meaning of each of these words only overlap in what he describes as a venn diagram at which the center represents the truth of this quality.

William Lethaby (1857-1931), an English architect and architectural historian who wrote extensively on the Arts and Crafts and Modern movement, may have spoken directly to how this quality of our built environment contributes to the human spirit was years before, when he stated: “Architecture, then, interpenetrates building, not for the satisfaction of the simple needs of the body, but the complex of one’s intellect.” Lethaby’s conception of architecture is one where it has the ability to both represent and satisfy the “desires and needs of men, the physical laws of their erection and combination…and their nature.”2 Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) believes that architecture also possesses an intimate and living connection with man. In his essay, The Art and Craft of the Machine, He describes the “Will of Life” emanating from the city of Chicago. The city in the view of Frank Lloyd Wright is composed of “cellular tissue, layer upon layer.” His call for organic architecture is no more or less ethereal than Alexander’s; He believes the built environment should be as pure and elevating as the trees and flowers. However, Wright is not being literal here, and his conception of organic architecture is intentionally symbolic in its relationships, and he throws out the term ‘organic architecture’ as an artist throwing paint on a canvas; to see if it will stick.3 Walter Gropius (1883-1969), defines the early modernist approach to the conception mimicking nature architecture succinctly. Gropius defines ‘natural’ as the “inner law without lies which governs all buildings.”

What he describes as a tension between building masses, and the rejection of superfluous forms, which amounts to a living form. This form manifests its structural integrity on its surface, as bone and sinuous muscle shape living tissue.4 Nature in architecture is both something to be imitated or something to be captured in the case of Alexander.

Lethaby is concerned with the didactic role of architecture. Wright’s conception of organic architecture is metaphorical, Walter Gropius is concerned with the maker. Alexander says for humans to live to their fullest capacity, it is necessary that our built environment is ‘living’ and has a ‘spirit’. He believes our relationship to our built environment is symbiotic.

2. The Gate and the Question of Style This quality in buildings in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed. The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it so for centuries, by using languages, which I call pattern languages.5 The question of what style we should build was on the front burner for most of the 20th century. How does the pattern language build upon this concept of style?

A pattern used in this context can be defined as: ‘unitary pattern of activity and space’. Although each pattern can define characteristics, there are some patterns which contribute to the ‘alive’ Quality mentioned in the previous section. These patterns are also situated relative to other patterns, and interact with them. The combination of these patterns forms a language. All acts of building, Alexander argues, are governed by a pattern language. Our traditional pattern languages represent the gradual evolution of a common language, 2 W.R. Lethaby, “Introduction,” Architecture, Mysticism & Myth. (Solos Press, 2015.)

3 Harry Francis, “Frank Lloyd Wright (1901),” “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” Architectural Theory. (Mallgrave, Blackwell, 2007) p. 131 4 Harry Francis, “Walter Gropius from ‘Program of the Staaliches Bauhaus in Weimer,’ ” Architectural Theory. p. 206-207 5 Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building. p.157

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and this common language allowed for the gradual, empirically-based improvement of our built environment.

As a result of this gradual evolution of a pattern language, these traditions represent a living form of building, and a form of building which facilitates the living quality of others.

Wright’s proclamation of the end of styles, refers to the broken languages of architecture which had lost their meaning. When Wright says that “the forms must be born out of our changed conditions, they must be true forms, otherwise the best tradition has to offer is only an inglorious masquerade,” he is speaking directly to the phenomenon of a new world order in which the associations attached to buildings no longer make sense.

Wright might say that we must redraw the lines of community and reinforce them with new forms which speak the new language.6 David Lewis, in his essay, The Ideal of Architecture as Sculpted Mass during the Interwar Period, discusses the principle of sculpture, as that which responds to both formal and material considerations of place. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), a notable british architect who designed the iconic red telephone box, emphasizes the principle of sculpting as the act of carving from a whole block of material as means of lending integrity to design. He asks that we “imagine himself or herself as carving a building out of a single enormous block of stone.” Alexander’s applied the idea of sculpting to the built environment. He is advocating for that sense of place felt only at the urban scale when it has this quality of wholeness.7 In light of these so-called broken languages—may we not recover a sense of place through a process similar to sculpting at the urban scale? Alexander agrees that our traditional languages have broken down, but what he is saying is that it is possible for new buildings to achieve this language. And furthermore, he is arguing we should pursue this course, as it represents a push for holistic integrity in our built environment. Although the identifiers of race, religion, and country no longer define the strongest bond between individuals, lifestyle, values, and workplace bring individuals under new banners. Although democracies like the United States may have unified disparate regions with vastly different climates, it has not replaced the need for regional identity, done away with regional material availability, climatic responsible passive heating and cooling. The state of democracy today surely reveals that we are not a harmonious whole, but divided deeply along geopolitical lines. Our architecture, as our communities must continue to respond to local climatic issues and house individuals who share common ground.

3. The Way and the Role of the Architect Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated…The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.8 How is Alexander’s concept revolutionary for the practice of architecture? To what extent does Alexander’s conception of the role of the Architect compare to the Bauhaus ideal of the craftsman and the planner?

The use of a pattern language allows for creativity to flourish in planners, architects, and builders. The process of design, then, is described as a gradual spiral from the general to the particular, outlined by Alexander as the gradual definition of space. Forming our built environment should be as easy as speaking sentences. The 20th century has seen the fundamental shift in architecture away from crafts toward the coordinating organizer.

Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School, defined a new role of the architect in the 20th century.

He saw the answer to creating unity in our built environment as reigniting the “joy of artistic creation.” He sought to foster the collaboration between architects, painters, and sculptors as a way of reinvigorating our 6 Harry Francis, “Frank Lloyd Wright from ‘In the Cause of Architecture,’ ” Architectural Theory. p. 206-207 7 David Frazer Lewis. “The Ideal of Architecture as Sculpted Mass during the Interwar Period.” Sculpture Journal, vol. 25, no. 3, 2016, p. 343–360.

8 Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building. p.351

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Selected Writing from Alternative Modernities built environment. Gropius calls for renewed scope for the architect as the “coordinating organizer,” as the new leader of a much broader organization of builder, technician, designer, and artist.9 Consider this conception of practice of architecture in contrast Le Corbusier’s (1887-1965) statement in Towards a New Architecture: “Only the architect by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit.” His view is that only the individual artist can conceive a holistic built environment.

His conception of the architect as creator enabled him to envision much larger projects like the Plan Voisin in Paris and the Master Plan in Chandigarh in what at best can be described as a colonialist, megalomaniac design vacuum.10 The pattern language is a language that can be used by anyone in the act of creation. This commonality links Gropius and Alexander in their idealism of the power of collective creation. This conception, we will see later, is linked to an underlying influence of Marx. Compare the following two statements from Gropius and Alexander respectively; “together let us desire… to one day rise toward heaven from the hands of million workers like the crystal symbol of new faith,”11 to “Within a framework of a common language, millions of individual acts of building will together generate a town which is alive, and whole.”12

4. The Kernel of the Way, Marx and Aristotle (1 page) This ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again. The essence of this kernel is the fact that we can only make a building living when we are egoless.13 To what extent does Alexander’s conception of the kernel of the way represent a philosophical innovation relative to the work of Marx and Aristotle. To this end, to which philosophical movement does Alexander belong? The kernel is the rejection of the mass-produced development houses in search of natural and egoless architecture. He claims that Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto do not reach this quality. To properly employ this ideal, you must be of a completely free state of mind from the need to impress, or other preconceived notions. It is a call to act as nature and to relish in the ordinary.

Considering Notre Dame Emeritus Professor Dr. Dennis Doordan’s assertion of “how Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, were each responsible for a body of work that fundamentally altered humankind’s sense of itself and its place in the world,” this premise begs the question of how much those scholars in the field of architecture were driving the discussion or reckoning with a larger order. The question of style and authenticity, and the arts and crafts, seem to have had their seeds sown by innovations in other fields—such as Marx’s contribution to political science.14 Alexander was undeniably influenced by the philosophy of Marx. Marx advocates for the ideal being practical, and the experience of sensuousness as only experienced through labor. This is somewhat tied to Aristotle’s conception of “human flourishing,” in that it is not in contemplation, but the practical wisdom that one experiences, that evokes sensuousness or human flourishing. Furthermore, this line of thinking led both individuals to the conclusion that revolutionary action was warranted toward the end of securing this sensuousness or human flourishing for all of man. This reveals the revolutionary thinking in both individuals, which bears an interesting implication for Alexander’s writing overall.

9 10 11 12 13 14

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Harry Francis, “Walter Gropius from ‘Viability of the Bauhaus Idea,’ ” Architectural Theory. p. 200-203 Le Corbusier, and Friedrich Etchells, Towards a New Architecture. (New York: Dover Publications, 1986.) p. 59 Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto.” (1919) Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building. p.351 Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building. p.535 Dennis P. Doordan, Twentieth Century Architecture. (Laurence King, 2001)

Stoa Magazine

An Essay by Juan Esteban Salazar

Le Poché

The idea of egoless architecture is one that reveals the sentiments of the philosophical underpinning which underlie many of the architectural movements of the 20th century. This rhetoric of Marx emerges evidently later in the Bauhaus, speaking to the collective dignity of Man, as individual and independent of tradition: But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of social relations.15 One particular assumption of this egoless architecture brings to mind Aristotle and his conception of virtue.

It seems that this fundamental order that Alexander speaks of is of a similar nature to virtue. If this is the case then we must assume that when he speaks of this intuitive sense of the quality, he is also speaking of our intuitive sense of virtue. This Aristotelian conception is determined by the golden mean: Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.16

Conclusion To the dear reader who has made it to the end of this exhaustive exploration, hopefully the answer to the original question of this essay has been answered. However, to summarize, his discovery lies in his ability to synthesize and eclipse the thinking of the previous generation of leading architectural thinkers and theorists with one comprehensive model for a new (but old) way of creating a quality built environment. He conquers new ground using a new systematic framework for thinking about architecture. Its ends are undoubtedly intended as revolutionary. Its innovation, however, lies in its organization of the content matter, and its ambition. This fallow ground is a precursor to a much more comprehensive and revolutionary conception of architecture, and its implication for the health and wellbeing of its occupants. Bound in red hardcover, this volume of loose-leaf paper promised to be a vehicle of Truth for Chesterton’s happy fool. It seems that this work stands in the order of some other empirically-based scientific discoveries of the 19th century in terms of the human body, genetics, and DNA—such as Gregor Mendel and his work with the pea plant and Friedrich Miescher who first discovered the presence of DNA—in the matter of its organization and multidisciplinary origin for the cause of architecture. Arguably, Alexander has set his triumphant flag a little further south of Brighton with this one. He is not only a pioneer in architectural terms, but will come to be considered as one of the great minds of the late 20th century.

15 Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. (Prometheus Books, 1998.)

16 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. (Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.)

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Il Bosco Lucien Steil’s Capricci Hometown Favorites Rome Dispatch Five-Word Building Reviews Gary, Indiana Architecture Book Recommendations

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Lucien Steil’s Capricci Edited by Carlos Flores

Moon Stars by Lucien Steil

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Carlos Flores (CF): How did you first become interested in art and architecture?

Lucien Steil (LS): There is no real date to this…

I loved to draw since my earliest childhood, but art and architecture were probably not part of the conversations at home and the teachings in elementary school and high school, at least the way I consider art and architecture: as profoundly intrinsic to human civilizations, and inseparable from ‘popular’ as well as from academic cultures. My earliest, more intuitive, and certainly Romantic infatuations with art were in the realm of modern US literature, the European Avant-gardes of the early 20th century, and vernacular architecture. I was born in a steel industry city in Brazil (Joâo Monlevade, Minas Gerais), and moved to another steel industry city in Luxembourg (Esch-sur-Alzette) when I was five years old. Earliest architectural impressions were profoundly marked by the spectacular and monumental industrial structures and the small industrial towns in the South of Luxembourg. My summer holidays in a small village in the Bourgogne as a child, and my hiking tours in the Luxembourg, Ardennes as a teenager rewarded me with unforgettable moments of joy and almost mystical exaltations. The love I developed for vernacular and rural architecture and landscape was spontaneous, emotional, and permanent. I realized that my fascination with art and architecture has been nurtured with what I understand now was a world of rapid change and mutations, where the dialectics between modernity and tradition had already been discarded from the cultural agenda of a self-devouring post-industrial civilization.

What I have come to understand as tradition today is not a longing for a lost past, but an act of resistance and cultural courage dedicated to the reconstruction of a beautiful, equitable, sustainable, and diverse world.

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Lucien Steil’s Capricci CF: Who are your biggest artistic influences?

LS: My earliest artistic influences were from literature, mostly fiction, and books on travel, foreign countries, and people. I started to read psychology early in high school, and I am delighted to have re-discovered the growing influence of neuroscience in contemporary architectural theory, as in the influential writings of Alain de Botton, Nikos Salingaros, Sarah Robinson, Juhani Pallasmaa, Harry Francis Mallgrave, etc.1 Though I loved to draw and paint, I had little access to art and architecture and I was not initially inclined to read about it. First, I would refer to the spectacle of nature and manmade countrysides, villages, towns, and cities where so many hands worked anonymously over innumerable generations to maintain, develop, and embellish, creating the most remarkable unsigned art.

“Only later did I understand that art and architecture are to be explored and processed in their material, spiritual-emotional, and tectonic-sensual immediacy...”

It struck me similarly that even in the greatest signed works of Renaissance art and architecture, so many of their authors remained anonymous. Contemporary1historiography prefers to point out individual genius and neglects collaborative genius and indissociable solidarity between artists, craftsmen, and workers in any great cultural endeavor. Only later did I understand that art and architecture are to be explored and processed in their material, spiritual-emotional, and tectonic-sensual immediacy—instead of abstracted and rationalized categories of academic culture When studying architecture in Paris, I finally had plenty of opportunities to visit museums and exhibitions, and was privileged not only to spend whole weekends in the Musée du Louvre, but also to see all the great exhibitions at the freshly built Centre Pompidou. I was certainly not able to make up my mind about what art and architecture were to be loved and appreciated best; I could equally love the abstract ‘Jazz’ compositions of Piet Mondrian, the ‘Piazze d’Italia’ paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Sandro Botticelli, the poetical musings of Paul Klee and Juan Miro, Kandinsky, as well as Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin, etc.

I have never concluded that the Ancients and the Moderns needed to be permanently at war, and I trusted my feelings and intuitions rather than the dictates of cultural orthodoxy and the conformism of mainstream academism. Ultimately, I think my earliest intuitions on the shortcomings of orthodoxy, dogmatism and fundamentalism have never betrayed me: not only would I stay loyal to myself, but I would also be able to develop my thinking and doing within a consistent ethical and intellectual framework.

Let me also insist on how important emotions and empathy have been in my life, work, and journey of learning. I have been as intrigued and worried by the exclusiveness of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ in the pamphlets of some of the most articulate theorists of classicism and traditional urbanism as much as by the doctrinaire rigidity and revivalist sentimentalism of more conservative professionals and academics. I often thought that only a radical romanticism would be able to redeem the world by means of poetry, love, and empathy; I tend to agree with Novalis, who wrote: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”

1 Juhani Pallasmaa and Sarah Robinson, Mind in Architecture, Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design (Boston, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015)

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Island of the Goddess by Lucien Steil

I originally wanted to become a painter and decided very early on that I had to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I decided only at the last minute to study architecture, and I remained confused about why I chose to study it throughout my six years in Paris.

Architecture was taught as a dull and uninspiring social science without much artistic and cultural bearing; I was desperate for a creative and imaginative educational adventure, and all I received was gloom and anxiety.

During a lecture by my studio professor, I came to know of the work of Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, Arduino Cantafora, Gianni Braghieri, etc. and became familiar with the prolific production of Italian and European Rationalism. This lesson was certainly my moment of epiphany which made me continue studying architecture. It was in my last two years of studies when I finally became acquainted with the work of Rob and Léon Krier, as well as the publications of counter-projects, pamphlets, and polemics of Maurice Culot at the Archives d’architecture Moderne, and I realized my ‘calling’: I had found a community of artists, architects, and intellectuals for whom architecture and urbanism was a passionate quest for meaningfully, beautifully, and sustainably building a world one could inhabit poetically. I started to passionately follow the work of the Italian, Spanish and Swiss

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Lucien Steil’s Capricci

Spring Blossoming Tree by Lucien Steil

Tendenza or Razionalismo, as well as the breathtakingly inspiring student work done under Maurice Culot’s direction at the École de la Cambre in Brussels. I attended lectures by Rob and Léon Krier in Paris, but it was the presentation of Léon Krier’s 1978 ‘New European Quarters’ project in Luxembourg which made me completely crack. The lecture evening was intense and dramatic, and this Luxembourg project remains one of my most cherished from Léon’s vast portfolio. Finding such a brilliant, courageous, and inspiring architect in my home country with whom I was able to immediately empathize has been one of the greatest blessings in my life.

CF: What motivates you to create?

LS: In his book Talent is Overrated, what Really separates World-Class Achievers from Everybody Else, Geoffrey Colvin highlights how hard work and perseverance distinguishes great achievers in sport, arts, science, business, etc. more than talent.2 Creative people in whatever discipline are moved—mostly by resilience, grit, aspiration, dreams, visions, great ambitions, and a quest for excellence—to act on their life, time, and place. They thrive to bring positive change, newness, and originality, and ultimately leave a legacy of transcending value to the world. A very good friend of mine called it the ‘sacred fire,’ and others would name it ‘creativity’ or ‘genius,’ but I rather like to romantically think of the classical ‘muses’ who inspire artists and architects to create beautiful artifacts and add to the making of a better world.

It seems to me that I have been drawing, painting, reading, writing, and most importantly daydreaming ever since. Since my earliest childhood I was playing imaginatively and passionately, constructing buildings and houses in mud and plasticine and Lego, and reflecting in wonder and awe at the beauty of the natural and manmade world. What 2 Geoffery Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Achievers from Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008)

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CF: Is there a specific environment or material that’s integral to your work?

“I am not thinking of ‘style’ and am not obsessed with ‘expressing myself ’, or of being ‘creative’; I just love to draw.”

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motivated me to create, I believe, is joy, fun, and pleasure—the same emotions children have while playing, experimenting, and learning. Where does this joy come from? I like to think it has much to do with what famous psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined as “Flow” in his seminal work The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

LS: I have done most of my capriccio sketching while traveling, often while waiting in airport lobbies, café terraces, or restaurants. My larger capricci paintings have all been drafted during dinner in Italian restaurants with ink pen and pastel on brown pack paper table-sets, and then rendered in watercolour at home, often years later.

I always carry sketchbooks of various sizes with me and would sketch depending on my mood and inspiration. I need both a public setting and privacy when I sketch; I am quite intimidated when people look over my shoulder and comment on my sketches, and prefer to work on quick Zen gesture drawings, rather than doing lengthy observation drawings where I would get unnecessary attention.

CF: How has your style changed over time?

LS: I am not sure I would call it ‘style’ changes, as I rather see an evolution of my graphic work within a relatively consistent stylistic ambiance. My work changes typologically and thematically over time; I think it is a natural process of maturity and artistic confidence.

The various ‘periods’ in my work result from a dialogue of experimentation and consolidation, and they happen organically without an over-intellectualized narrative. Like you would be told by Zen master Alan Watts, “Zen is not thinking about doing something but doing it.” Similarly, I am not ‘thinking’ about drawing but ‘practicing’ it; it is a meditative activity allowing one to go ‘beyond thinking’. Being formally trained in neither drawing nor painting techniques, I enjoy the slowness and serendipity of autodidactic and unprejudiced learning. I have also come to accept my limitations and imperfection, and have been keen to avoid competing with or emulating other artists. I consider ‘style’ both as an expression of formal, thematic, and artistic excellence, and as a synthesis of the aforementioned characteristics; it is a process of constant refinement and perfecting, as well as an aspiration towards the highest standards of quality. I am sketching with much passion and constantly endeavoring to enhance my skills and improve my techniques. Changes in the characteristics of my artwork seem to be the natural consequence of an evolving artistic confidence and a vital curiosity. I am not thinking of ‘style’ and am not obsessed with ‘expressing myself’, or of being ‘creative’; I just love to draw.

“What motivated me to create, I believe, is joy, fun, and pleasure—the same emotions children have while playing, experimenting, and learning.”

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Lucien Steil’s Capricci

Pink Pavement by Lucien Steil

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CF: Tell me about your favorite medium.

“I was told that coffee is highly acidic and will ultimately destroy the drawing: this has not discouraged me, however, to continue using coffee.”

LS: My favourite technique is mixed media where I can combine ink pen, Sharpie, felt pen, soft pastel, colour pencil, watercolour, and often ‘coffee-wash.’.

I have experimented with oil paint and lino printing, and occasionally use Acrylic paint, though I like to avoid tools and material derived from fossil oil as much as possible.

CF: Out of all your wonderful capriccios, which do you like the most?

LS: I love everything I did, even my failed sketches and paintings, my uncompleted works, and doodles. There are several paintings I love better, particularly my later ones which have become quite colourful, orientalising, and ornate, but I also cherish particularly some earlier ‘capricci’ done in my Moleskine sketchbook in ink pen and coffee-wash. I am also quite fond of some of my earlier ink washes in my ‘Oregon Sketchbooks’ while I was teaching at Oregon School of Design (1986-1988) CF: What are some characteristics of your pieces that are specific to your work?

I was made aware that my work could be categorized as Arte Povera: I am indeed using unpretentiously normal and cheap tools and material, and often use table sets and pack paper rather than expensive watercolour paper, and love to experiment with sharpies, as well as soft pastel, graphite, charcoal, chalk, fat pencils, etc.—all materials which allow quick sketching, painting, and above all smudging. I have done a lot of experimenting with ink washes and love to work with coffee washes.

Other characteristics of my work are the absence of Renaissance ‘perspective’, the absence of shadows, and the use of ‘oblique’ representation, as well as shading used more likely in Medieval and some 20th-century paintings.

In most of my ‘capricci’ there is an eerie urban setting on a waterfront, often with a cloudy and agitated sky and a luminous full moon. In my most recent works I tend to add several snow-tipped mountains inspired by Mount Fuji, and I have started to add blooming trees to my urban sceneries. There are never people in my ‘capricci’ drawings and paintings, though my imaginary cities don’t appear to be abandoned.

CF: I know that coffee sometimes makes its way into your work, how did that come about?

LS: Coffee is indeed one of my favourite beverages, and I started painting with it spontaneously once in an Italian café while drawing in my sketchbook. I found out that coffee has been used frequently by artists for quick washes and renderings on the Grand Tour; it smells so good on paper, and it has a wonderful golden amber colour difficult to match by conventional paints. I was told that coffee is highly acidic and will ultimately destroy the drawing: this has not discouraged me, however, to continue using coffee. I am intrigued by the idea of ephemeral art and all the philosophical associations connected to the concept of Impermanence from Buddhist culture.

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CF: If I were to try to create a capriccio in your style, how would I go about it? Is there anything specific you do that I should really emphasize or include?

I have taught several ‘capriccio’ workshops with specific tutorials, but generally I would encourage students to avoid over-rationalizing and over-planning; I often refer to the Surrealistic technique of Automatic Writing designed by André Breton, or refer to the techniques used in Zen painting where a preliminary meditation prepares for a quick ink calligraphy.

The ‘capriccio’ is not a ‘collage’ but an organic, reconstructive and meditative work where one reassembles places and buildings from experience and imagination into places which are unique and new, but also utterly familiar and inspiring. The painterly methods can be quite varied as one can see when studying the capricci by Canaletto and De Chirico, or by Léon Krier, Robert Adam, Alireza Sagharchi, Samir Younés or Carl Laubin. The ‘capriccio’ consists in the process of relocating existing places and buildings, eventually transforming, or adding to them, and giving them a landscape context, sky, and atmosphere, which makes the architectural components a completely integral part of a natural metaphysics. I always thought that the ‘poetics’ of the architectural design process were very similar—if not identical—to the nature and mental and ‘mnemonic’ procedures of the ‘capriccio’ technique.

CF: Lastly I know you are in the works of creating a book about your capriccios. How is that going?

LS: My book Sketches from Elsewhere and Nowhere will feature a wide range of my sketchbook capricci and paintings. It will be a hardcover, 280-page artbook to be launched in fall 2022.

I am planning to have a book signing event and exhibition in the USA coinciding with the book launch.

Fullmoon Coffeewash by Lucien Steil

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HOMETOWN FAVORITES EDITED BY TALIA STEINWALD

Our hometowns are the first introductions we have to the built world, as the backdrops to our formative years. Our understanding of architecture at a young age may not compare to how we read and comprehend the world as adults, but the buildings of our childhoods remain prevalent in our minds because of the memories they hold.

We asked a few Notre Dame School of Architecture professors what buildings in their hometowns they most love, and we are happy to share the responses of three professors.

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The first hometown is that of John Mellor, a double graduate of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. With over 25 years of experience, he is currently practicing architecture in South Bend and has been a professor at Notre Dame since 2014.

John Mellor Omaha, Nebraska My hometown is Omaha, Nebraska where there is not much architecture of note, either good or bad. It is all rather meh.

Instead, I included two buildings that were influential on me growing up that are nearby.

The first is the Nebraska State Capitol Building, designed and constructed in the 1920s by Bertram Goodhue at the height of his career. It is a fantastic stone building designed in a transitional period between Beaux Arts Classicism and Modernism, and is worth visiting if you are ever in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The second is the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This stone church, designed in the Beaux Arts style

by French architect Emmanuel Masqueray, had a major impact on me as a kid—it was the parish church of my grandparents, so I visited it for Mass 3-4 times a year.

So, in short, it is possible to find good architecture, even out on the prairie. I still consider both of these buildings to be among my favorites, even though I haven’t seen either of them in decades.

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Hometown Bests The second hometown featured is that of Selena Anders, currently living in Rome and a professor of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture Architecture Rome Program. A practicing design professional, researcher, and educator, she received her BA from DePaul University, M.Arch from the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, and Ph.D from La Sapienza University of Rome.

Selena Anders Chicago, Illinois One of my favorite buildings of all time in Chicago would have to be the small but mighty Krause Music Store located on 4611 North Lincoln Avenue. This mixed-use building has continued to put a smile on my face from when I was five years old to the present day. Louis Sullivan designed the whimsical terra cotta facade in 1922 to enliven the busy commercial street, providing pedestrians some protection from the elements with a gentle setback.

The building enlivens the streetscape with Sullivan’s signature organic details.

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The final hometown feature is that of Julio Cesar Perez Hernandez. A professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture since 2017, Professor Perez Hernandez received his Diploma in Architecture at the School of Architecture of the University of Havana and in 2001, became a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Julio Cesar Perez Hernandez: San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba My favorite building in my hometown was the two-story mixed use building located on the main corner of the foundational square.

My hometown, named San Antonio de los Baños, is a colonial town founded in 1794 near a meandering river in Havana, Cuba.

The building is still known as the Spanish Casino and was built in the 1920s. It’s a mixed-use Neoclassical building that once housed a cinema, a gymnasium, a library, and an art gallery. My memories from childhood are tied to this building where we enjoyed films as children and teenagers and later studied at the library. The entrance to both was on Royal Street across from a bar and cafe where we could buy candies before the movies started. The Municipal Library occupied the whole second floor and afforded views to both the square and the street. The ruinous condition of the building led me to conceive of a comprehensive rehabilitation project for the whole building in 2009.

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R O M E

D I S P A T C H E D I T E D B Y DAVE DEBACKER

The Class of 2024’s third-year students have made the most of their time in the Rome Studies Program, building upon their academic experiences and forging unforgettable memories along the way. Because each student has interacted differently with their environment, classwork, professors, and peers, each has had unique experiences. To compile some of these testimonials, I asked four of my classmates the same question: “What has been your favorite experience during your time abroad?” In a curiously similar way, they each tilted their heads up and smiled at the ceiling to begin their response, eyes flicking across the tiles as if scanning their minds for memories.

When they selected one, each launched into tales with details and imagery as though the events had occurred yesterday. Such vivid, personal recollections illustrated how impactful each individual’s time in Rome has been. A memory can be a camera roll. It can be an espresso-stained sketchbook. It can be a scar you smile at when you recall its origin. We take these memories with us back to South Bend. Through these stories of discovery, misadventure, and gratitude, I hope to represent a fraction of what it means to be a part of the Rome Studies Program. Please enjoy four accounts of student experiences from the Class of 2024.

—DAVE DEBACKER

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Early in the semester, I went to the Amalfi coast with my friends. We had heard that Amalfi was beautiful at that time of year, and we simply had to go. Unfortunately, actually getting to our destination was more difficult than we thought. After a train ride, we boarded a bus that careened around the winding roads of the coast.

An unlucky passenger was busy losing his lunch in the row ahead of us. The bus took us as far as it could, but we needed a taxi to reach our destination. The taxi whipped around the curves in those treacherous roads even faster than the bus. We finally arrived at our rental and took in the gorgeous scenery below us.

A student naviagtes irregular mountainside paths down to sea level.

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BRENNAN KELLY

Armed with sandals and blind ambition, we embarked on a steep downward hike towards the beach. After asking a farmer for directions, he instructed his dog, Bruzzo, to guide us. To our amazement, Bruzzo began to trot down a path and we happily followed. Soon after, we passed two chatty men in a fig tree. They freely gave us some of their harvest and invited us to dinner at their house. We tentatively agreed, thanked them for the fruit, and continued.

Arriving at a gate, we thanked Bruzzo for his service, and sent him back home. Just then, a man with

The city of Amalfi, as seen from an off-shore boat ride.

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Rome Dispatch

Regional aperitivi of bruschette, roasted peppers, and fried vegetables.

buckets full of tomatoes started a conversation with us and also invited us to dinner at his house. He warned us against continuing to the beach with our choices of footwear. We waved goodbye and disregarded his advice immediately. Of course, he was right, and we ended up bailing and turning around. Since the beach was a no-go, the next best option was dinner at fig-man’s house.He brought out seemingly endless prosciutto, mozzarella, tomatoes, limoncello, bread, wine, and more. It either tasted incredible, or we were just happy to be alive by the end of the surreal experience.

We had to leave the following day and decided to ferry back to the train station because there was no way we would survive another trip on that bus. Unfortunately for us and the freshly-bought tickets in our hands, neither the ferries, buses, nor the taxi service ran on Sundays. We resigned ourselves to begin the 1.5 hour journey on foot…after taking some scenic selfies to ease the pain of the situation, of course. After meeting some helpful hikers, hopping a wall, and hauling our luggage the rest of the way to the station, we finally made it back to Rome. Almost nothing went to plan on this trip, but doing it all with my friends made it a truly unforgettable experience.

Looking down on an Amalfi beach from surrounding cliffs.

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RICARDO PEDRAZA A highlight of my time in Italy was definitely traveling over winter break. My friends and I decided to split our time into three week-long chunks. First, we went to Vienna, Austria. After living and studying in Rome for months, Vienna seemed like a very different city in character, climate, and culture. From walking the Schönbrunn Palace gardens and gloriette at sunset to visiting the Karlskirche and Belvedere Palace, we were stunned by Vienna’s architecture. The traditional Christmas markets were definately high points of the trip as well. Fresh Wiener Schnitzel, Wurstl, and mugs of Weihnachtspunsch kept us warm in the freezing Austrian temperatures.

Top: Lake Como, Italy Bottom: Giant Brezels at Christkindlmarkt on the Rathauplatz (City Hall Christmas Market)

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Rome Dispatch A visit to the Acropolis of Athens, Greece, to see the Parthenon.

The next stop was Athens, Greece. We went straight for the Acropolis. Learning about these ancient structures in class is one thing, but to actually see historic architecture like this up close was incredible, especially because we focus so much on Classicism at Notre Dame.

The last stop on our tour was the Lake Como region of Italy. We stayed in Varenna and spent our remaining days of winter break exploring the city and surrounding areas. Seeing the sun roll over the lake from atop a centuries-old castle was an unforgettable experience.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend visiting this region of Italy. These trips were a much-needed mix of relaxation and adventure that helped us recover from a tough semester, and I am happy to have had much more of the same excitement in the following months.

Lake Como, Italy

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The setting sun in the Cinque Terre.

SARA NELSON Throughout the first semester, I only left Italy once, but that’s not to say I didn’t travel. I have to say my favorite memory so far has been exploring Cinque Terre during fall break with five of my friends. We went directly from Florence after coming off a busy school trip in Tuscany. The rental house in Corniglia was insanely cute and had a terrace with an ocean view, and we were able to hike to the neighboring town of Vernazza and jump into the ocean from rocks at the beach. The region had much fewer english-speakers than Rome, but that gave us an opportunity to practice our Italian.

The food was phenomenal, and I particularly enjoyed a restaurant inside the remains of an old castle with terraces overlooking the sea. The highlight of the trip was probably spending entire days at the beach.

Though getting to the shore entailed hundreds of steep stairs, climbing over rocks, and a few bumps and bruises, we had a great time, and I’ll always remember our sunset picnic. The breathtaking scenery, delicious fresh food, and company of my friends combined to create one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life.

A seafront lunch featuring a favorite waitor.

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Rome Dispatch

Professor Ettore Mazzola with a canine friend in Palermo, Italy.

JULIA RABITO The biggest highlight of my time in Rome has definitely been my experience with the professors.

Professor Mazzola in particular was a shining example of how much the teaching faculty care about us. After a long day of traveling on a class field trip, a water taxi captain in Venice stranded the majority of our class miles away from our destination. The ensuing righteous fury of Ettore Mazzola was truly a sight to behold. I’ve never seen an educator so adamantly and earnestly go to bat for and defend his students.

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In addition to his passion, I also really appreciated Professor Mazzola’s empathy towards students.

Every architecture student knows that during deadline week, time is the most valuable thing in the world. Professor Mazzola not only went out of his way to unlock the building early for me and my classmates, but also argued with the police who tried to remove us when the building’s alarm kept going off. He understood the demands of the architecture curriculum and was willing to beef toe to toe with the carabinieri on our behalf.

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Aside from being an all-around badass who contends with police officers and defends us against crotchety watercraft operators, he is a phenomenal teacher. His Roman Urbanism class really opened my eyes about the architectural character of the city.

The non-homogenous patchwork of communities and building styles in Rome gives rise to variation and individuality within the profile of Classicism. I feel like now I have a greater appreciation for the nuances and intricacies of both the human and built

composition of urban environments. Additionally, I truly appreciate professors who are passionate about what they do and make every effort to help their students grow. Also, the man is a certified dog whisperer. He can fawn over a passing cockapoo or spaniel and talk about successful public housing initiatives in the same breath. They say dogs are the best judges of character. I’m happy to report that I, my classmates, and the dogs of Rome unanimously hold Professor Ettore Mazzola in the highest regard

Professor Ettore Mazzola with another canine friend in Palermo, Italy.

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5 Word Building Reviews

by Michael Bursch

University Campus UTEC Grafton Architects Lima, Peru

Concrete. Brutalism just won’t die.

Vortex Student Housing Durig AG + Itten + Brechbuhl AG

Chavannes-près-Renens, Switzerland

Yellow Giant Donut of Sadness.

111 West 57th SHoP Architects Manhattan, NY

“Context can’t reach up here!”

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by Michael Bursch

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Christopher Newport Hall Glave & Holmes Architecture Newport News, VA

Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

Rowdy Meadow

Peter Pennoyer Architects Hunting Valley, OH

Bold, prismatic, traditional, in... Ohio?

Delta Gamma House Michael G. Imber Architects Fayetteville, AR

Andrea Palladio pledges at Arkansas.

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Visiting Gary, Indiana A Closer Look at South Bend’s Forgotten Neighbor

by Hope Halvey and Angelica Ketcham

Indiana Dunes Park. In the distance: Gary Works.

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Gary, Indiana HISTORY by Hope Halvey The “ghost town” of Gary, Indiana may be barren to the eyes of the highway traveler, but beneath the rust in this rust belt city is a storied history that gleams with music, industry, and art. The catchy tunes of the Jackson 5 may pop into your head as you pass their hometown, or even the song “Gary, Indiana” from the Music Man, if you’re more inclined towards musicals.

As college students traveling between South Bend and Chicago, we recognize this city as soon as the smell of rotten eggs reaches our noses: we scrunch our faces and are reminded of the criticisms of Midwestern family and friends as we glance at the twin domes that decorate an otherwise desolate town. Before we can wonder why Gary draws such a harsh reaction from both our peers and our senses, the smell fades, we pass Gary’s city limits, and our thoughts turn once again to our destination.

Each part of this brief but recurring experience Notre Dame students have with Gary is tied to a history filled with prosperity and hardship; turbulence and tranquility.

Gary, Indiana was established in 1906 by Elbert Gary, the founding chairman of the United States Steel Corporation. Gary’s idea was to make a company town: a town whose social and economic value was driven by one company, or one industry.

Some company towns—like Pullman, Illinois—were towns whose stores, homes, and churches were entirely owned by its founding company. Other company towns, like Gary, were not completely owned by the founding company, but promised economic prosperity and support for its citizens.

Artwork near the train depot.

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City Methodist Church, built in 1926. The main church in Gary until it closed in 1975.

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Gary, Indiana

By the 1920s, Gary had the largest steel manufacturer in the United States; the U.S. Steel Corporation employed over 16,000 people in Gary and was the main employer in the city. World War II brought even greater economic prosperity to the city as a result of a rise in the country’s demands for steel. By the 1950s, Gary was known for its progressive schools, state-of-the-art architecture, limitless entertainment, and, of course, its endless opportunities for employment. The excretion of hydrogen sulfide from the steel mill still scrunched the noses of the new citizens of Gary, but rather than being a sign of blight, it was an indicator of opportunity.

Prosperity, though, rarely comes without hardship. The economic opportunities of Gary attracted white immigrants from Eastern Europe, African-Americans from the South, and women looking for opportunities with their newfound freedom. The city filled with people of different ethnicities and races—a beautiful opportunity for social growth that was stifled by ignorance which brought turmoil to the city.

While Gary was thriving economically, it was one of the most segregated cities in the United States, even after the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The consequences of racial segregation and the reliance on one industry for economy appeared, at the beginning of globalization. According to U.S Census data, in 1970, Gary Works, a branch of the U.S. Steel Corporation, was employing over 32,000 people in Gary, and was a leading producer of steel in the United States.1 By 1990, due to competing global sources, Gary Works had only 8,000 employees and supplied merely a quarter of what they were supplying in 1970.

1 U.S. Census Data derived from Catlin, Robert A. Racial Politics and Urban Planning: Gary, Indiana, 1980-1989. The University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

West side of City Methodist Church. Roof is collapsed, and a small amount of recent graffiti decorates the exterior.

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Dilapidated apartment complex near Broadway Street.

As jobs left, so did the population. Gary experienced what is known as “White Flight”: the abandonment of cities by white populations as a result of a downturned economy and racist attitudes towards an influx of minority peoples. Though low wages and long working hours for all employees brought about low morale across the board, African-Americans in Gary experienced lower wages and greater poverty compared to their white counterparts. As a result, when the U.S. Steel Corporation nearly vanished, white populations had the funds to leave, but Black populations were stuck, left with an empty town and no opportunities for economic success.

By 1990, African-American people made up 84% of Gary’s population: the highest percentage of African-Americans in one city in the United States. The population of Gary continued to dwindle in following decades, and today, Gary has about 75,000 residents—100,000 fewer than in 1970. By the mid-90s, it also became known as the “Murder Capital” of America—a result of unending poverty from the abandonment of population and economy. Although the population remains low, Gary is recovering in other ways: its crime rate is significantly lower than what it was in the 1990s (in fact, it is slightly lower than South Bend’s), the arts and sports are making their way back with a new Arts & Creative District and a recently built Minor League stadium, and Gary is advertising its rare 20th-century architecture with the launch of historic preservation tours. Gary is beginning to find itself once again.

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Gary, Indiana

Artwork near the train depot.

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Gary, Indiana

VISITING GARY by Hope Halvey Despite its recent improvements, Gary still faces its Murder Capital/Ghost Town reputation; it is hard to overcome the rumors and off-handed criticisms shared between average Midwesterners who drive by Gary here and there. As architecture students and passers-by of Gary, the rumors of danger in the area did not stifle the spark of curiosity that Angelica and I had for the city. Despite some dissuasion by family and friends, we took a day trip to this “ghost town” to see what Gary is really all about.

The hour drive to Gary was broken up by a stop at the Indiana Dunes for lunch. We sat at the beach, where, to the east, was a clear sky lined by the Dunes. To the west was a greyer sky backed by the Steel Mill of Gary Works.

Once we were full and had enough fresh air, we drove a few more minutes to Gary.

We got off the toll-road at Broadway Street and were welcomed by an abandoned train depot, beautifully decorated by local artists. The train depot is hugged by two overpasses—one for freight trains, the other for cars—and surrounded by overgrown plants. Its dilapidated state evoked emotions we had felt once before, towards the ruins in Rome: awe of the architecture, nostalgia for a history we had never experienced, and an acknowledgement of the life this building once welcomed.

Driving south on Broadway led us between City Hall and the county courthouse towards the city center. We were the only ones on the street, despite it being a clear and mild Saturday afternoon. Some places had businesses running, but most were disinvested, closed up, and quiet. The architecture, both in use and abandoned, was stunning. The United Methodist Church in particular was a sight to see—a beautiful space abandoned, deteriorating, and left for nature to overcome.

As someone who is from a young city, this type of abandonment was something I had not experienced before. Angelica, on the other hand, was used to seeing abandoned or

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Newly developed neighborhood built by Habitat for Humanity.

overgrown buildings in her hometown of Chicago, but those felt more like pockets of disinvestment attached to a still-thriving metropolitan downtown. Regardless, the level of dereliction we saw throughout Gary was new to both of us.

We made our way through a few neighborhoods where many houses seemed occupied and well-maintained. Tree-lined streets led us down block after block, making us ever more excited to spot our next favorite house. 1920s craftsman-style homes line a lot of these streets, just like in South Bend. Rumors had told us that all the residential streets would be full of dilapidated, empty homes. While this was in part true, we were pleasantly surprised by the full and welcoming nature of most of the areas we drove through.

We made our way back towards Broadway, and encountered a neighborhood of Habitat for Humanity homes: a sign of growth and support. We continued to pass by art murals: another sign of local investment and neighborhood pride. Our time was limited, so we traveled back down Broadway to the toll road. Our initial curiosity was well-fed, but we were also left with many questions regarding both the current condition and the future of Gary.

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Gary Train Depot. Built in 1910, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Gary, Indiana REFLECTION by Angelica Ketcham It is customary for the Notre Dame undergraduate architecture student to spend their middle year primarily in Rome, with side jaunts to other areas of Italy and France, perhaps Europe broadly, and even adjoining continents if time and money permits. We quickly learn to see Rome as a city of layers: each era is built on the ruins of the last, with stone pieces of various centuries sunning themselves among the poppies and umbrella pines.

The magic of Rome’s most ancient ruins is appreciated by visitors, citizens, cats, birds, and weeds alike. We know almost instinctively, upon meeting a toppled column, to revere it for the fact that—some time ago—it used to stand vertically, surveying characters in a Roman drama whose design and dialogue we can only guess. The eyes of Ionic capitals have seen generations come and go, and have seen centuries emerge and dissolve. A few lucky columns have stood vertically defiant of the test of time. Their roofless temples frame the sky more exquisitely than any intact window; their archaeological sites are so adored that every inch of brick is deemed worthy of further study. As visitors, we long to share rooms with the civilizations that came before, and feel closer to them with each detail we measure. Even those stones slowly disintegrating into the earth are worshipped, and not merely because some of them once housed gods.

On the other side of the world, in an industrial town past its prime, ruins of another sort entirely rest in Gary, Indiana. They are younger and more urban, are less relaxed but equally overgrown, and perhaps few can rightly be called temples. Some wear murals, or a cloak of less-sanctioned but no-less-beautifully-rendered graffiti.

Beyond that, though, these ruins—of houses, a gothic church, a train station—have a great deal in common with their Ancient Roman parallels. They are built of brick and stone. They have missing windows, caved roofs, and crumbling steps. When you can see through them to the sky, it creates a spectacular geometry of blue.

People once used these buildings for living, working, traveling, and praying. Now, they house whatever plants dare to grow there. Why, then, do we fail to revere these ruins, fail to visit them, and fail to study them? Are their memories not old enough? Were their inhabitants not important enough? Can we not learn about the city around them by the fact that they have fallen?

One answer: these ruins exist too tenuously in the threshold between archaeology and renovation. If the people that once used these spaces are far from gone, why not repair them, and let the use reappear? It is not too late to bring back what was recently lost. Though, if there is no money for repair, why not at the very least view them as beautiful, rather than blighted?

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Broken-in and boarded-up windows along the side of the Train Depot.

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Gary, Indiana Another answer: these ruins do not belong to passing spectators. Unlike Rome, Gary is not a tourist destination. It is passed on the highway between Chicago and South Bend, seen in glances that somewhat cruelly say, that’s a nice domed building, and so is that, but wow is the rest of it depressing. Have we done the respectful thing, though, in stopping to take a closer look? Or are we treating this as another playground, just like the archaeological sites of Italy, for looking and touching and drawing conclusions for a brief afternoon, and then driving away to leave the crumbling pieces of Gary for its citizens to see every day?

Gary City Hall. One of the twin buildings that flank Broadway Street off of I-90.

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Pausing to photograph, touch, and eat a sandwich on broken pieces of Rome is appropriate, because Ancient Romans are not trying to survive and thrive against the odds as we do so. The citizens of Gary, however—far from extinct—cannot tell if our stares come from a place of reverence. There is no reason for them to expect anything other than the usual disdain, characteristic of anyone commuting along a route that Gary happens to bisect. And the decision of the visitor to label these buildings as ruins is dismissive—as dismissive as the departed white population of Gary—of the needs of the remaining, majority-African-American community.

Who are we to find beauty in the remnants of segregation and a collapsed industry, in those potent reminders which captivate us for an afternoon but entrap residents for a lifetime?

A strange paradox emerges, one which it may not be our place to solve: to drive through Gary for a brief architectural tour is both respectful and disrespectful at the same time. On the one hand, instead of passing through with a patronizing glance of pity at the disrepair, we are stopping to really see the city, and admire its moments of genuine beauty. On the other, we invest nothing but our time in the city, giving no money in return for our tourism; we have the arrogance to debate what is beautiful and what is not after one hour; we return to a campus chock-full of privilege, where every building is intact, to think carefully about what our visit has meant. We may be better neighbors than before, but we should not dare to presume that we can capture what it is to live in Gary.

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ARCHITECTURE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE MEMBERS OF STOA MAGAZINE Edited by Meredith Fairman Frances Barrera 4th Year

The Address Book by Dierdre Mask “Having just finished The Address Book, I found seamless overlap with the fourth year studio curriculum, especially having just been to Rome and applying that experience to our Washington, D.C. masterplan. The book masterfully covers how race, social class, and power manipulate a region’s urban structure, and the implications that street names bear on a region’s context and organizational strength. The book delves into a range of locations across the globe, and each is entertaining to learn more about. Easily digestible to the reader, this book is a delight for any reader remotely interested in urban planning.”

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Michael Bursch Atlante di Roma by Compagnia Generale Ripreseaeree 5th Year “The book shows the entire city of Rome in figure ground and in aerial photography. No other resource is more valuable to understanding the School of Architecture’s favorite city; from the street layout, to tiny urban spaces, to the scale of buildings, this book sheds a whole new light on the Eternal City (and is great for a memory trip for the upperclassmen).”

A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia & Lee McAlester “Ever walk down a street and wonder what style that old house is, and when it was built? This is the book for you! After reading this book, you’ll be able to differentiate between an Italianate and a Second Empire home, and know when your favorite Tudor or Queen Anne house was built.

Filled with pictures and little diagrams, you will be able to tell the time period and style of a house as easily as identifying the different types of classical columns!”

A Pilgrim’s Guide to Rome’s Principal Churches by Joseph N. Tylenda “This book is a ‘tour guide’ book for the greatest churches in Rome. The author walks the reader around the church through a keyed plan, noting

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architecture, sculpture, and painting, as well as architect/sculptor/ painter, time period, subject, and theological content in a thorough and methodical way, leaving no stone unturned. If you want a guide to the churches of Rome (which everyone should) this is it!”

Ruins of Ancient Rome by Massimiliano David “This book contains a treasure-trove of plates by winners of the Beaux Arts’ Prix de Rome. Unlike most books on Beaux Arts work, this book is in full color and contains several double-page spreads that showcase the jaw-dropping work of the École in a rarely-seen way.”

Stealing From the Saracens by Diana Darke “This new book (published 2020) tells the little-known story of Islamic influence on European architecture. Diana Darke draws powerful connections revealing how much Gothic, Neoclassical, and other popular styles of architecture have utilized Islamic architecture. Dome construction? Christopher Wren wasn’t looking at the Pantheon, but farther east. Pointed and trefoil arches? Sorry Pugin, those aren’t “Christian,” but have Islamic origins. A fascinating read that will change your perception of architectural history. [And read the STOA article on the Dome of the Rock and the Holy Sepulchre on page 150 of this issue!]”

Patrick Caron 2nd Year

Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier

Meredith Fairman 2nd Year

City, Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte “A fantastic book about how the small choices that architects make can drastically change the urban environment; a good reminder of how architects and city planners have the responsibility to make our cities open to everyone.”

Hope Halvey 5th Year

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein “Not necessarily about architecture, but about the underlying laws and regulations that have influenced the way in which we build and how it has affected specific groups of people. This book has drastically changed the way in which I consider the context in which we design buildings and how I should design in relation to that context.”

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Architecture Book Recommendations

Naomi Hernandez 5th Year

Edifices de Rome Moderne by Paul Letarouilly “This book is absolutely stunning. It’s a great source for precedent and inspiration. There’s not much to read, but a lot of images to learn from!”

Angelica Ketcham 4th Year

Eloise at the Plaza by Kay Thompson “Eloise was the heroine of my childhood and made me want to live in New York City. Her book showed me more about how to show a building via perspectives, elevations, scale figures—and even the occasional section and diagram—not to mention how to make an effective drawing with simple lines and a limited color scheme—than I ever realized as a kid.”

Italian Gardens of the Renaissance by J.C. Shepherd & G.A. Jellicoe “Even though our copy is black and white, it remains the most spectacular inspiration for watercolor renderings of landscaping— trees have never been more simple yet beautiful.”

Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms of the Art Institute of Chicago

by Fannia Weingartner & Bruce Hatton Boyer “I was lucky enough to grow up in Chicago and go to high school near downtown, and thus have regular access to the Art Institute. Every visit involved at least a peek into the Thorne Rooms exhibit, which shows 68 different tiny rooms, all of different styles and eras, and each with tiny furniture and windows and moldings and landscaping. Not only did it serve as an architectural history education of sorts, it also showed how much can be accomplished visually at a small scale. Also, they’re incredibly cute.”

Powers of Ten by Philip & Phylis Morrison “Following the films of the same name by architects and designers Charles and Ray Eames, this book taught me everything I know about scale and detail by zooming in to the Milky Way, solar system, Earth, and eventually in to the atoms in the hand of a man having a picnic in a park.”

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Connor Tinson Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life 2nd Year by Judith Heerwagen, Martin Mador, & Stephen R. Kellert “Architects and urban planners need to utilize design methods to fight the increasingly prevalent effects of climate change. Through twenty-three essays, this book beautifully outlines the necessity of nature-inspired design in buildings and communities. It then outlines methods of incorporating nature in design to connect those experiencing a place with the surrounding environment, which leads to positive health and environmental impacts. This is a must-read for anyone interested in biophilic, healthy, or sustainable design.”

Jennifer Trzaska 5th Year

The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars “It’s a guide to how cities work, with the coolest illustrations and some really great stories. Also a great podcast.”

Samuel Usle Graduate Student

Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis “This is not a book on Architecture per se; however, if we consider ourselves composers of form and light in perspective, then there is no better book to illustrate these principles.”

Valeria Whitmore 4th Year

American Shelter: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the American Home by Les Walker “This book has great axonometric drawings and a great history of American houses—which I love!”

Sharon Yehnert, Americans in Paris: Foundations of America’s Architectural Gilded Age 4th Year

by Jean Paul Carlhian & Margot M. Ellis The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett Monograph of the Work of McKim, Mead and White “Professor Mesko recommended McKim, Mead & White’s monograph to me sophomore year, and it’s been my go-to source for studio precedent ever since.”

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Stoa Magazine Volume 02

Executive Team

Angelica Ketcham, Executive Editor Sharon Yehnert, Director of Design Hope Halvey, Director of Finances Meredith Fairman, Section Editor, Il Bosco Margot Holbert, Section Editor, Le Salon Joan Ngai, Co-Section Editor, Les Ateliers Jennifer Trzaska, Section Editor, The Garden Stacey Xiong, Co-Section Editor, Les Ateliers

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Textual Team

Kristyn Aiello Frances Barrera Michael Bursch Dave DeBacker Anna Drechsler Carlos Flores Travis Frame Peyton Gable Naomi Hernandez Kate Schnitker Talia Steinwald Connor Tinson Samuel Usle Valeria Whitmore

Design Team

Patrick Caron Travis Frame Tristan Huo Joseph Neus Alyssa Sutanto Timothy Tighe

Special thanks to: Notre Dame Staff and Faculty

Sean Nohelty, 2021-22 Advisor Selena Anders Robert Brandt Jennifer Hoover Carol Kraus Krupali Uplekar Krusche Michael Lykoudis Liam McCauley John Mellor Michael Mesko

Jennifer Parker Julio Cesar Perez-Hernandez Stefanos Polyzoides Bernadine Stein Duncan Stroik Evan Vandermeer Samir Younés Mary Beth Zachariades

Notre Dame Students and Alumni

Marie Acalin Julia Bertram Andrew Califano Danielle Corbin Guy Crowley Miranda Cuozzo Leighton Douglass Claire Egelhoff Joseph Faccibene Edward Faicco Emily Fuchs Kristen Gates Mare Gattuso Kiara Gutierrez Nayun Hong Christian Johnson Molly Jorden Maeve Kelley Brennan Kelly

Sabrina Lee James Lengen Angela Li Joanna Lindstrom (née Skros) Maria Maxwell Maxwell Meuth Lucas Misra Garrett Nagorzanski Sara Nelson Anne Northrop Erin Panker Ricardo Pedraza Faith Primozic Julia Rabito Juan Esteban Salazar Benjamin Shelton William Smith Rayne Zhu Xinyuan Samanta Zhuang

Student Proofreading Volunteers

Allison Cornell Samantha Francois Elisabeth Hanley

Ginika Kalu Sabrina Lee Joyce Tipe

External Contributors

James Stevens Curl Anthony Fitheoglou Mark Foster Gage David Lewis

Tim McCarthy Jenny Roe Marika Smith Lucien Steil

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