Photography by Michael Arden
Eye on Architecture
James Steele is a distinguished teacher and author.
James Steele ’65 saw crisis and opportunity in the faces of children in Cambodia.
Steele, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, was teaching his own students in the USC architecture school’s Summer Program in Asia when he was inspired by young Khmer students who learned their lessons without the benefit of a school building.
“They come from miles around to sit under a tree. It broke my heart,” he says. And so he asked, “Why couldn’t we do a project as a summer studio of designing a school, raising funds to build it?”
It’s happening. With the help of a grant, Steele is writing a book on contemporary Chinese urbanism whose sales will fund the $30,000 needed to build the Cambodian school. He also is establishing a nonprofit foundation, the Asia Community Design Workshop, to assist with this project and future ones.
Steele founded the Summer Program in Asia in 1998 to take architecture students to examine firsthand the building and urban planning issues facing Asian nations. His experience in Islamic countries made Malaysia a natural choice for the first series of courses. He has since added China, Vietnam, and Cambodia to the annual program.
“It’s the most popular program in the School of Architecture,” he says, adding, “Our world is urbanizing. The architect’s arena today is the city.”
Steele’s journey from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under Louis Kahn after graduating from Lafayette, to Southern California, where he has taught since 1991 and earned a Ph.D., went through the Middle East. It was accelerated by a volume he published on the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy.
After Penn, Steele started his own firm in Bucks County, Pa., specializing in designing single-family homes, but after a dozen years, in the face of an economic downturn, he left to teach at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia. There he heard about an Egyptian who was “the regional equivalent of Le Corbusier” but virtually unknown in the West. A champion of sustainable building methods and community-based, traditional design, Fathy was, Steele says, “the antithesis of what I learned at Penn from Kahn.”
Steele’s 1983 monograph on Fathy earned him recognition worldwide and “opened up opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.” The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which honored Fathy for lifetime achievement with its inaugural Chairman’s Award in 1980, named Steele curator of its collection of Fathy’s drawings. Steele left the Middle East in 1988 to teach at the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, London, then joined the faculty at Texas Tech in 1989.
Steele delivered the College’s annual John and Muriel Landis Lecture, which focuses on issues of technology and international cooperation, in 2008. The author of more than two dozen books, including Sustainable Architecture: Principles, Paradigms, and Case Studies and Ecological Architecture: A Critical History, he spoke on incorporating sustainability considerations in traditional designs.
Steele’s latest book is the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Homes through World History, released this year.