LEARNING TO DRAW
AS GRADUATE STUDENTS AT PRINCETON, RATTNER AND Cameron found several faculty members--including architect, theorist, and critic Alan H. Colquhoun, architectural historian Anthony Vidler, and Michael Graves--who were interested in the classical underpinnings of modernist theory, but no professors who were sympathetic to the idea of classical practice in the here and now. Rattner consequently received instruction in drawing the several classical Orders (an Order consists of the column and the architrave, frieze, and cornice) in a class offered by Classical America, an arts organization directed by architectural historian Henry Hope Reed, at the National Academy of Design, in Manhattan. The books he borrowed from Marquand Library "hadn't been checked out in 40 or 50 years," he recalls. Cameron says he had to struggle for weeks, in an extracurricular class he took as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, before he could draw the simplest Order, the Tuscan, correctly. The fruit of his labors "was the most beautiful thing I'd ever done. I was hooked."
The two classicists contend that the current academic wisdom leads students to assume that genius or creativity can only emerge through defiance of precedent and convention. Such romantic notions, they contend, are ill-suited to the realities of the architectural marketplace, which can accommodate no more than a few cutting-edge designers. What's more, these notions contribute to a dire shortage of qualified architects interested in designing the traditional buildings Rattner and Cameron believe most Americans would prefer to live in, work in, and look at.
"Architecture schools think they're training creative artists," Cameron says, "but what we ought to be training are journeymen musicians. Architects should be educated the way musicians are educated at Juilliard, where you spend a great deal of time studying classical harmony and playing Bach partitas. You don't just start with John Cage and abandon everything that came before."
In line with Cameron's observation, ISCA emphasizes a pedagogical balance between theory and practice. The curriculum embraces proportion's role in the philosophy and esthetics of classical design and the employment of proportional systems as a design tool; theoretical treatises on classical architecture going back to the Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote in the late first century B.C.; and the adaptation of the classical canon to modern technologies, such as computer-aided design (CAD) and steel-frame skyscraper construction. These topics are also pursued in The Classicist, ISCA's annual review devoted to architecture, its "allied arts" (painting, sculpture, the decorative crafts, landscape architecture, etc.), and urbanism.
ISCA instructors place a high priority on rendering, which is taught as a means of training students to think ideas through in three dimensions and to visualize the way light, shade, and shadow fall on the surfaces of the buildings they design--something of which CAD can as yet provide only a crude suggestion. Rattner notes that "architects across the spectrum" complain that graduates of architecture schools tend to be incompetent draftsmen all too ready to bank on CAD as "the great equalizer."
Much as a musician might study the enduring principles of harmony, moreover, ISCA students learn the classical canon as a coherent, enduring design system. Rattner has written that the classical represents "a unique continuum . . . a unified idea continually reinterpreted across time." He maintains that art history courses, in emphasizing formal distinctions rather than unifying principles, convey an amorphous impression of the tradition as an atomized assortment of period styles. And whereas most architecture students become familiar with the Orders by way of art-history slide lectures, ISCA students draw them both freehand and mechanically, while also measuring elements of New York's classical buildings on site.
Much of the traditional rigor ISCA espouses--in architectural rendering technique, for instance--derives from the curriculum employed at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, prior to the student upheavals of 1968. The École is the successor to the royal academies that governed the fine arts in 18th-century France, and its curriculum served as the basis of architectural education in the United States before modernism became the reigning dogma during the 1930s and 1940s.
For all their emphasis on academic rigor, however, Rattner and Cameron insist that they see ISCA's mission as education, not indoctrination. They note that a modernist pioneer like Mies van der Rohe, the designer of the famed Seagram Building in Manhattan, ventured to create his "new architecture"--what he took for a new classicism-Ñbecause he had the sort of familiarity with classical principles which designers now tend to lack. "We prefer conventions, and our practice reflects that," says Rattner. "But confusing the educational with the ideological aspect would turn a lot of people off. We'd rather make the mode of expression the student's choice."

THE SORT OF CLASSICISM TO WHICH RATTNER, CAMERON, and Ferguson subscribe is evident in the work at Ferguson Murray & Shamamian, whose commissions tend toward high-end traditional residential construction in various parts of the country as well as the renovation of sumptuous apartments on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The firm's style is eclectic rather than period-oriented, and often bears the imprint of Charles A. Platt (1861-1933), an eminent American architect and landscape gardener who incorporated the pavilions, vaulted ceilings, arcaded loggias, and pergolas of the Italian Renaissance into residential designs renowned for their simple elegance. Through both ISCA and Ferguson Murray & Shamamian, however, Rattner and Cameron aspire to put classical architecture back into the heart of the public realm, from which it was expelled half a century ago.
Though it is widely assumed that classical architecture is too expensive for anything but rich men's mansions, the two contend that any building, modernist or traditional, that relies on custom-made elements is going to be expensive. The problem peculiar to the classical and other traditional idioms (such as the Gothic) is that modernism's rejection of ornament rendered the arts and crafts on which those idioms depend all but obsolete. As a result, Cameron says, "Handcrafting is very expensive. It is hard to find qualified craftsmen in an era of industrialized building. We need a broader-based culture of craftsmanship for it to be widely available." High-profile institutional commissions for classical museums, corporate headquarters, university buildings, and the like will be required for this "culture" to reach critical mass, he adds.
Rattner and Cameron are confident that the necessary commissions will be forthcoming. "Look at what the developers said about the economics of traditional urbanism when DPZ [the urban-design firm headed by Andres Duany '71 and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk '72] revived it 15 years ago," Cameron says. " 'Impossible!' " And indeed, the traditional urbanism movement has gone from strength to strength in recent years, not only because planners, developers, and home-buyers have come to appreciate the pedestrian scale characteristic of older towns and cities, but because they prefer traditionally oriented architecture as well.
The various regional or vernacular styles that are part and parcel of this country's classical tradition, as well as the classical habit of shaping urban spaces--streets, greens, and plazas--into outdoor "rooms" that provide a pleasing sense of spatial enclosure, have played major roles in this movement. Which is only natural, so far as Rattner and Cameron are concerned. With its intimate relationship to human proportions and the human scale, classicism "is about making ourselves at home in the world," Cameron says. "It is a profoundly humanist way of looking at architecture."