Tabb to co-chair architecture, spirituality and
culture symposium this summer in Georgia

This summer in the Georgia community where he serves as master planner, Phillip Tabb, professor of architecture at Texas A&M will co-chair a symposium pondering the divine and the structures humans build to experience it.

The event, sponsored by the Forum for Architecture, Culture and Spirituality, is scheduled June 29 - July 1 at Serenbe, an environmentally friendly residential development.

The forum is an international scholarly environment established in 2007 to support architectural and interdisciplinary scholarship, research, practice and education on the significance, experience and meaning of the built environment.

Two focus sessions, two open sessions and a final synthesis session will give symposium participants opportunities to discuss relationships between architecture and spirituality.

One focus session, led by Hyejung Chang, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of New Mexico, will explore the nature of the sacred as it has evolved in ritual, art, spiritual architecture and in Serenbe and similar communities.

A second focus session, led by Michael J. Crosbie, editor-in-chief of Faith and Form magazine, will examine structures people create to encounter the divine, including case studies, student design projects, global trends and hypothetical assertions.

Tabb and Serenbe’s founders, Steve & Marie Nygren, will lead a guided tour and lecture about the development, which Crosbie praised in a 2009 issue of AIArchitect.

“The stronger the sense of place, the more people feel invested in the community and strive to preserve it,” he wrote. “Such a notion of sustainability is at the heart of the design of a new community, Serenbe, just outside of Atlanta.”

For more information about the symposium, which has no fees but is limited to 50 participants, visit www.acsforum.org.

Serenbe’s home page can be accessed at www.serenbe.com.

- Posted: Feb. 2, 2011 -

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.