Manifesting Moments in Time

New Orleans, my hometown, made me want to be an architect. Growing up, I spent countless hours drawing the buildings, balconies, and ornate ironwork of the French Quarter. When I started my formal studies at Tulane, I came to understand that New Orleans’ diverse and distinct buildings, as much as I loved them, belonged to a specific moment in time. They were part of the city’s history, and I didn’t want to just imitate them. It felt essential, however, to learn from them. So I dedicated my thesis to investigating the city’s vernacular housing to find a deeper understanding of that which went beyond historicism or style and could be used to develop an architecture that belonged to my moment in time; not just an architecture that resonated with me personally, but with twentieth-century New Orleans.

That line of inquiry eventually led me to the work of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Aldo Rossi, whose Teatro del Mondo had captured my imagination. In 1980, I enrolled in the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, specifically to take an advanced design workshop with him. I had the good fortune to not only study with Aldo that year but to work with him soon after on a design competition in Milan. The job was supposed to last a few weeks, but a few weeks turned into a few years, and a few years turned into a professional partnership that lasted more than a decade. Working with Aldo was the most profound educational experience of my life. I learned to see in new ways, design with fresh methods, and trust my architectural instincts.

When Aldo died in 1997, it didn’t feel right to continue the firm without him. After completing our unfinished projects, including the Scholastic Building in SoHo, I closed Studio di Architettura and opened my own practice in New York City. Moving forward, it seemed apt to reformulate what I had learned into something relevant to my own experience and the time and place I was practising: the American city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We developed our own understanding of context and methods of interpreting historical architecture — methods based less on analysing building types and architectural forms that define a street, neighbourhood or city and more on the ideas that inspired the forms and the historical forces that made them possible.