Архитектор и педагог из Огайо Майкл Кэдвелл скончался в возрасте 73 лет

Ohio Architect and Educator Michael Cadwell Dies at 73 Michael Burditt Cadwell, longtime faculty member and former director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University, died at his home in Columbus, Ohio, on Sunday of pancreatic cancer. He was 73 years old. Best known for his slim but influential books, Strange Details and Small Buildings, Cadwell sought in his building, teaching, and writing to articulate the sensual poetry of built form. He was as adept with hammer and nails as he was with the written word, and across his work extolled the timeless beauty of simple forms thoughtfully assembled. In the quartet of diminutive buildings he constructed himself in rural New England in the 1980s, Cadwell conjured a distinctive lowercase monumentality that drew equally on the vernacular farm structures of his youth in rural Vermont and the abstracted archetypes favored at the time by James Stirling, whose teaching at the Yale School of Architecture strongly influenced his work. Strange Details (2017). Image courtesy MIT Press In Strange Details, published in 2007 in the MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series, Cadwell homed in on the tectonic idiosyncrasies he observed in the work of modern masters, finding uncanny liquidity in Carlo Scarpa’s masonry, transitory impermanence in Frank Lloyd Wright’s wood framing, elegant erasures in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s steel connections, and ethereal lightness in Louis Kahn’s concrete. The book was a hit. It was shortlisted in two categories for the RIBA Architects Book Award, remains a staple on university syllabi, and was deemed worthy of “required reading and re-reading in every school of architecture” by the historian Kenneth Frampton. “Michael’s writing always inspires me to look at architecture differently, more carefully,” observed Eric Höweler, professor of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “His poetic readings of ‘strange details’ remind us that architectural details are much more than how materials come together. . . . In Michael’s reading, they embody ways of looking and knowing the world.” Cadwell studied English literature at Williams College before enrolling in the architecture program at Yale in 1978. He worked briefly in the Vermont office of Turner Brooks as a student and upon graduation took a position in César Pelli’s office in New Haven, where he assisted with the design of the World Financial Center in New York City. In 1983 he completed Bridge-Box, the first of his small buildings, on a secluded site in Salisbury, Connecticut. The project consists of a simple timber truss that spans a small creek and is surmounted by a pine-clad box. Within, a plywood seat aligns with a square window framing a pastoral scene beyond. A ladder at the back of the seat pokes through another square opening overhead, through which visitors access two gently reclined banquettes that direct one’s view toward the sky. Looking for quick answers on architecture and design topics? Try Ask RECORD, our new smart AI search tool. Ask RECORD → Bridge-Box (1983), Salisbury, Connecticut. Photo courtesy Jane Murphy Three more small buildings followed soon after. In each, Cadwell produced carefully choreographed spaces in which occupants could momentarily withdraw from everyday life to reconnect with “the elemental rhythms of nature.” The withdrawal, however, was fleeting. “One’s meditations in seclusion inevitably affect one’s engagement with society at large,” he wrote. “While there is a retreat, there is also a return.” To underscore the transitory nature of his efforts, Cadwell designed a limited lifespan into his structures, building them with unfinished green lumber to hasten their inevitable slouch back into the landscape. These projects brought Cadwell national attention through publication in Perspecta 21 (1984) and RECORD (February 1984) and helped him to secure fellowships at the MacDowell, the Woodstock Art Colony, and the American Academy in Rome. But more important, they provided him with a “sensual education” to complement the intellectual training he had received at Williams and Yale. Through them, as he explained in Small Buildings, Cadwell demonstrated his belief that the word building was first and foremost a verb and was best understood not as a means to an end but rather a fundamental cultural activity. I met Mike in 1993, when he served as my third-year studio instructor at Ohio State. He and Jane Murphy, his partner in practice and in life, had joined the faculty a few years before and recently launched Columbus-based Cadwell & Murphy Architects. The pair completed a handful of accomplished residential projects in central Ohio including the Hayden-McCulloch addition, a masterful essay in light-frame wood screens that modulates the relationship between the home’s interior and the surrounding landscape. On occasion, Mike took students for illuminating visits to the job site, during which he explained, in the same measured cadence and relaxed tone he deployed in the classroom, the tectonic challenges and unexpected discoveries that arose through the process of construction. In the summer of 1996, Mike and I spent several weekends putting up a small building and fence in his and Jane’s backyard. Never intended for publication, he nevertheless imbued this tool shed with quiet nobility and unlikely refinement, employing simple forms, stout proportions, and a trellised rooftop hideout for their young son, Gus. Ever the generous teacher, Mike was patient with my sometimes-ham-handed carpentry and indulged me as I invented, then agonized over, a “corner problem” in the spacing of the fence slats, which we finally resolved over cold beers and sandwiches on the lawn. Small Buildings was released around that time by Princeton Architectural Press as Pamphlet Architecture 17. A few years later, Cadwell was off to the American Academy in Rome, where he began the research that would lead to Strange Details. In later writing, he examined the work of Steven Holl, José Oubrerie, Renzo Piano, and others, always beginning with an unusual quirk of tectonics or materiality and ending with a discovery earned through immersive experience and patient observation. Cadwell served as the head of Ohio State’s architecture section from 1997 to 2004 and again in 2010, then served as director of the Knowlton School, overseeing programs in architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning from 2011 to his retirement in 2020. Among his last acts as an administrator was to guide the school through the sudden shutdown and shift to online instruction forced by the pandemic. Unwilling to allow others to put themselves at risk, Cadwell insisted that he alone staff the check-in table to admit students and faculty, one by one, into the building to retrieve essential belongings prior to the lockdown. Photo courtesy the Knowlton School “Michael was an able administrator who strengthened the Knowlton School’s relationships with the College of Engineering, the university, and the professional community in Columbus and nationwide,” said Robert Livesey, who had recruited Cadwell to the school in 1989. “But his greatest legacy will be his infectious dedication to the power of making buildings well, which he passed on to several generations of students during his 31 years at the school.” Cadwell’s contributions to architectural education were recognized with several accolades from the university and, in 2015, with elevation to fellowship in the American Institute of Architects. In his life as in his work, Cadwell sought a richness of experience characterized by what he once referred to as “a unique combination of low comedy and high endeavor.” He was a skilled guitarist and enjoyed skiing, soccer, and triathlons, in which he continued to compete even as his illness took its toll. He will be fondly remembered by Jane, Gus, his four surviving brothers, and countless students and colleagues for whom he modeled a dedication to simple acts executed well and left in his writing a poetics of paying attention that will inform our field for generations to come. Looking for a reprint of this article? From high-res PDFs to custom plaques, order your copy today!