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.
