PEOPLE

Franck to direct new architecture initiative

By Staff
////
Categories: 

Franck
Christine G.H. Franck -- an award-winning designer, author and educator -- has been named the first director of Contemporary Traditional Architecture Initiatives at CU Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning.

Says CAP Dean Mark Gelernter, “This new position will help pull together a number of programs and initiatives in our college around the theme of ‘Enduring Places.’ This means designing buildings and places that can last longer by adapting to changes over time, rather than wastefully replacing them when functions or tastes change.”

Enduring Places partners sustainability with historic preservation, and focuses renewed attention on how buildings in the past adapted more gracefully to change than many recent buildings. This initiative is intended to help today’s practitioners learn important lessons from traditional settlement patterns, design languages and building practices.

The Enduring Places theme builds on existing strengths in the college. The Center of Preservation Research (CoPR) documents and analyzes historic buildings and places for lessons today, while the master’s in Historic Preservation studies traditional building materials and processes. The Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art supports a special topic area in classical architecture.

Franck holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and a master’s in architecture from the University of Notre Dame. She began her career working for leading classical architect Allan Greenberg, and administering the first two American programs of the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Building Community. Her own residential design work has won national awards including a Palladio Award.

She was the first executive director of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in New York. Franck also has taught in the architectural programs at the University of Notre Dame and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Franck currently serves or has served on the Board of Directors of the ICAA, the ICAA Rocky Mountain Chapter, the National Civic Art Society, the International College of Chapters of INTBAU, and the Advisory Council of the University of Notre Dame. In 2002, she was honored by HRH The Prince of Wales with the first Public Service Award of the Prince’s Foundation for “her outstanding contribution to the study of architecture and design.”