The Historical Society of Moorestown’s current exhibit, “Malcolm Wells: One Man’s Crusade To Save The Environment Through Architecture,” is on view through Tuesday, May 14.
Wells, designer of the township’s former municipal complex, championed environmentally responsible design and was considered the father of modern Earth-sheltered architecture, according to the historical society’s website.
The exhibit focuses on Wells’ early conventional architecture, his innovative period and his futuristic ambitions. The society hosted William Whitaker – curator of the architectural archives for the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design – on April 29 for a talk at the township library. His presentation, “Of Dust and Death-Rays: A Reflection on Architecture and Change,” was part of the society’s New Jersey History Speaks Lecture Series.
Built heritage tells the story of culture in solid material terms and over time, a community’s relationship to its built environment changes. The rate of that change may be barely perceptible or can be more sudden. Whitaker explored the topic through an examination of work by Wells, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn and the structure of local landmarks.
“We’re in a school of design,” Whitaker said of a photo of the architectural archives’ reading room he described during his talk, “and we use the records that we hold to teach young architects and landscape architects about decision making in architecture, about how you shape an idea through drawing, through model-making (and) through decision making.”
Trained as an architect at Penn and the University of New Mexico, Whitaker has worked for more than 20 years documenting and interpreting the collections of the archives, most notably the work of Kahn and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and the partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, according to his biography.
He has organized and co-curated more than 30 exhibits and co-authored “The Houses of Louis I. Kahn” (Yale University Press 2013), with George Marcus, the first comprehensive study of the architect’s house designs. Whitaker is also a co-editor of “Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), with Kurt Helfrich.
“The work that architects and landscape architects do generally happens in a studio with walls around you, but they’re building something out in the world …,” Whitaker explained. ” … I want I want to explain this idea of architectural change, particularly between 1945 and about 1980, in a period which Malcolm Wells was doing work in the region, and I will talk about the community along an area that I know (as) City Avenue in Philadelphia, City Line Avenue.
“But I will also take us to this side of the river and explore that area, Cherry Hill,” he added. There’s a lot in common between those two communities, and this is really a way of understanding forces that were changing architecture and reshaping the environment around us.”
The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania preserves the works of more than 400 designers from the 17th century to the present. Established in the fall of 1978, the archives gained an international reputation initially through the Louis I. Kahn Collection, whose resources include all drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, and project files from Kahn’s office, according to the university’s website.
The research collections in the archives are available to faculty, students, and scholars for independent study as well as to support teaching at the university.
“We have lots of ideas that are explored and then put aside and maybe not returned to,” Whitaker noted. “We can call those dead ends, accidents, rejected ideas … For us, it’s more than just documenting the built environment out of particular reason. It’s more expansive, it’s kind of what goes on in the head of an individual, and then in the collaboration, people (are) working together.
“It’s never just one individual doing architecture or landscape architecture,” he added, “there’s a lot of people involved, so it’s embracing that larger context.”
