A Mini-Review of Julia Walker's Lecture

A Rick Joy work

Julia Walker is an art history professor at one of our rival schools, Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. She was educated in San Antonio, Texas, and received her graduate information in Pennsylvania. Her specialization is in Post-Unification Government Architecture. She titled this lecture "Sustainable Chic: The Style of Building Green." Our professor Adrian Duran introduced her as a returned favor; he explained that five years ago he visited SCAD, where she introduced him.

House of Earth and Light

Her talk was informational but less than thrilling. Her language, though poetically beautiful at times, did not really convey her main point: that building simply green should be the future of architecture and housing. She showed us examples of various architects' works, including Anne Marie Russell, Frank Lloyd Wright, Al Beadle, Judith Chafee, Rick Joy, and Marwan Al-Sayed. Most of the work seemed to stick to an international-style look, and the some of the buildings could only be afforded by the upper class of our society. Her most helpful words came during the questions segment when she talked about the cost of some of the greenest building materials featured in some of the slides. Then she went on to say that the upper class shouldn't be the only people who have access to well-planned, greener houses. From a post-colonial perspective, her slides contradicted her thesis, as the majority were made by Caucasians for the wealthy, with the exceptions of Wright's Ocatillo Camp and Al-Sayed's House of Earth and Light. Her heart was in the right place, but her judgment of societal connection had a faulty foundation.