Larry Speck, FAIA, Awarded the 2011 Topaz Medallion

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Larry Speck, FAIA, the University of Texas-Austin architecture professor and former dean renowned for combining teaching and practice in ways that make architecture accessible and vital to a wide community of students, is the 2011 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education recipient.

A Higher Education

Writing

The narrow, politicized ivory towers of yesterday have been replaced by architecture schools that value diversity of thought and practice.

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Campus Architecture and Planning at The University of Texas

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THE CASS GILBERT ERA : 1910-1922 Cass Gilbert imagined a campus for UT that was grand and monumental. Even before actually receiving the commission, he produced ketches of a campus with powerful scale and clarity. His buildings conspired together to frame dominant vistas and define malls, courts, and plazas, creating memorable exterior spaces. In these images, the rural-feeling green lawns were…

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The Heroic Decades

Writing

From 1910 to 1942 the University of Texas at Austin built an extraordinary ensemble of buildings which demonstrated palpably to its public the ambitions of an emerging institution. In a relatively short period of time, the image of the University was transformed from a sleepy, small-town college housed in a hodgepodge of mismatched buildings into a powerful, sophisticated institution whose campus…

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The University of Texas: Vision and Ambition

Writing

During his thirteen-year tenure as campus architect, from 1909 to 1922, Cass Gilbert made a seminal contribution to the University of Texas that would have a profound and far-reaching impact on the development of that institution. From his very earliest sketches, Gilbert portrayed an image of the university that was far more ambitious and sophisticated than had been imagined previously. In his…

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