Lecture: Peter Waldman, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture, University of Virginia School of Architecture

Peter Waldman is both an architect and educator. In dialogue with Surveyors, Nomads and Lunatics they conjure up Spatial Tales of Origin through incremental Specifications for Construction. Waldman often recounts the lessons of mentors to articulate equally his appreciation of the coincidental lessons of both ancient seers as well as revolutionary explorers who inspired his brand of teaching as A Field Guide for Getting Lost (Solnit). He believes architecture frames, with the help of celestial sources and essential gravity, the flows of this changing world.

Peter Waldman is rumored to have quarried mica ever since his early childhood explorations of the wilderness of New York City more than six decades ago. He studied architecture from 1961-69, first at Princeton University, and later as a Peace Corps volunteer in Arequipa, Peru. He served his apprenticeship in the studios of Richard Meier briefly and more substantially with Michael Graves. Since the 1970s, he has been an architect and educator teaching first at Princeton, briefly at the University of Cincinnati, then at Rice University and currently at the University of Virginia, where he is now firmly grounded in the Piedmont condition. His extensive residential practice has been concerned with the Climatic House constructed according to Specifications for Construction executed by Nomads, Surveyors and Lunatics. His fables of the Gardener and the Engineer manifest his profound respect for the spirit and resources of the renewable American urban condition.

Published internationally in Global Architecture, Area, Architecture and recently the Yale Perspecta, Waldman is winner of several Progressive Architecture design citations, Urban Design Competitions, and New Jersey AIA Design Awards. The climatic condition has been the subject of his built projects such as the Parasol and Hurricane Houses in Houston, an Oasis for the Stegosaurus and the Trojan horse in Galveston, and Parcel X, a Satyric campsite in North Garden, Virginia. He is currently working on projects of Work and Play: compounds for double-crossing generations in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; Out Houses for North Garden; and an inevitable Earthquake Shelter for Arequipa, Peru. He has recently completed construction on a pleasure garden for medievalists-in-exile in Washington, D.C. His teaching has always benchmarked the Beginning and the End, and views Architecture as a Covenant with the World.