July 15, 2009 (RALEIGH, NC) — David Hill, assistant professor architecture at North Carolina State University’s College of Design in Raleigh, has received Triangle Modernist Houses’ first Macon Smith Research Grant.
Triangle Modernist Houses.com is the online entity of Triangle Modernist Archives, Inc., an award-winning nonprofit which preserves, advocates, and builds community around modernist residential design in the Triangle area of North Carolina.
TMH established the Mason Smith Research Grant program to support research into Modernist architecture and architects who practiced in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill region of North Carolina.
Hill will use his grant to travel to Oakland, California, where he will interview modernist architect George Matsumoto. Matsumoto taught and practiced architecture in North Carolina from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and was instrumental in helping establish the NC State University School of Design. Besides numerous residences in the area, Matsumoto also designed the College of Design’s “Matsumoto Wing” at Brooks Hall.
“David Hill’s oral history of Matsumoto will be placed in the NC State University Library Special Collections,” said TMH founder and director George Smart. “The archive and recording will then serve as a material basis for further grant proposals, research, documentation, and perhaps a book that publishes Mr. Matsumoto’s work.”
“David Hill’s petition for funding was accepted,” says Smart, “because it was focused, directly relevant to our mission, and easily implemented.”
The TMH grant awards of up to $1000 to private citizens, academics, or institutions on an ad hoc basis during the year. It is named for architect Macon Strother Smith, an NC State graduate, past president of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the recipient of AIA/NC’s highest honors, the Deitrick Medal in 2001 and the F. Carter Williams Gold Medal in 2006. In early 2008, Smith scoured his own records to help TMH get underway. He died later that year.
For more information on the Mason Smith Research Grant and Triangle Modernist Houses, visit the website at www.trianglemodernisthouses.com.
About Triangle Modernist Houses:
The Triangle area of North Carolina has the third largest concentration of modernist houses in America, more than anywhere except Los Angeles, California, and Chicago, Illinois. Triangle Modernist Archives, Inc., is committed to archiving, advocating and, where possible, restoring modernist architecture in the Triangle. Its primary public service is managing Triangle Modernist Houses (TMH), an award-winning nonprofit educational archive for cataloguing, preserving, and advocating modernist residential design in the Triangle area of North Carolina. TMH also hosts modernist house tours several times a year, giving the public access to the Triangle’s most exciting residential architecture, past and present. These tours raise awareness and help preserve these works of art for future generations. Established in 2007 by George Smart, Triangle Modernist Archives, Inc., became a formal nonprofit in 2009.
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