Summer programs offered through the School of Architecture offer unique learning opportunities for students to apply what they are learning to a real world context. Recent foreign studies programs have taken place in China, Japan, Cuba, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Programs offered in 2009 include a four-week studio intended to familiarize Notre Dame Architecture students with the city of Bath, England and its impressive 18th-century fabric and the urban developments it subsequently inspired. Students extracted models from these for contemporary adaptation.
BATH SUMMER STUDIO 2009
Trip photos, projects and final presentation
Video encapsulation
Project gallery
The principal objective of this special summer studio was to familiarize the academic team with the architecture of the city of Bath in England, particularly its impressive 18th century fabric and the urban developments that it subsequently inspired, and to extract models from these for contemporary adaptation. Bath’s historic neighborhoods are renowned for the quality and consistency of their architectural detail, their comfortable urban scale, and especially their ingenious integration of public and private functions, which has allowed them to successfully accommodate the needs of modern life, including private means of transportation. While becoming familiar with the city’s unique architectural character, students were challenged to further develop the local urban and building types in the design of a masterplan for a central area along the River Avon.
Recent proposals around Bath have faced public opposition in part because of their grounding in post-War industrial ideology and their espousal of a reductivist ‘machine aesthetic’. Such an approach rejects essential architectural features like moldings, cornices, columns and pilasters, classical ordering systems, etc., as well as the solid load-bearing constructional techniques out of which these forms developed. For this reason, and despite some exceptional recent interventions, many new buildings in Bath have been incapable, at the most fundamental level, of integrating with the historic city’s admirable classical and traditional architecture. While developing inventive, individualized design solutions (especially with regard to public buildings), the Notre Dame team chose instead to keep closely to the established local vocabulary of forms, urban and building types, range of building expressions, degree of articulation, and constructional techniques that make Bath unique and deserving of its World Heritage status.
While studying Bath, in the first of its three weeks in session the team also toured London, Richmond and Oxford, and visited the historic sites of Prior Park and Chiswick House. In the tours, emphasis was placed on Georgian urban strategies, in particular the constitution of the typical 18th century urban block, which locates carriage houses along internal mews or secondary streets, providing an additional scale of residential options and a buffer for private gardens. This type of urban block was subsequently adapted in American cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, and still serves as the essential structuring device in the layout of new traditional developments in the U.S., especially those realized by members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU).
Until recently, the area chosen for the master-plan effort, known locally as the Western Riverside quarter, was the site of local gas works and heavy industry. Taking the view that urban growth ought to occur incrementally - neighborhood by neighborhood - and noting that the site is ideally suited for a traditional, mixed use neighborhood development (TND), the team first determined an appropriate pattern of streets and public spaces (emphasizing the riverfront and views), assigned locations for necessary and other useful new public buildings, specified commercial frontages along certain streets according to anticipated public activity, and subdivided the resulting urban blocks in accordance with the prototypical Georgian block, while allowing for more comfortably scaled residential units.
The Georgian terrace house, more familiarly known as a row house in America, was chosen as the basic residential unit (with semi-basements where permitted by flooding considerations), both for its elegant simplicity and because it allows maximum unit sub-divisions in response to changing socio-economic circumstances. Carriage houses significantly increased residential unit counts and, together with on-street parking spaces and some undercroft parking (doubling as outlet for anticipated flooding of the River Avon), easily met recommended parking requirements for this area. Buildings were limited to three stories plus attic (with basements where possible), to match the typical roof heights of historic Bath. Architectural expressions ranged according to the traditional model from simple vernacular (with occasional classical references) for residential and commercial buildings, to dignified classical compositions for public edifices.
The team worked initially in a classroom near Green Park, and produced its final watercolor renderings at a studio space in Widcombe, a short walk south of the Bath Spa Rail Station. Final drawings were reviewed on June 8th at the Salvation Army Hall by a panel of distinguished British architects and academics, and were then presented in a public forum in the same Hall, in the presence of the Chairman of Bath and North East Somerset Council, and the Mayor of Bath. The forum, which was billed Bath TND: Traditional Neighborhood Design for a Sustainable Future, commenced with brief talks by Professors Richard Economakis and Samantha Salden outlining the broader philosophy behind the proposal, and continued with a student presentation of the scheme, led by T.A. Kalinda Brown. The renderings were arranged to emphasize the focus on urban and architectural typology, beginning with the masterplan and views, continuing with typical blocks, streets and squares, and ending with residential, commercial and public buildings. The public response was highly favorable and welcoming, and ended with a warm ovation. An invitation was graciously extended by the Mayor to attend a special reception at the Guildhall (town hall) the following day. The Bath Summer Studio concluded with a public exhibition of the work at the Bath Society Hall, in Green Park Station.
With its admirable architectural qualities, urban scale, seamless integration of functions, typological clarity and flexibility, the historic city of Bath offers itself as a model for future urban growth that merits the full attention of the architectural profession. The Notre Dame project for the Western Riverside area embraces this model, intending to be understood not as a mere exercise in familiarization with the local historical architecture, but rather as a vision for future growth that recognizes established urban types and appreciates traditional forms as elements of living architectural languages that adjust to changing needs and lifestyles, embody genuine notions of sustainability, and retain their relevance as expressions of natural, durable constructional techniques. The proposal seeks to inspire architects and planners to look beyond the industrial paradigm promoted by modernist ideology, to recognize that modernism is not the only option for urban growth and architectural expression available today, and to appreciate the wisdom and practicability of the well-tested traditional model, to which Bath owes its unsurpassed charm and world-wide fame.
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University of Notre Dame
Bath Summer Studio 2009
Danny Aijian
T.A. Kalinda Brown
Iva Dokonal
Prof. Richard Economakis
Aaron Helfand
Bradford Houston
Emily Jaquay
Cindy Michel
Amanda Miller
Prof. Samantha Salden
Aimee Sunny
Clayton Vance