Christine G.H. Franck's posterous

Christine G.H. Franck's posterous

Christine Franck  //  is a designer, author and educator with a practice focusing on custom residential design and decoration. A leader in education, she served as the first executive director of the ICAA and has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her published work includes the Winterthur's Traditional American Rooms, Jose M. Allegue: Legacy of a Builder, and the forthcoming ICAA's Handbook of Classical Architecture.

Archive for

January 2012

Jan 31 / 5:26am

The Italianate Style in America

            Mid-nineteenth Century America was a time of great energy and change.  Cities grew, immigration soared, railroads expanded, and new building technologies emerged.  To meet the housing needs and tastes of our growing and increasingly diverse populace, architects designed houses in a multitude of styles.  Though widely varied, the Romantic Revival styles of this period all reflect Romantic and Picturesque sensibilities in their yearning for the security of the past to ameliorate the complexities of modern life and in their idealization of nature as an antidote to the city.

Italianate_image

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Jan 25 / 6:57am

THREE GLIMPSES OF THE INSTITUTE: ROME, NEW YORK, FLORIDA

[As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, I thought I would share with you a memoir I wrote for our tenth anniversary.]

 

ROME

Just before Rosabelli and I walked into the Piazza Navona I asked her to pause for a moment, knowing the thrill that she was about to experience for the first time. Then she walked into the Piazza and with awe she gasped at the beauty of the plashing fountains with their brilliant sunlit sculptures set off in front of the darkly towering San’Agnese in Agone.  Large tears welled up in her eyes as she breathed in a small part of what Rome offers an architect. It was Rosabelli’s first trip to Rome from her native Brazil and it was also the Institute’s inaugural Rome Architectural Drawing Tour.

Rome-4

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