It has long been asserted that Frank Lloyd Wright (1867−1959) had little to no impact or influence on American architectural education during his lifetime, as well as in the years following his death. This perception was the motivation for the 1991 publication of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer on Architectural Principles, assembled and authored by a group of university faculty, including myself, who were teaching courses on Wright in American architecture schools. The publication, which began as a proposed issue of the journal Oppositions, endeavored to address the absence of essays critically analyzing Wright’s work so as to reveal the underlying principles that act to order his architecture—something that has been common practice in academia for many years regarding the works of other modern architects, most notably Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but which has been rare in the case of Wright. As Jonathan Lipman, one of the authors, noted, from Wright’s death until the 1980s, “the opinion [within Ivy League schools of architecture] was that Wright was a genius, but his work was too idiosyncratic, non-academic and inconsistent to provide useful models” for analysis. Yet Lipman also noted that when subjected to the “rigorous analysis to which the works of Le Corbusier were routinely subjected… Wright’s work in fact yielded up its own inner logic” and ordering principles.[1]
In America, this type of critical analysis was initially applied to modern architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, where from 1951–55, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Dean of the School of Architecture, assembled a young faculty that included Bernhard Hoesli, Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky, John Hejduk and Werner Seligmann. These architect-teachers went on to evolve methods of spatial and morphological analyses that dominated and characterized much of architectural education and criticism for the latter half of the 20th century: Hoesli at ETH Zurich, Rowe at Cornell, Hejduk and Slutzky at The Cooper Union, and Seligmann at Syracuse. Also beginning in the 1950s, an important strengthening of this analytical approach, fusing formal and spatial aspects with equally critical constructional and experiential aspects, was achieved by a group of British architect-teachers, all of whom were trained as architects, including Kenneth Frampton, Richard MacCormac and John Sergeant. The 1991 publication brought together essays on Wright by a number of these architect-teachers, including Hoesli, Rowe, Seligmann, Frampton, MacCormac and Sergeant, as well as essays by their students (who were also architect-teachers), including Partick Pinnell, Lipmann and myself, thereby serving as the beginning of efforts to redress the relative absence of critical analyses of Wright in academia.
Yet any paucity of pedagogical influence originating from Wright’s architecture and thought in American academia during his lifetime was arguably largely his own fault, for he was consistently and scathingly critical of university architecture schools throughout his life. Wright’s antipathy towards academia arose from his belief that an appropriate modern American architecture, such as he pursued in his work, had no relation whatsoever to the dominant educational models that he saw as demeaning architecture’s disciplinary history by reducing it to a formal style for use in designing contemporary buildings, and which emphasized comparison over analysis. In this, Wright learned from his architect-teacher and mentor, Louis Sullivan, who, while keenly feeling the absence of a true American architecture, warned against efforts to speed its arrival by “transplanting and grafting” historical styles onto the American continent. Sullivan believed that any true indigenous American architecture would develop on a regional basis, with variations dependent upon climate, landscape, and local building methods (a definition that will later be taken up by Lewis Mumford in defining American regionalism). Having experienced it himself, Sullivan was skeptical as to whether contemporary architectural education in America, based as it was on academic exercises in the predetermined classical style, would ever allow the development of forms that followed function, much less an appropriate American architecture. Sullivan believed instead that architectural education should cultivate what he called the “common sense” of analytical thinking.[2]
In the decade from 1900 to 1910 when Wright’s Prairie Period designs were conceived, his Oak Park Studio was made up of a group of talented young draftsmen and women, and in this context it should be noted that several of Wright’s draftsmen, including George Willis and Charles Tobin, had been educated in what was called “pure design” by Emil Lorch at the Chicago School of Architecture, housed in the Art Institute. “Pure design” was developed by Lorch in Chicago starting in 1899, and later employed at the University of Michigan, where Lorch led the architecture school from 1906 until his retirement in 1940. Based upon the pedagogic techniques that Alden Wesley Dow and Denman Waldo Ross developed at Harvard at the end of the 1800s, “pure design” was an art educational program that employed abstract form-based exercises emphasizing pattern and formal ordering systems, paralleled by the analysis of Oriental ornamental patterns in search of first principles, all with the intention of allowing students to avoid adopting existing historical forms so as to be able “to develop a truly American architecture.”[3] Relating in a number of ways to the Froebel kindergarten training Wright himself had been given as a child, and which he taught his own children in the late 1890s, the method of instruction known as “pure design” was highly abstract, and, according to David Van Zanten, “Lorch’s innovation was that he sought architectural bedrock in patterns and conventionalizations of nature rather than in function or statics.”[4]
Wright, who spent less than a year in university studies, rejected formal academic architectural education by setting up his own alternative “school,” the Taliesin Fellowship, founded in 1932 and continuing long after Wright’s death. The student-apprentices lived at Taliesin, worked in Wright’s house, farm and architectural studio, as well as building new structures, all of which involved “learning by doing” or making related to both the pedagogical methods of Wright’s friend, the philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey, as well as medieval craft guild apprenticeship training precedents. Wright’s assessment of American university architectural education remained consistently negative through its transition from the dominance of classical Ecole des Beaux-Arts pedagogical influence, which reached a peak in the early 1900s, to the emergence and eventual dominance of Modern architectural education and Bauhaus-influenced academic programs starting in the 1930s. In addition, throughout his life, Wright regularly refused to lecture at university schools of architecture unless invited by the students, rather than by the faculty or administration.
In this lack of academic influence, the situation with Wright has parallels with the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, whose work, like Wright’s, was inspired by natural structures and local landform, and who dominated the architectural profession in Finland to an even greater degree than Wright did in America. Goran Schildt, Aalto’s biographer, was scandalized to discover that, in the later years of Aalto’s life, the archives of the Architecture Department at the Helsinki University of Technology—all the buildings of which Aalto had designed—did not contain a single image of his works, and that the students were never asked to study Aalto’s designs during his lifetime. Similarly, as any architect educated in America during the last half of the 20th century can attest, Wright, unquestionably the greatest American architect, was, with the exception of history survey courses, almost entirely absent from the architectural curricula of virtually every one of the over 100 schools of architecture in America.
Yet the legacy of the influence of Wright’s work and thought in American schools of architecture, both during his lifetime and after his death, was more pervasive and profound than the perception imparted by the lack of critical analyses or curriculum and courses on Wright’s work might at first seem to indicate. To take an Ivy League example, starting in the late 1940s the work and thought of Wright was a surprisingly strong influence in the school of architecture at Yale University. One of the primary reasons for this was the faculty member and historian Vincent Scully, whose teaching increasingly focused on American modern architecture, and even more precisely on the work of Wright. Scully’s intense examination of Wright’s works, and his enthusiastic descriptions of the experience of space in Wright’s buildings, had an effect on the students as well as his fellow faculty members, including Louis Kahn and Buckminster Fuller, along with visiting critics such as Pietro Belluschi and Eero Saarinen.
During this period, the work of the architecture students at Yale was strongly influenced by the designs of Wright. William Huff, a student at the time, recalls that the spirit of Wright hung heavy over the school; “Those students who were ‘with it,’ literally carried Hitchcock’s In the Nature of Materials under one of their arms and spouted verbatim passages from [Wright’s] An Autobiography, which they carried under the other.”[5] In particular, the student work from the studios taught by Eugene Nalle, the charismatic instructor of the first year program, was typically characterized as closely paralleling the recent work of Wright. [6] That Wright’s influence remained strong at Yale through the 1950s is evidenced by the fact that it was a Wright-inspired designer who was cast as the student-hero of Edwin Gilbert’s novel, Native Stone, a book based directly upon the Yale school of architecture and its faculty in this period.[7]
However, taking a broader overview of developments in the US, it can be argued that the influence of Wright’s designs and ordering principles on architectural education was the most extensive and deeply rooted not in the East Coast region, which was largely dominated by the Ivy League schools and their embrace of European “International Style” Modernism, or even in the Mid-west region, where the vast majority of Wright’s works were built, but in a number of schools of architecture in the American South. These include the University of Texas in Austin from 1951–58, where Wright’s influence can be seen in the teaching of Dean Harwell Hamilton Harris, Bernhard Hoesli, John Hejduk and Werner Seligmann;[8] the University of Oklahoma, under the leadership of the architect Bruce Goff, where Wright gave public lectures in 1946, 1952, 1954, and 1958; and the School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, from 1953 onwards, where Wright’s influence was actively engaged in the curriculum and teaching by E. Fay Jones (for whom the School is now named), who was one of the most celebrated and accomplished of the architects who choose to work in Wright’s very long shadow.[9] In order to demonstrate Wright’s influence in architectural education in greater depth, we will here explore only one example, that being the pedagogy of the School of Design at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, from the 1940s to the 1960s.
As to why during this period the Southern region was open to the influence of Wright’s principles in architectural education, we refer to the thinking regarding the then-emerging concept of regionalism of two of the principal players in this story. The historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, one of the founders of American regionalism, gave a series of lectures at Alabama State College in 1941, which he published that same year as The South in Architecture. In this remarkable and too-seldom-studied book, Mumford sets out his definition of regionalism, one that does not result from simply imitating the forms of historic buildings in the region, or employing the local building materials, or engaging the regional climate. Rather, Mumford proposes a regionalism that results from an analysis of historical buildings and an engagement with contemporary social and cultural values, arguing that such an approach has—through the work of the architects Thomas Jefferson and Henry Hobson Richardson, both born in the South—“enabled the South, in particular, to leave an imprint on buildings far removed” from that region.[10]
Mumford holds that regionalism avoids the “appreciation of historic buildings [that is] confined to the surface,” or “the narrow antiquarian preoccupation with the past,” rather reflecting the understanding that “every regional culture necessarily has a universal side to it. It is steadlily open to influences which come from other parts of the world, and from other cultures, separated from the local region in space and time or both together.”[11] A constructive architectural regionalism is the result of a building tradition that is open to universal concepts coming from outside the region, which are in turn assimilated and adapted to local conditions. Appropriate regional development involves the recognition of the inherent “tension between the regional and the universal… every culture must both be itself and transcend itself; it must make the most of its limitations and must pass beyond them; it must be open to fresh experience and yet it must maintain its integrity. In no other art is that process more sharply focused than in architecture.”[12] Mumford holds that the most important character of regionalism originates in the social and cultural; “The forms of building that prevail in any region reflect the degree of social discovery and self-awareness that prevails there.”[13] In the context of this essay, it should be noted that in the book’s final chapter, “The Social Task of Architecture,” Mumford presents Wright as the architect who most effectively expanded and continued Richardson’s legacy in the US, and whose architecture exemplified an appropriate character for the various regions in which he worked.[14]
Thirteen years later, Harwell Hamilton Harris further refined the definition of regionalism in a 1954 lecture to the Northwest Regional AIA. At the time of the lecture, Harris was the Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin; a leading disciple-at-a-distance of Wright; as well as one of the most important practicing architects in the US. Harris was the designer of both the astonishing and too-little-known Havens House in Berkeley, California, of 1940, immortalized in the photograph by Man Ray, as well as what was arguably the first Case Study House, John Entenza’s own house of 1938 in Los Angeles. In his lecture—which was strongly influenced by Mumford’s concepts as presented in The South in Architecture—Harris begins by stating that regionalism in architecture is not so much the result of “climate, geography, the presence or absence of certain materials,” as it is the result of the attitude of those who practice architecture and their clients—“regionalism is a state of mind.” Harris outlines two types of regionalism, the first being the “regionalism of restriction,” which is focused on continuing traditions and “living patterns rooted in a vanished past;” and as a result “it cares more for preserving an obscure dialect than for expressing an idea.” Harris opposes this “regionalism of restriction” with another type of regionalism: “the regionalism of liberation… This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought of the time… [This regionalism’s] virtue is that its manifestation has significance for the world outside itself.”[15]
Harris goes on to describe the differences in the ways the two types of regionalism deal with outside concepts and contemporary influences, or what Mumford called the “universal.” Harris describes the “regionalism of liberation” that flourished in California in the 1930s, when ideas of modern architecture coming from Europe were met with a living architectural tradition. “California’s acceptance [of these ideas] was partial but intelligent, largely confined to what it found relevant,” which were incorporated into the “flexible and living California tradition.” In New England, on the other hand, the “rigid and entrenched tradition” of a “regionalism of restriction” at first resisted and then surrendered to the modern architectural ideas coming from Europe; “New England is now accepting European ideas whole.” Yet Harris maintains that universal concepts need to be engaged by the “regionalism of liberation” in order to be realized; “To be expressed, an idea must be built; to be built, it must be particularized, localized, set within a region. And what are important are not the limitations of the region but the resources of the region. A region’s most important resources are its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future…” Harris concludes by stating: “For an architecture to be really great it must express the variety, freedom, expansiveness, and love of the physical world that are the product of the best regionalism—the regionalism of liberation.”[16]
An examination of the influence of Wright’s principles and work on the teaching at the School of Design, North Carolina State University begins and ends with Henry Kamphoefner.[17] Educated at the University of Illinois (1926−30) and Columbia University (1930−31), Kamphoefner established his practice in Sioux City, Iowa in 1931. His municipal Music Pavilion and Outdoor Theatre at Grandview Park of 1936 was recognized with major awards from both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Despite his Beaux-Arts classical education, during this period Kamphoefner became keenly interested in Modern architecture as well as the work of Wright, and he visited Wright and stayed two nights at Taliesin in 1932, the year Wright founded the Taliesin Fellowship. Of particular pertinence in this context is Kamphoefner’s memory of Wright telling him that “every building that he [Wright] had built was based on a unique structural experiment.”[18]
Kamphoefner’s educational career began when he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 1937, where he later served as Chair of the School of Architecture from 1944–48. During his eleven years in Oklahoma Kamphoefner endeavored to engage the school in the Modern architectural educational model that was then emerging across the US, as well as leading the efforts to have Modern buildings realized on the campus.
In 1948, based in part on the recommendation of Joseph Hudnut—then Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, former Dean at Columbia University during the time Kamphoefner was a graduate student, and the figure whom Kamphoefner later characterized as “the father of modern architectural education”[19]—Kamphoefner was hired as the founding Dean of the School of Design at the North Carolina State College in Raleigh. Energetically engaging the opportunity to build a school of architecture from the ground up, during his first year as Dean Kamphoefner removed the majority of the existing faculty and brought four University of Oklahoma faculty members to the School of Design: George Matsumoto, Terry Waugh, Duncan Stewart, and James Fitzgibbon. In addition he hired Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Matthew Nowicki and Eduardo Catalano as faculty, as well as initiating the Visiting Faculty program, one of the first of its kind, which during the school’s first seven years brought in such leading professionals as Wright, H. Th. Wijdeveld (the Dutch architect and editor of Wendingen who had been offered the directorship of Taliesin by Wright in 1931), Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer and others for extended workshops. Particularly notable was the peripatetic Fuller’s seven-year involvement in the School of Design, from 1948 to 1955, and his connections to the school in this period were strengthened when he set up a practice in Raleigh with Fitzgibbon and T. C. Howard, a local structural engineer.
From the outset, Kamphoefner intended that the school foster the emergence of a regionally inflected “organic architecture,” to be accomplished by emphasizing the study of nature, structural geometries, and in particular the integration of spatial design and building structure. In his 1948 letter to Mumford offering him a position on the faculty, Kamphoefner stated that the school was being organized “for the development of an organic and indigenous architecture,” emphasizing the regional approach Mumford advocated.[20] In deciding to hire Nowicki, who was recommended by Mumford, to be the head of the architecture program, Kamphoefner had been deeply impressed by Nowicki’s work on the United Nations Assembly Building in New York, later saying that he was “absolutely overwhelmed” by Nowicki’s ability to integrate structure into architectural design.[21] Kamphoefner’s belief, shared with his mentor Hudnut, that architecture faculty should also maintain active practices was so strong that when J. S. Dorton offered Kamphoefner the commission to design the North Carolina State Fair arena in Raleigh, Kamphoefner proposed instead that it be designed by a faculty team led by Nowicki. The Dorton Arena, a 7600-seat elliptical-plan tour de force of integrated structure and spatial design, with a saddle-shaped roof supported by steel cables spanning between two peripheral angled parabolic compression arches, was completed in 1952, and was later named one of the ten most important buildings of the last 100 years by the AIA.
Within two years of its founding, the School of Design was already being recognized as having a highly diverse faculty who were open to outside ideas, committed to a pedagogy of learning by making, supportive of each student’s individual intuition, and sharing the intention of encouraging the development of an organic and indigenous architecture, paralleled by the integration of structure and inhabited space. Here it is important to note that from the beginning the curriculum developed by Kamphoefner and the faculty required every student of architecture to take courses in landscape architecture from the first year onwards, making the landscape and climate an integral part of every design project. While the teaching of the faculty was not dominated to any particular design or pedagogical formula, many of them were influenced by the work and thought of Wright, sharing a design approach that emphasized Wright’s consistent insistence on learning from nature, natural geometries (as exemplified by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book, On Growth and Form, which was a required textbook in the studios), and natural structural forms. In his lectures and writings of this period, Wright invariably noted the importance for his work of his first-hand analysis of the internally integrated forms of natural objects such as the crystalline geometries of rock formations, which Wright called “proof of nature’s matchless architectural principles,” and the dynamic structure of the saguaro cactus, which he called “a perfect example of reinforced building construction,” both of which exhibit the integrity that results from a coherence of spatial composition and construction order.[22]
The School of Design Bulletin of 1950, published two years after the school’s founding, articulates the principles ordering the curriculum and
pedagogy of the school, as well as setting it apart from certain practices of other schools. Reinforcing the central importance of integrated structure and the study of nature in the school’s pedagogy, the Bulletin opens with the definition: “NATURE, The source and medium of creation—demanding subordination and granting freedom of its expression. The birthplace of all structure.”[23]
In the Bulletin’s signed preface, Mumford introduces the school’s primary principles, shared by Kamphoefner and the faculty, of regional-appropriate design, technology defined by human needs, and education of the entire person. “Architecture, in the fullest sense, is the art of humanizing the environment,” he begins, arguing for a return to the all-encompassing definition of the architect’s task as first defined by Alberti, ranging from the individual to the city. Unlike the more famous architecture program at Harvard, where history was eliminated from the curriculum in this period, Mumford states: “We believe in the modern movement in architecture because we conceive it, not as a breaking away from history and tradition, but as a deeper rooting of architecture in the soil of the region and the community, with the fuller utilization of the universal forces that bind humanity as a whole together.” Mumford’s conclusion includes a subtle but unmistakable criticism of the leading historian-critic at Harvard, Sigfried Giedion, and his recent book, Mechanization Takes Command; “Only by helping to create fully developed men and women can we hope to reverse the present tendency to let mechanization take command. The architect cannot humanize his whole environment unless he learns to humanize himself. These tasks and these goals are essential, we believe, to the health of our Democracy.”[24]
The Bulletin’s “Conclusions,” unsigned but likely authored by Kamphoefner, contains another unmistakable critique, this time of the famous aphorism of Le Corbusier from the 1920s, which is here countered by a reference to Wright’s definition of the primary task of architecture being to provide physical and psychological shelter; “The study of well-being of the contemporary man…continues to be the inspiration for our work… It is no longer ‘The Machine to Live In’ that stirs our imagination. It is the eternal feeling of a shelter to which we subordinate our creative ideas.” The inspiration of nature, underappreciated by previous generations, requires a “conscious revival of its importance” for architecture. In counterpoint to “the mechanized concept of values” and “the mechanized life of a metropolis…the coming chapter of our life might be inspired by the regional approach to life,” resulting in the school having a pedagogical philosophy “which well might be termed as a new humanism.” Presaging Harris’s definition of the regionalism of liberation, the author states: “An architect must be a promoter of new ideas beneficial to the life of men.” Indicative of the preponderance of practicing architects on the school’s faculty, the essay concludes with an argument for the fundamental humility of the architect; “Architecture…is an art of collaboration with a client… [and for this reason] humility must be part of [the architect’s] professional ethics.”[25]
In May 1950, Wright came to Raleigh, where he had an animated discussion with a large group of School of Design students in the shade of a tree during the day, after which Wright lectured in the evening to an audience that included the faculty and students of the School of Design, architects from around the region, and members of the public. The lecture took place in the recently completed Reynolds Coliseum, the university’s sports hall, and the 5000 people who attended constituted the largest audience ever to hear Wright speak, signaling the emergence of the School of Design as an important leader in American architectural education. In the lecture, Wright, who had earlier characterized Kamphoefner as an “architectural missionary” during his time at the University of Oklahoma,[26] called for the school to nurture an American organic architecture, based on the close study of nature and natural structural forms.
During its first two decades, the teaching in the School of Design emphasized the search for an appropriate organic or indigenous architecture alongside the development of individual intuition, as well as emphasizing learning from natural form paralleled by the exploration of the most advanced building structures. The School was recognized for its integration of architectural design and structural research in teaching undertaken by faculty such as the Argentine architect Eduardo Catalano, who joined the faculty in 1949 and whose own 1954 house in Raleigh, with its twin wooden hyperbolic parabola structural beams supporting a tensile roof and bearing on only two points, was one of the very few buildings praised by Wright. Catalano, who had been recommended to Kamphoefner by Marcel Breuer, was appointed head of the architecture program following Nowicki’s untimely death in 1950 in an airplane crash on his way to the new capital of India’s Punjab region, Chandigarh, for which he was the lead architect.[27] In addition to Catalano, Kamphoefner brought in a number of leading architects who engaged structures in their work to teach at the School, including Horacio Caminos, Felix Candela, and Eduardo Torroja. The School soon became known for the faculty and students’ advanced thinking on thin shell and various folded and parabolic structural forms in reinforced concrete.
The structurally innovative designs made by the students in the studios, along with faculty research, invited essays, as well as selected presentations of the twenty Visiting Lecturers Kamphoefner brought to the School each year, were all publicized in the Student Publication of the School of Design, the first issue of 1951 being dedicated to the memory of Nowicki. The contents of each issue of the Student Publication was determined by the students, often by way of school-wide votes, and each issue was assembled and published by the students, with the assistance of a faculty advisor. The Student Publication, founded shortly after Yale University School of Architecture’s student journal, Perspecta, documented the rigorous, diverse and innovative pedagogical work and research of the School, fostered by Kamphoefner’s consistent demand for excellence, and as a result the Student Publication was of critical importance in establishing the “national reputation, visibility, and prominence” of the School of Design.[28]
The Visiting Lecturer program Kamphoefner established brought many important, high profile practitioners to the School, and the architect-lecturers were often deeply affected by their time there. As an example, in 1964 Louis I. Kahn, a personal friend of Kamphoefner’s, lectured on his early designs for the Bangladesh National Capital complex in Dhaka at the School of Design.[29] During this period Kahn was struggling to resolve the roof of the Assembly Building at Dhaka, and while he was in Raleigh, Kahn met Candela, who showed him the thin-shell concrete octagonal-plan, parabolic-section roof vaults of the “Los Manantiales” restaurant and the St. Vincent Chapel, both in Mexico City. Kahn’s final design for the Assembly Building roof at Dhaka, resolved shortly after his visit to the School, was composed of a set of eight parabolic concrete shells that are strikingly similar to Candela’s thin-shell structures.[30]
Another example of the School’s fertile combination of Wright-inspired organic architecture, with its emphasis on learning from nature, and advanced structural experimentation, also involves Kahn. After the completion of his Yale Art Gallery in 1952, Kahn continued to experiment with the building’s open-web tetrahedral floor slab and its possible prefabrication. While Kahn was unsuccessful in convincing the faculty at Yale, where he taught until 1958, to explore this structural type, he found there was intense interest in other schools. As Roberto Gargiani has noted in his study of Kahn’s early concrete architecture; “The main centers of experimentation on the prefabrication of tetrahedra in keeping with Kahn’s vision are the School of Design”—with Caminos, who assigned tetrahedral concrete floor structure exercises in studio in 1961—“and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”—with Catalano, who departed the School of Design in 1956 to become Dean at MIT, and who supervised the 1962 thesis on precast floor systems of Robert Burns, a School of Design graduate then in the Master of Architecture program at MIT.[31] The close parallels between the inspiration for structural concepts to be found in natural forms in Kahn’s design process and in the design thinking fostered at the School of Design is indicated by Kahn’s statement to his nephew regarding D’Arcy Thompson’s book, which was assigned as a standard textbook at the School of Design; “If a person could read only one book during their life, it should be On Growth and Form.”[32]
Rather than diminishing with his death in 1959, Wright’s influence in the School of Design may be said to have increased in the next decade. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a number of the original faculty appointed by Kamphoefner, including Catalano, Caminos, Fitzgibbon, Matsumoto and Leslie Laskey, accepted positions at other architecture schools.[33] Seeking to maintain the school’s commitment to the organic and regional approach, in 1962 Kamphoefner hired Harwell Hamilton Harris, who had stepped down from the Deanship at University of Texas at Austin in 1955 and then practiced in California. With Kamphoefner’s encouragement, Harris, one of the most talented of those architects who worked in Wright’s long shadow, moved his practice to Raleigh. Kamphoefner intended the hiring of Harris to be understood as a statement of principle, as he indicated in his letter to the university chancellor, where Kamphoefner argued that through his teaching Harris would demonstrate to the School of Design students “the principles and practice of compatible site and building relationships.” He also valued Harris for understanding and practicing “those principles of design first developed by Frank Lloyd Wright.”[34]
Robert Burns, the 1957 Paris Prize-winning graduate of the School who Kamphoefner appointed as head of the architecture at the School of Design in 1967, and who was among Kamphoefner’s closest colleagues in the School of Design in his later years as Dean, noted that Kamphoefner’s organic and regional approach was intended to be a break from the European modern tradition of the “International Style,” which Kamphoefner felt endeavored to establish an internationally uniform definition of architecture. In contrast, Burns argued that Kamphoefner’s approach fostered the development of a diverse and varied yet appropriate American architecture that engages the landscape and nature, “in keeping with the philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright.”[35]
In conclusion, I would like to note the parallels between the architectural pedagogy in the School of Design from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, and the situation in American architecture schools today. Burns pointed out that Kamphoefner intended the pedagogy of the School of Design to be an alternative to the then-typical embrace of European modern architecture formulas by American schools. This involved not only the rejection of the “International Style” of universally applied architectural form and construction in professional practice, but also the parallel pedagogical methods employed in schools. The last included variations on the “atelier” studio system, wherein students learn to employ a narrowly defined form-making
formula;[36] the de-emphasis of architectural history in the curriculum and its evacuation from the design studio; the emphasis of theoretical thinking over engaged making; the suppression of individual intuition, which is dismissively reduced to personal “expression;” all culminating in tightly scripted formal “experiments” disengaged from their physical and cultural contexts, and “inventions” conceived without an evaluation of appropriateness or any reference to disciplinary history.
The pedagogy of the School of Design took the opposite approach, emphasizing a Socratic studio pedagogy involving individual interpretations of shared ordering principles; learning by making, wherein both the evaluation and evolution of a concept involves its embodiment in the made; an emphasis on thinking and making, where theory comes from practice, and not the other way around; the engagement of multiple sources of inspiration, including natural geometries, structural analysis and architectural history; the support of each student’s individual intuitive interpretations of the program; the evaluation of the experiential qualities of designs, as well as their appropriateness; all culminating in place-specific, regionally, materially, socially, culturally and ecologically appropriate and sustainable designs that were understood to be an integral part of, and contribution to, a larger disciplinary history.
Today both the profession and the schools are increasingly dominated by the pursuit of a universal self-generating formalism, digitally enabled and parametrically determined, intentionally disengaged from regional material culture, landform, climate and the particular qualities of place, and emphasizing surface pattern-making over experiential place-making. It can be argued that current international formalism is simply the most recent variation of the cyclically recurring universal stylistic formulas, from the Beaux-Arts, to the International Style, to today’s digitally-generated surface manipulations. David Van Zanten has characterized these kinds of uniformly interpreted design formulas as the “art of command,” where predetermined formal parameters are applied without regard to the qualities of material, context, climate, and program. Van Zanten contrasts the “art of command” to the “art of nurture”—practiced by both Wright and Kahn—which is concerned with doing what fits into pre-existing conditions and what is appropriate as regards the qualities of material, context, climate, and program.[37]
Late in life, Kahn, who taught continuously from 1947 until his death in 1974, summarized his pedagogical method by stating, “I teach appropriateness. I don’t teach anything else.”[38] Today such an approach as that developed at the School of Design in the period examined here may serve as a model for contemporary architectural education in search of the appropriate.