Tag Archive for: architecture
Distinguished Speaker: Clemson’s Spring Lecture Series Includes Frank Harmon
Frank Harmon, FAIA | Photo by Will Harmon
When Clemson University’s School of Architecture announced its 2024 Spring Lecture Series recently, Raleigh-based architect, author, and educator Frank Harmon, FAIA, appeared as one of the distinguished speakers. He will address participants in the Clemson Design Center, which is located in the Cigar Factory on East Bay in Charleston, SC, on April 3 at 12:30 p.m.
The Series’ theme is “The Third Place,” referring to spaces for socialization separate from the usual environments of home and work, such as churches, community centers, neighborhood bars, and coffee shops. It will examine how the disruption of social, political, and economic structure is reframing society’s relationships with traditional third places.
The series will also discuss the intersection of identity, cultural expression, and social interaction, along with the impact gentrification, displacement, and creative production have on communities.
Frank Harmon has been a professor of architecture at the NC State University College of Design for three decades. He has also taught at the Architectural Association in London and served as a visiting critic at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Auburn University’s Rural Studio.
Clemson’s School of Architecture Spring Lecture Series will be streamed on Zoom. The lectures are free and open to the public. For details, including how to attend via Zoom, CLICK HERE.
Frank Harmon, his buildings and principles, are on display now in the exhibition “A SOUTH FORTY: Contemporary Architecture and Design in the American South” in Venice, Italy
“Across the architectural profession, Frank Harmon, FAIA, is the face of North Carolina architecture…[He] has brought to a national audience a glimpse of the unique character and architectural culture of his home state.”
Architect Jeffrey Lee, FAIA, wrote that assessment in his letter to nominate Frank for the 2013 NCAIA Gold Medal. This year, Frank and the work he produced in his former firm Frank Harmon Architect (he is now retired) are included in a special exhibition coinciding with the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale entitled “A SOUTH FORTY: Contemporary Architecture and Design in the American South.” The exhibition is installed in the Great Hall at Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy.
The Venice Biennale, Italian Società di Cultura la Biennale di Venezia, is an international art exhibition featuring architecture, visual arts, cinema, dance, music, and theater. It is held in the Castello district of Venice every two years during the summer. On the preview days, 25,000 artists, collectors, curators, museum directors, and journalists attend, followed by 600,000 visitors in the months after.
The Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design at the University of Arkansas, along with the literary journal Oxford American and modus studio in Fayetteville, AR, organized A SOUTH FORTY “to provide an overview of the current vitality of contemporary architecture and design in the American South…” by looking at the work and principles of architects who practice in the region.”
The criteria for a regional architect’s work to be included in the exhibition reads like a brief narrative of Frank’s projects and the principles that guided him: “…place-based design, attentive to the necessities of climate, materials, labor, and purpose, but also attentive to overlooked or undervalued typologies, constituencies, and locales.”
Awakening
Frank credits his friend and mentor, the late Harwell Hamilton Harris, with his professional osmosis from a modernist architect to a modern regionalist architect who embraces the environmentally sustainable principle of designing houses and buildings based on the context, customs, climate, geology, geography, and topography in a particular region. Regionally appropriate structures use regionally practical materials and feature elements specific to climatic needs.
Harris moved to Raleigh from California in 1962 to teach at NC State University’s School of Design (now College of Design). According to Frank, Harwell taught his students that the most important assets of a region are “its free minds, its imagination, its stake in the future, its energy, and, last of all, its climate, its topography, and the particular kind of sticks and stones it has to build with.”
Frank, in turn, has shared this wisdom with his own architecture students at NC State (some are included in the Venice exhibition), with interns and staff in his former firm, and with fellow practitioners through multiple seminars at state, regional, and national AIA conventions.
From his book Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See — Frank’s sketch of an old barn in Deltaville, VA.
Along with Harwell Harris’s influence, Frank credits his study of vernacular architecture, especially old barns and farmhouses throughout the rural South, with his dedication to sustainable, regionally appropriate design. “I’ve learned more about architecture from studying old barns than I ever did in a classroom,” he tells his audiences.
A prime example of his regionally appropriate methodology is the multi-award-winning Iron Studio that Frank designed for the Penland School of Arts & Crafts in the North Carolina mountains in 2000. That project was featured in Architectural Record in 2014 and is showcased in A SOUTH FORTY.
The Venice Biennale runs through November 21. For more information, click here.
To see a full gallery of Frank’s work, visit www.frankharmon.com.
Webinar Proposal + CE Credits: “Native Places – Drawing as a Way to See” with Frank Harmon, FAIA
“I find my sense of hope and possibility renewed in these simple, evocative drawings and the wisdom that accompanies them.” – Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, AIA 2020 Gold Medalist
Celebrated architect and author Frank Harmon, FAIA wants to change the way we see. That’s why he started his online journal Native Places.org six years ago and, more recently, created his book, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See.
Frank now offers a webinar free of charge to AIA Chapters. The webinar is about drawing, writing, and the making of architecture. Its goal is to inspire architects by offering a sense of hope and possibility in the closely observed world outside our window.
“Frank Harmon FAIA delighted our audience with inspired thinking while sharing easy tips to challenge the way we see the world.” — Scott Clowney, director of public programs, AIA Washington, D.C.
What, When & How
Through Zoom, BlueJeans, or another video conferencing platform, Frank presents a 40-minute illustrated talk from his home and gardens in Raleigh, North Carolina, followed by a lively question and answer session.
Dates will be scheduled to suit the Chapter’s schedule.
To book Frank’s “Native Places” talk for your Chapter,
contact his publicist, Kim Weiss, at blueplatepr@gmail.com,
or contact Frank directly: frank@frankharmon.com.
“And now for a few minutes with Frank Harmon…”
FRANK HARMON, FAIA (photo by William Morgan)
Beginning May 4th at 3 p.m., Frank Harmon, FAIA, will become a recurring guest on US Modernist Radio: Architecture You Love, the popular podcast hosted by George Smart and Frank King.
Once a month, Smart will introduce the Raleigh architect/author with the tagline “And now for a few minutes with Frank Harmon.” Frank will then read excerpts from his book Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See.
“US Modernist Radio is a bright spot in my day,” Frank said. “What a wonderful way to keep in touch with architects everywhere.
About the Podcast:
George Smart, founder and president of the non-profit organization NC Modernist Houses, created US Modernist Radio to appeal to midcentury modern design enthusiasts. In July 2019, it was included in Dwell magazine’s “Top 9 Design and Architecture Podcasts To Tune Into.”
US Modernist Radio “is both entertaining but informative, and hosts George Smart and Frank King spend each episode interviewing architects, designers, historians, preservationists, advocacy experts, museum curators, homeowners, and others—just about anyone who “owns, creates, dreams about, preserves, loves, and hates Modernist architecture, the most exciting and controversial buildings in the world.” Click here to listen via an assortment of apps. The live shows load at 3 p.m.
For more information on Frank and Native Places, visit nativeplacesthebook.com.
WALTER: “Home Grown – Frank Harmon’s Garden”
Frank Harmon watches his garden fill with plantings—and memories
by Frank Harmon for WALTER magazine | illustration by Judy Harmon
Every spring a lawn care company tosses a flyer over my garden gate. They promise to make my lawn perfect by using herbicides and pesticides. But I think I’ll keep the lawn just as it is, with scatterings of chickweed, withered starflower stems, and the occasional snakeskin.
I live in a small pink stucco house near N.C. State University. My wife Judy and I designed the house and garden in 1989. We broke ground on Valentine’s Day and moved in a year later. Then we planted the lawn.
We’d put down roots. READ MORE…
Scuppernong Books in Greensboro Welcomes Native Son Frank Harmon and ‘Native Places’ on January 27
FRANK HARMON (PHOTO BY CHRISTINE SIMELOFF)
Multi-award-winning architect Frank Harmon, FAIA, grew up in the 1950s on Rolling Road in Greensboro. In the introduction to his new critically acclaimed book Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See, Harmon relates that he “discovered reading in the Greensboro Public Library” and that he “learned most of what I needed to know to be an architect” playing by his favorite stream, which “ran between rocky banks in East Greenway Park.”
A professor in the NC State University College of Design as well as a practicing architect, Frank Harmon has called Raleigh home for many decades. But on Sunday, January 27, he will return to his hometown when Scuppernong Books hosts a special book-signing event for Native Places and its native son. Free and open to the public, the book-signing event will begin at 3 pm.
Van Gogh’s window
Delight in Ordinary Places:
Published by ORO Editions, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See is a collection of 64 of Harmon’s watercolor sketches paired with brief essays he’s written about architecture, nature, and everyday objects and places that first appeared on his popular online journal NativePlaces.org. The sketches convey the delight he finds in ordinary places. The short essays, inspired by the sketches, offer his fresh interpretations of what most people take for granted.
Harmon’s goal for Native Places is, in fact, “to transform the way we see,” he says, and to promote his belief that hand drawing offers “an opportunity to develop a natural grace in the way we view the world and take part in it.” He will explain both concepts in his presentation.
What others are saying about Native Places:
In a letter to the Harmon, poet, author, and former North Carolina poet laureate Fred Chappell wrote, “Native Places…has afforded me happy pleasures, different from any that I have before derived from a book. It is unusual in many ways, one of which is that it defies strict classification. It is a sketchbook, a memoir, travel journal, aesthetic experiment, a collection of small familiar essays, and maybe in some respects even a manifesto.”
Mike Welton, the architecture critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, calls Harmon’s book “delightful” and suggests that it is “destined to change how we see this world.”
Tom Kundig, FAIA, of Olsen Kundig Architects in Seattle, WA, praises Harmon and his book for “reminding us in brilliant, thoughtful, quiet meditation our unbelievable luck to be alive and to think. A masterful legacy on all levels.”
Scuppernong Books is located at 304 South Elm Street. For more information: www.scuppernongbooks.coim (336-763-1919).
For more details on Frank Harmon and Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See, visit the book’s website (nativeplacesthebook.com) and Facebook page.
Charleston’s Blue Bicycle Books Hosts Architect/Author Frank Harmon and ‘Native Places’ on January 17.
Architect and author Frank Harmon, FAIA, who designed the modern, award-winning Sunday School addition to the historic Circular Congregational Church in Charleston and the “Seven Sisters” residence on St. Helena Island, will present his new, critically acclaimed book Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See when Blue Bicycle Books hosts a book-signing event on Thursday, January 17, beginning at 5 p.m.
Free and open to the public, the event will begin with an introduction of the Raleigh, NC-based author by South Carolina architect Whitney Powers. Harmon will then give a presentation about his book and his passion for hand sketching. After a Q&A with the audience, he will sign copies of Native Places, which will be available for purchase in the store.
Delight in Ordinary Places: Published by ORO Editions, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See is a collection of 64 of Harmon’s watercolor sketches paired with brief essays he’s written about architecture, everyday objects and sites, and nature that first appeared on his internationally popular blog NativePlaces.org. The sketches convey the delight he finds in ordinary places. The short essays, inspired by the sketches, offer his fresh interpretations of what most people take for granted.
Harmon’s goal for Native Places is, in fact, “to transform the way we see,” he says, and to promote his belief that hand drawing offers “an opportunity to develop a natural grace in the way we view the world and take part in it.” He will explain both concepts in his presentation.
What others are saying about Native Places: In his review of the book, Charles Linn, FAIA, architect, writer, and former deputy editor of Architectural Record, wrote, “For those who love drawing, seek enlightenment and inspiration from the things they may pass by every day, and perhaps want to capture them in their own sketchbooks, I give Native Places my highest recommendation.” (Linn also helped Harmon select and organize the sketch-essay pairs for the book.)
Mike Welton, architecture critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, calls Harmon’s book “delightful” and suggests that it is “destined to change how we see this world.”
Tom Kundig, FAIA, of Olsen Kundig Architects in Seattle, WA, praises Harmon and his book for “reminding us in brilliant, thoughtful, quiet meditation our unbelievable luck to be alive and to think. A masterful legacy on all levels.”
Owned and operated by Jonathan Sanchez, Blue Bicycle Books is located at 420 King Street, Charleston, SC 29403 (843.722.2666); bluebicyclebooks.com.
For more details on Frank Harmon and Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See, visit the book’s website (nativeplacesthebook.com) and Facebook page.