One spent part of the summer in Lebanon working for an organization started by Britain's Prince Charles. Another is designing the campus for a new university in Jordan.
Faculty from Notre Dame's School of Architecture are making a name for themselves in an unlikely place: the Middle East.
Thomas Gordon Smith, chairman of the ND architecture school, has been asked to design the proposed American University of the Jordan, whose name refers to the river, not the country, although it's being planned for 500 acres of Jordanian desert donated by Jordan's King Hussein.
Smith was invited to participate in the project by William Beam, an advertising and marketing executive in Louisville, Kentucky. Beam's company is providing paid staff for the project, which is the dream of Zahi Masri, a heart surgeon born in Palestine who has been living in Louisville for more than 30 years. Masri envisions the University, which would feature American faculty and all classes taught in English, as promoting peace in the Middle East by providing a place where people of different backgrounds could interact. Smith's work came to the attention of Beam partly because Beam's son, Jeffrey, is a Notre Dame architecture student.
So far Smith's involvement in the project has been entirely in a voluntary capacity. A member of the project's board of directors, he's begun sketching designs for buildings that would draw on the history of the region. He says he's hopeful that his efforts will evolve into a professional commission once the more than $200 million needed to construct the university is raised.
Meanwhile, at the request of Charles, heir to the British throne, ND architecture professor Samir Younes led a group of students from Notre Dame and other schools around the world on a field trip of sorts to Lebanon this past summer. One of the many classically inclined members of the ND architecture faculty (including Smith), Younes became acquainted with the Prince of Wales in the late 1980s when he was teaching at Catholic University in Washington. Younes, who also had his own architecture firm in Northern Virginia, wrote the prince a letter complimenting him on the book he'd just written celebrating Britain's architectural heritage, Visions of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture.Younes encouraged the prince to establish a school of architecture to carry on those traditions.
That suggestion turned into the Prince of Wales's Institute for Architecture, which for the past three years has organized month-long summer study excursions. During the trips a group of students, dubbed a task force, inspects a city neighborhood in transition and talks with people living and working in the area. They then draw up plans for potential redevelopment.
Younes says a representative of Prince Charles asked him to lead this year's task force to Beirut, the country where Younes lived until he was 18. The group that made the trip comprised four faculty members, including fellow Notre Dame architecture professor Norman Crowe, and 22 students (four from Notre Dame) representing 10 countries.
In Lebanon the team visited Beirut briefly then spent three weeks in the 6,000-year-old city of Sidon. There, expanding on Younes' preliminary designs, students drew up plans for structures employing classical architecture and traditional materials. The envisioned city was also rendered in a scale model so large that one could actually walk the streets.
Younes says the team's master plan for long-term redevelopment of Sidon was favorably received by the ministers and members of parliament to which it was presented.
Although Prince Charles didn't stop by, he did call, Younes says, and he's expected to made an appearance next summer when Younes leads a task force to Tripoli, Lebanon.