Closing Remarks, Three Generations of Classical Architects: The Renewal of Modern Architecture, University of Notre Dame School of Architecture (2005)

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I am charged with offering concluding remarks and answering the questions of what the future holds and what challenges we face to meet that future. Before I do, I would like to thank our hosts and offer a special thanks to Michael Lykoudis for his vision for this conference. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank those people who have been so critical to the path of my own career – Bill Westfall, Thomas Gordon Smith, Rodney Cook, Richard John and my dear friends at the Institute.

Now, what challenges do we face and how do we meet them? Well, to consider this, I am first going to take my gloves off for a moment and succumb to what I would call realism, or what Michael Lykoudis has called pessimism, and then I will put my gloves back on and, hopefully, conclude on a polite, optimistic note.

Three Generations of Classical Architects conference speakers, panelists, and attendees, University of Notre Dame (2005)

Three Generations of Classical Architects conference speakers, panelists, and attendees, University of Notre Dame (2005)

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Windsor Forum on Design Education: The Classical Model

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From April 12-14, 2002 architects, urbanists, and educators gathered at the town of Windsor in Florida to discuss an ideal curriculum for architectural education which would address the crisis in architecture and urbanism. Among many distinguished speakers, I was invited to present the programs and philosophy of the Institute of Classical Architecture (today’s ICAA). Here below are my remarks as published in the Windsor Forum on Design Education: Toward an Ideal Curriculum to Reform Architectural Education, edited by Peter Hetzel and Dhiru Thadani (Miami: New Urban Press, 2004).

Christine G. H. Franck demonstrating rendering techniques during ICAA Summer Program

Christine G. H. Franck demonstrating rendering techniques during ICAA Summer Program

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Avoiding Fenestration Fiascoes

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A beautiful house can only be so when the windows of the house are right.  All too often today houses that would otherwise be beautiful are not because of choices made in the placement and selection of windows.  While there are many issues of good design that affect the cost of a building, placing and selecting well-designed windows do not.  In the past, while directing the ICAA’s Program in Classical Architecture for Design and Construction Professionals, I have seen a wide range of today’s houses and common window products and have thus been able to see many of the most typical errors in fenestration. For a catalog of windows and their details visit my collection of windows.

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The Will to Build Locally

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“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation.”– Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place, 1992

Through my windshield I watch the sinuous River Road fade into gray as a summer storm lets loose its rains on waving fields of sugar cane. Here in southern Louisiana, driving between Laura and Oak Alley plantations on a sultry August afternoon, I am reminded of how powerful and precious place is to who we are and how we live.

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Building Skill in Summer: New Orleans

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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.


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American Dutch Colonial Domestic Style

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In 1608, Henry Hudson, an English explorer sailing for the Dutch East India Company in search of a shorter route to the Far East, discovered the great North American river that still bears his name. Although the prospect of a western route to the Asian subcontinent soon faded, the enterprising Dutch saw an opportunity to develop a lucrative fur trade in the New World. From 1613–14, Captain Adriaen Block was the first to map the area between Virginia and Massachusetts, which he named New Netherland. By the 1620s, thirty-some families were settled on Manhattan, Long Island, and in Connecticut. Few examples of their earliest homes exist, but their architectural legacy has survived.

Dutch Colonial

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