Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Malcolm Quantrill, a noted author, architectural scholar, teacher and distinguished professor at Texas A&M University, died Tuesday, Sept. 22 in College Station. He was 78 years old.
Funeral services are scheduled 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29 at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, located at 603 Church Avenue in College Station. A vigil will be held 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28 at Hillier Funeral Home, located at 2301 East 29th Street in Bryan.
The Quantrill family asked that remembrances in Malcolm’s name be sent to the Texas A&M Foundation and designated to support architecture student travel.
Throughout his career, Quantrill, who also served as director of the Center for the Advancement of Studies in Architecture (CASA), authored, co-authored, translated and edited numerous books examining architectural research, practices, traditions and teaching.
His scholarly interests focused on architectural history and theory, architectural and urban design, and design diagnostics. He joined the architecture faculty at Texas A&M University in 1984 and was promoted to the rank of distinguished professor in 1986, becoming the only member of the Texas A&M College of Architecture faculty to be so honored. He retired from the faculty August 2007 and was subsequently awarded the title of distinguished professor emeritus.
In 1990, Quantrill received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Distinguished Professor Award. And for his outstanding contributions to the growth of research in architecture, in 2003 he received the James Haecker Distinguished Leadership Award for Architectural Research from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium — the premier architectural research organization in North America.
Quantrill earned a doctorate in engineering in 1975 from Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland. He received a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and a bachelor in architecture in 1954 from Liverpool University.
In 1998, in recognition of his contribution to the study of modern Finnish architecture, Quantrill was conferred as "Knight Commander" in the Order of the Knights of the Lion of Finland by Finnish President Koivisto.
Until his death, he maintained membership in the Royal Institute of British Architects in the United Kingdom, and in the Comité Internacional de Críticos de Arquitectura in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
One of Quantrill’s most recent scholarly efforts the co-translation and revision of “The Architectural Project,” a book by Argentinean scholar Alfonso Corona-Martínez, offers a challenging interpretation of design education and its effect on design process and products.
Other books authored, co-authored or edited by Quantrill include: “The Norman Foster Studio: Consistency through Diversity,” “The Culture of Silence,” “Finnish Architecture and the Modernist Tradition,” “Urban Forms, Suburban Dream,” “Constancy and Change in Architecture,” “Reima Pietilä: One Man's Odyssey in Search of Finnish Architecture,” “The Environmental Memory,” “Reima Pietilä: Architecture, Context and Modernism,” and “Alvar Aalto: A Critical Study.”
After retiring from the Texas A&M faculty in 2007, Quantrill remained active as director of CASA and was appointed International Representative for the Luis Barragán Chair at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Queretaro, Mexico.
This appointment followed years of work with colleagues in Mexico, which resulted in the publication of “Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape: The Evolution of the Colonial City” (Texas A&M University Press, May 2007). He edited the book, written by Monterrey Tech colleagues and collaborators Fernando Nunez, Carlos Arvizu and Ramon Abonce, which is about the influences of ideas and views that gave birth to the built spaces and structures of Mexico, especially those of Queretaro.
In October 2007, Quantrill was a visiting professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, were he presented a public lecture, “Materiality and Otherness: Architecture as a Vision Beyond Seeing.” That November, he lectured at the Royal Institute of British Architects of London with Professor Brian Mackay-Lyons of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
MacKay-Lyons, an architect, was the subject of another book by Quantrill, “Plain Modern.” In that book, the Princeton Architectural Press wrote, Quantrill “weaves together an intimate portrait of MacKay-Lyons and his work, elucidating the ‘peculiar regionality’ of his subject’s architecture
- Posted: Sept. 24, 2009 -
