Tomorrow I head to New Orleans to teach on The Prince’s Foundation’s Summer Program. I look forward to working with my fellow instructors, the students, and to seeing the Big Easy again. My involvement with the Foundation’s programs reaches all the way back to two programs we developed in 1996 and 1997, the first two American Summer Schools of what was then called the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture. Our programs ranged all across the United States, from Asheville to Charlottesville to Richmond, and from Los Angeles to Berkeley.
It is heartening to see The Prince’s Foundation continuing to work throughout the world to improve the built environment, foster community, and ensure the best traditional building methods are brought to bear on contemporary issues. I’m honored to be involved.
See below further information about the New Orleans program and the Prince’s Foundation.
Each year, through a series of lectures, design workshops, drawing, building exercises and field trips, Summer School participants develop an in-depth knowledge of traditional architecture, preservation and building techniques and how these can be applied in the 21st century.
This year’s Summer School will be held in New Orleans and the Mississippi River Plantation Country. It runs from 6th August – 25th August.
After an initial week introducing drawing, geometry and structure exercises, as well as architectural drawing tours, students will travel into the field to study architectural development and history. They will be able to work together with local expert craft teams to learn craft and conservation skills in the fields, amongst others, of traditional millwork, plasterwork, ironwork and masonry.
The programme will end with a design workshop. This will include public consultations, design modeling and technical drawing. Local Residents and a panel of experts are drawn together to choose the winning design, which will then be built by Plantation Master Craftsmen with the help of building craft apprentices.”
http://www.princes-foundation.org/content/building-skill-summer-new-orleans-0