News & Events Architectural Historian Carroll William Westfall To Speak on "To Restore the American City” at Amherst College Sept. 11

August 25, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Carroll William Westfall, the Frank Montana Professor of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, will give a talk titled “To Restore the American City: A Guide from the Past to the Present” at 8 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 11, in Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) at Amherst College. The first lecture in the series sponsored by the Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst, Westfall’s talk is free and open to the public.

Westfall’s early work, devoted to the Italian Renaissance and the consolidation in architecture of political authority and theological reform in the Catholic Church, resulted in scholarly articles and a book, In This Most Perfect Paradise (1974). He has since concentrated on the relationship between the history, theory and practice of architecture, especially the role of tradition in shaping the practice of the present to serve the future. A review of this interest is in his contribution to Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (1991), written with Robert Jan van Pelt. Westfall, whose current interests are in tradition and classicism in architecture and the American city and on the architect’s capacity to nourish the Christian faith, studies the history of the city with attention to the reciprocity between the political life and the urban and architectural elements that serve the needs of citizens.

Westfall was educated at the University of California (B.A., 1961) and at the University of Manchester (M.A., 1963) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1967). After teaching at Amherst College (1967-72), the University of Illinois in Chicago and the University of Virginia, he joined the faculty of the Notre Dame in 1998 as Frank Montana Professor at the School of Architecture.

###