history

Oak trees provide greenery and shade at an elementary school and along a farm-to-market road in League City, examples of the civic-mindedness of the late Lynn Gripon ’49, a former Texas A&M University landscape architecture student who passed away in 2000.

Author, curator and Rice University art history lecturer Yasufumi Nakamori will present "Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture" at the Department of Architecture's Spring 2012 Lecture Series at 5:30 p.m. April 2 in Preston Geren Auditorium.

Visitors to Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, France, can once again visit a cliffside monument honoring the World War II heroism of U.S. Army Rangers, led by a future Texas A&M president, following a $6 million site restoration based on information gathered by the university’s Center for Heritage Conservation.

An exhibition retracing a landmark 1972 New York Museum of Modern Art exhibit of Italian design co-curated by Peter Lang, associate professor of architecture, was lauded as one of the world’s 2011 cultural highlights.

Texas A&M’s celebration of Black History Month began Feb. 1 with an exhibit of the acclaimed “Torchbearers” series of portraits by Robert Schiffhauer, associate professor of architecture, at the Langford Architecture Center’s Wright Gallery.

James R. Thompson ’68, an outstanding alumnus of Texas A&M’s College of Architecture, shares a journey of discovery in the current issue of Texas Aggie magazine that began when he bought an Aggie Ring at a Waco auction house in 2008.

A new book co-edited by Kevin Glowacki, assistant professor of architecture, is deepening the understanding of ancient houses and household activities in the Greek island of Crete. Glowacki and collaborator Natalla Vogelkoff-Brogan, of Athens, Greece, also penned an introductory chapter.

Gene Summers FAIA, who left his design imprint on some of the world’s most recognizable Modern landmarks, a protégé of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and an outstanding alumnus of Texas A&M’s College of Architecture, died Dec. 12 in a California hospital from liver cancer.

The renovation of Texas A&M’s historic YMCA building, overseen by Nancy McCoy ’81, FAIA, an outstanding alumna of the College of Architecture, is mostly complete. McCoy, a founding principal at Quimby McCoy Preservation Architecture, LLP, is an award-winning preservation architect.

Preston Bolton ’41, an outstanding alumnus of Texas A&M’s College of Architecture and a member of the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows, passed away Nov. 2 in Houston. Funeral services are scheduled at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 7 at First Presbyterian Church, 5300 Main Street, in Houston.

The first comprehensive study of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sacred architecture is in a new book by Anat Geva, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M. Geva is also the first to introduce a theoretical framework illustrating the relationship between faith, form and building technology in sacred architecture.

Tom De Blasis, global design director for Nike soccer and a champion of design as a vehicle for solving some of the world’s intractable problems, presents “Nike: The Game Changer,” Sept. 19 in Preston Geren Auditorium. The lecture kicks off the Texas A&M Department of Architecture’s Fall 2011 Lecture Series.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and many other items from the college archives were on display Aug. 26, 2011 at an open house in the Technical Reference Center's extension on the fifth floor of Langford A.

A rare work in Texas A&M’s Forsyth Center Galleries by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a preeminent figure in U.S. art history, is receiving its first-ever scholarly attention from Stephen Caffey, assistant professor of architecture at Texas A&M. Caffey said it's an important yet little-known painting.

Members of the Ernest Langford family visited the Technical Reference Center June 27, 2011 to take a look at the center’s Langford collection, with more than 400 photographs and documents of one of the giants in the history of Texas A&M's architecture program.