Dear Friends:
I had the pleasure to join
board chairman, Peter Pennoyer, and his predecessor, Anne Fairfax, along with
Institute trustees, Gary Brewer, Adele Chatfield -Taylor (a long-time member of
the Driehaus and Henry Hope Reed Prizes’ jury…) and Christine Franck at the 8th
annual Richard H. Driehaus Awards ceremony in Chicago last weekend. To learn
more visit our Web site or make inquiry at Notre Dame School of Architecture,
subject Driehaus Awards.
PWG
March 27, 2010
I am deeply grateful for this award, and I sincerely regret not
being able to be there to receive it in person. I am especially moved by the fact that it is given in the
name of Henry Hope Reed, with whom, as an unbearable young modernist, I used to
disagree about everything some fifty years ago. But it is I who have changed more than he. It is true that my devotion to classical
architecture, despite my love for Greek temples, will never be as pure, or
exclusive, as his - and modernism too is in my bones. Still, the horrors of the urban renewal of the 1960s made me
realize how destructive of the city modernist planning and practice was and so
set me on a course at least analogous to his own. It is in that spirit that I gratefully accept, and am
honored by, this Henry Hope Reed Award.