SUMMER: A Propitious Absence of Rest

A message from our President, Paul Gunther

I am pleased to announce that the foremost educational priority of recent months–the planning and upcoming launch of the new trail-blazing Beaux-Arts Atelier for fall 2011–has advanced beyond our brightest expectations. Click here for a description of the program if you’ve yet to see it; the deadline just passed June 30.

Despite a relatively rapid turn-around for this inaugural Class of 2012, this first-ever, year-long design atelier framed by our unique curriculum and regular instructors has received a diverse and talented pool of worthy applicants from seven states. The admissions committee under the watch of Atelier head, Richard Cameron, as coordinated by Registrar, Anne Lawson, has made their admission decisions along with tuition assistance awards requested as resources allow. More details will be reported ahead but the goal of an initial student body of ten shall likely be exceeded. Such progress validates the formative impulse that took us down what so far seems truly the auspicious education pathway we aimed for. Your steadfast support makes it possible.

Special thanks go to Richard Driehaus and his Chicago colleagues for bringing the promise of the Richard H. Driehaus Scholars program to bear from the outset with essential prospective tuition assistance for those whose need coincided with the merits of the according application and training to date. It is a magnificent ten-year challenge to one and all.

I am pleased too to acknowledge Taconic Builders for announcing the three-year Taconic Scholars tuition award reserved each year for one outstanding candidate who may signal special interest in pursuing a career in the building arts per se including the commission of complementary craft excellence. Rigorous classical training offers promise in so many inter-related ways. The One West 54th Street Foundation is another precious source of tuition assistance as they have now been for nearly a decade. We are exploring possible assistance from other sources and welcome contact from any and all interested in stepping forward to do so in the name each donor specifies.

Please share our joy meanwhile on this most vital institutional front.

I hope in the summer months you will take advantage of any and all chapter offerings and when in New York make a point to visit the trail-blazing exhibition The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at East 104th Street; ICAA is co-sponsor.

A second Institute-related show called The Classical Ideal has just opened in the midtown galleries of our friends at Gensler as conceived by a team of volunteers including Andy Taylor, Briana Miller, and Steve Bass, along with Ryan Greene and Justine Kalb from the staff and the students of the Grand Central Academy of Art. Click here to learn more about The Classical Ideal including procedures for scheduling visits. This exhibition features recent student and instructor work in the context of the historic tools and guiding principles used in our classrooms. We will be posting a virtual tour online as soon as completed. This podcast will join the growing array of explanatory downloadable ones we have produced to tell our story and announce current offerings at www.classicist.org.

The Classicist No 9 is on track for late fall publication with its illustrated peer-reviewed section now a critical part of its overall multifarious purpose serving several like-minded constituents in advancing awareness and individual academic careers.  Meanwhile the fifth annual Hudson River Painting Fellowships are well under way in the fabled valley of that great cradle of American landscape painting as sustained by our Grand Central Academy of Art and the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund.

If you are in New York, Wednesday, July 13 at 6 PM make sure to attend the final 2011 Fellows' Summer Lecture Series sponsored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Andrew V. Giambertone & Associates Architects PC. This final installment of a series concentrating on the centennial of the New York Public Library features peerless architectural historian Francis Morrone. He will address the Henry Hope Reed volume that he and photographer Anne Day (with a special grant from the Arthur Ross Foundation) have fully revised with condign care concerning the Fifth Avenue landmark’s design blueprint and the fine rebirth of its decoration both inside and out. It is the latest addition to our Classical America Series on Art and Architecture, along (from Dover) with re-publication of two essential studio resources: The Secrets of Architectural Composition by Nathaniel Cortlandt Curtis and the Secrets of Good Design for Artists, Artisans and Crafters of Burl N. Osburn. Again details are on the Web site and at the Classicist Bookshop if you’ve missed the various e-campaigns on this as with all ICAA initiatives. (If that’s the case, let us know so we can set it straight)

I would like to extend a special welcome to our friends and colleagues in the United Kingdom with advent of a new alliance between the ICAA and TAG, the Traditional Architecture Group, a Linked Society of the Royal Institute of British Architects. We look forward to sharing information and resources in more formal tribute to a long sharing of mission intent. I can report too that a fifteenth Institute Chapter is now emerging in Salt Lake City to be called the Utah Chapter as direct spawn of the Rocky Mountain Chapter, whose interstate embrace set the stage for such local, community-driven evolution. Once official we will send out immediate word.

In sum as always, there’s a lot going on. Summer dog days seem for better or worse a distant memory in the world of contemporary classicism.