Last year, on a November evening underneath the copper dome of the Massachusetts State House, Eric Daum stood before an audience and gave a speech christened with two words as profound as they were brief:
“Why Classical?”
Daum’s address was a preface to the fourth annual Bulfinch Awards, an occasion to praise the best traditional design projects in New England. It was also a chance to explain why classical architecture matters in the 21st century. “There are connections within our entire culture rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity,” says Daum, an architect with Amesbury’s Merrimack Design Associates, of the speech today. “Classical architecture is just one of them.” And, he argues, just as the literature of Plato and Aristotle continues to be relevant in the present, so do the design traditions deriving from the cradle of Western civilization.
That belief is a core part of the ethos behind the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Art & Architecture (ICAA), the organization behind the Bulfinch Awards. Founded by architects who eschewed flavor-of-the-month Modernism in favor of Classicism’s enduring principles of symmetry, hierarchy, and proportion, the group has been a steward of pre-20th-century design traditions throughout six states for nearly a decade. Now, ICAA New England continues to make great strides toward ensuring the region’s rich vernacular architecture carries on.
The roots of the ICAA New England chapter trace back to the 1970s and 1980s, a time when an architect’s education focused almost entirely on Modernism. To be a budding architect with an interest in traditional design was to go against the grain, says Sheldon Kostelecky, interim president of ICAA New England and a Lexington-based architect. “We had to spend our own time and money buying books, traveling, sketching, going to lectures, and basically teaching ourselves how to correctly design traditional architecture.” In fact, while enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the early 1980s, Daum—ICAA New England’s past president and current treasurer—says that he was one of only a handful of students to submit a classical building design for his thesis project in four decades.
Kostelecky and Daum were new Classicists, an emerging generation who saw Modern and Postmodern designs as trendy. By contrast, Federal, Greek Revival, Jeffersonian, and other traditional styles had already proven their timelessness. “Those historical precedents are there for a reason: They last,” Kostelecky says. By the late 1980s, this dispersed interest in classical design among architects became a groundswell. Professor Thomas Gordon Smith turned the curriculum at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture into the first devoted to a traditional, Beaux Arts–style education. Then, in 1991, the Institute of Classical Architecture—the precursor to the ICAA—was established in New York City, a nonprofit fostering this nascent community through conferences, lectures, classes, and publications. Kostelecky and Daum both joined the organization, and by the mid-1990s, each had found his way to the Boston area.
In 2002, the Institute of Classical Architecture merged with 44-year-old Classical America to form the ICAA, and the group spawned chapters around the country. Kostelecky decided to start a local affiliate of the ICAA, one that would promote New England’s centuries-old heritage of traditional vernacular architecture. Just as importantly, Daum says, the region’s architects were producing pedestrian, uninspired attempts at traditional design and stood to benefit from a more rigorous, academic approach. “We wanted people to be aware that there was an opportunity to achieve a greater level of authenticity in the work they were doing,” Daum says.
Kostelecky, Daum, and a small group of like-minded Boston-area designers founded the ICAA New England in July 2005 with the aim of promoting and appreciating Classical architecture and much more: landscape architecture, urban design, interior design, “anything within the realm of traditional design,” Kostelecky says. Daum served as the inaugural president of the organization (while Kostelecky embarked on a postgraduate program at Notre Dame). In 2009, architect John Margolis succeeded Daum, and after Margolis’s departure earlier this year, Kostelecky stepped in as interim president, a post he’ll hold until January.
Today, the New England chapter is one of 15 regional chapters and counts exactly 100 members in its ranks—architecture firms, builders, interior designers, artisans, and members of the general public interested in crafting traditional-style structures with competence and authenticity. It’s a tight-knit group, a closeness born of scarcity. “Maybe one or two percent of architects do [traditional design],” says Kostelecky, “so we’re the mavericks now.”
The early years saw the New England chapter organizing tours of Bay State Road in Boston, Newburyport, New Haven, and other locales throughout New England; workshops and classes, including a recurring partnership with the Boston Architectural College (BAC), where a number of ICAA New England board members (including Kostelecky and Daum) have taught semester-long classes; lectures from authors of classical architecture books; and other initiatives. Education remains the core of the ICAA New England chapter, whether in the form of a lecture, a skills workshop, or an event.
And beginning in September, new ground will be broken: Thanks to a partnership among ICAA New England, its national progenitor, and the BAC, a series of online continuing education classes in traditional design will be offered. Three six-week courses are offered to start—Introduction to Classical Architecture, Understanding the Classical Orders & Moldings, and Geometry for the Practitioner—and credits can be applied toward the national ICAA’s Certificate of Classical Architecture. “This is a major component of our efforts to expand educational opportunities for students nationwide,” Kostelecky says.
It’s important to note that the ICAA New England chapter’s celebration of classicism doesn’t translate to anti-Modernism. Instead, Kostelecky says, it’s a matter of Modern designers understanding the laws before breaking them. “It’s like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit: If you do it out of ignorance, you’re wrong,” Kostelecky says. “But if you do it because you’re making a statement, then it’s okay.”
Along with cultivating a legion of savvy classical designers, the ICAA New England chapter honors the best among them at the Bulfinch Awards, its annual accolades devoted to the region’s top traditional design projects across 11 categories. Named for Charles Bulfinch, this year’s ceremony—the fifth so far—is scheduled for November 12. “The idea behind the Bulfinch Awards is to not only celebrate the projects themselves,” Kostelecky says, “but to also celebrate the people behind them—the architecture firms, the design firms, the artisans and craftsmen—and to let the general public know that there are folks out there doing this high-quality work.”
And last year, it was an opportunity for the ICAA New England to spell out exactly why Classicism still matters. Daum concluded his speech with a distinction: “Given the choice between Modernism on one hand, the machine-aged architecture of constantly changing fashion enabled by technology,” Daum said, “and Classicism on the other, the architecture of humanism, reason, and democracy, enabled by craft and expressing the human spirit…we choose the Classical. We choose the human.”
That sentiment—like the 18th-century Federal-style building in which it was delivered— still stands the test of time. classicist-ne.org