Study Abroad Rome

Likely the most influential coursework of my young educational career occurred while studying abroad in Rome a number of years ago.  Here I made my very first discovery of the inseverable connection between architecture and culture.  A simple thing.  Took me 90 days and about 400 hours of drawing to see it.  Classical antiquity was the spark, and the richness and sophistication of Italian urbanism fed the flame.  In Europe, I learned to orient the human body to its past and present surroundings, and I learned to truly sit in a piazza.  

University of MD:, a long time ago, but it is still relevant
Instructors:  Thomas Schumacher and Michael Ambrose
Location:  ...Florence, Venice, Vicenza, Frascati, Bergamo, Tivoli, Como... 
Program:  on-site analysis of urban principles and the Italian facade

Past and Future

I am no photographer, but Carlo Scarpa does make it easy to take a nice picture.  Left, the colloseum.  Middle and right, Carlo Scarpa's Brion Cemetery where he is currently buried alongside his wife, Nini.  This is truly one of my favorite works of architecture in the world.  Although he purports to be a modernist, the phenomenologist in him flairs up in this place.  I simply fell in love with the texture, the play of light, and the lengthy storyline that Scarpa tells as one moves through his mausoleum.

Final Project

The semester culminated in a 2-week design of a "great hall", modeled after a traditional ecole des beaux artes process of making.  Parts to a whole was the project buzzword.  In the absence of any other programmatic or site parameters, I attempted to create a proportional logic of parts that came together in synthesized theory of architecture.  My solution established an experiential progression from a neo-fascist exterior to a more classically inspired interior, where thinness/thickness and repetition ruled.  Michael Graves would be so proud.

Entry Sequence

A series of vestibules leads great hall visitors from compression to expansion and back again, celebrating the two main spaces with traditional thresholds, ambulatories, and aisles.  Shade and shadow took on a life of its own and brought sensitivity to the program and "poche" of the building.

Piano Nobile

Scale of detail reflects scale of space.  Private conversation begets finer carving, tigher niches, and more overtly representational motifs. Inhabitants are meant to feel the weight of their individual and collective identities through the manipulation of scale and texture.