A Foundation
to Honor James Marston Fitch
In a world
where considerations of style have overshadowed those of substance and in
a profession whose loudest voices have promoted fashionable, rather than
meaningful, form in architecture, there has been one clear consistent voice
of reason concerned with the built world and the forces that shape it: the
voice of Dr. James Marston Fitch. In his role as educator, author, critic,
and design practitioner for more than five decades, Dr. Fitch has both pioneered
and continually defined and redefined the goals of a viable architecture,
old and new.
When American
architectural history was still in its infancy, Dr. Fitch's American Building:
Forces That Shape It (1948) helped to formulate the social and cultural
goals of his generation of architects and historians. When, in the decade
of the 1950's, modernism in architecture began to show signs of degenerating
into a sterile formalism, Dr. Fitch, then architectural editor at House
Beautiful, proposed an architecture based upon micro-climatic analysis,
a concept definitively presented in his American Building: The Environmental
Forces That Shape It (1972). This was reissued in 1999 by Oxford University
Press in a new edition, revised and updated with William Bobenhausen. As
"urban renewal" began to lay waste to America's vital city centers, Dr. Fitch
created the nation's first program in historic preservation at Columbia University
in 1964, its purpose to train young architects, planners, and historians
to preserve and restore the historic buildings and districts then threatened
with destruction. In turn, when preservationists, caught up in zealous fervor,
began to see cities as museums, it was Dr. Fitch who prodded his colleagues,
reminding them that the city is an ever changing, rather than static, organism.
In his seminal book, Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the
Built World (1982), Dr. Fitch reminds us that the built world is a functional
whole - one in which buildings of past and present must coexist as the foundation
for the future.
Dr. Fitch's
pioneering and provocative work - aimed at preserving America's built legacy
while making it a better place in which to live - is fully documented in
his formidable bibliography of some 250 books and articles printed both in
America and abroad. From his first published paper of 1933 - in which he
discusses the reasons why the forces of modernism were bound to triumph over
the historicizing eclecticism of the day - to his more recent arguments against
the vapidity of post-modernist theory, Dr. Fitch's voice has retained one
clear principle: architecture, indeed design in general, should respect those
forces inherent in nature while both serving and expressing those values
basic to modern American society.
Few people
have so fundamentally transformed the conscience of our profession. For his
reasoned yet compassionate work - his publications, his lectures, his key
positions in the American profession, his foreign missions (to India, Japan,
Ecuador, Italy, Lebanon, among others), Dr. Fitch received countless awards
and diplomas, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977-78), the AIA Gold Medal
(1976), the ACSA Distinguished Professorship (1986) and the Louise Dupont
Crowninshield Award (1985).
In order to
perpetuate the intellectually rigorous philosophy and activist energy with
which Dr. Fitch has imbued the field, in 1988 the partners of Beyer Blinder
Belle established the James Marston Fitch Charitable Trust (now Foundation).
The objectives of the foundation are to encourage and support the study of
the wide range of problems encompassed by the preservation and rehabilitation
of America's historic, architectural, and urbanistic heritage.
What the
Foundation Will Do
The James Marston
Fitch Charitable Trust will award research grants to mid-career professionals
who have an academic background, professional experience, and an established
identity in one or more of the following fields: historic preservation, architecture,
landscape architecture, urban design, environmental planning, architectural
history, the decorative arts. The Foundation will consider proposals for
the research and /or execution of the preservation-related projects in any
of these fields. The grants are not visualized as prizes for past accomplishments,
but rather to support innovative original research and creative design. The
grants are intended to promote the practice of historic preservation; the
project must demonstrate usefulness to practitioners and the results must
be in publishable form.
The Foundation
will award grants for research and projects which will pursue issues and
problems which are primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with America.
The Foundation endeavors to establish new links between the academic and
professional contingents in the field of historic preservation and to strengthen
the connections between theory and practice in conservation technology. Thus,
special attention will be paid to projects which have an educational potential
- to projects, that is, which in their execution will involve students and
beginning professionals in interdisciplinary work experience while enriching
the knowledge of more advanced professionals and their colleagues.
Mid-Career Grant Program
