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AIA Central NJ Celebrated 100 Years in 2023 at Architects Housing in Trenton!

Posted on Jan. 13, 2025  /  Subscribe 0

AIA Central New Jersey Celebrated 100 Years in 2023 at Architects Housing in Trenton!

Photo: Event attendees posed in front of Architects Housing and the statue of George Washington, situated in a square lit by gaslight. 

As well as our 2023 Board Members pictured here for their dedication and support this year:

Elina Shchervinsky, (2023 AIA Central NJ President), Erin Newton (2023 President Elect); Ben Walmer (Treasurer); David Von Stappenbeck (Secretary); Tania Althoff (Trustee); Joshua Zinder (Trustee); and George Sincox (Trustee and Board Secretary for 20 years).

Photo: Isles.org presented "Community Planning, Development, and Rehabilitation in Trenton". Thank you to Sean Jackson and Michael Nordquist for the informative seminar on the economic development challenges impacting Trenton and its communities. 

Thank you to Bob Russell, AIA, the President of Architects Housing, for presenting the history of the development of this project, the competition, and ultimately the design by Robert Geddes of Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham Architects. 

Image: 1979 Architect's Housing Contest Winners, Robert Geddes, Neville Epstein, and Robert Brown. 

Robert Geddes, AIA studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the post-war Walter Gropius and Joseph Hudnut era, he taught architecture and civic design at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design (formerly University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts) from 1951 to 1965. He moved to Princeton University in 1965 to become the first Dean of the School of Architecture, and was William Kennan Professor Emeritus. Under his leadership over 17 years, the School of Architecture emerged as a major center for the exchange of architectural ideas, while retaining its small size and close connections with the rest of the university.

In 1953, Geddes co-founded a collaborative practice, Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham: Architects (also known as GBQC Architects), in Philadelphia, later adding an office in Princeton. Prior to founding GBQC, he worked briefly for Hugh Stubbins, Jr. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. GBQC won national and international competitions and awards, starting with being runner-up in the Sydney Opera House design competition (1955). He was GBQC design partner or co-partner for the Pender Labs at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania; the Police Headquarters of the City of Philadelphia; Richard Stockton College in New Jersey; Hill Hall at Rutgers University-Newark; the College of Liberal Arts of Southern Illinois University; the Architects Housing in Trenton, New Jersey; Princeton Community Housing's Griggs Farm neighborhood; and probably best known, the Dining Hall and Birch Garden quad at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Design, and GBQC was awarded the highest professional honor of the American Institute for Architects, the Architecture Firm Award (1979), for "design quality, respect for the environment, and social concern."

Photo: Erin Sharp-Newton (2023 President-Elect), Elina Shchervinsky, AIA (2023 President) and Sean Cuddahy, AIA (2018 Past-President) 

Photo taken at the Architects Housing ramp, with the statue of Washington in the background, situated in the park where he turned the tide and won the country in 1776, was cast in Italy. The statue was first was showed at the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and was purchased by the city in 1896. It sits on South Montgomery Street, an offshoot from the bottom of Mercer Street, in a square lit by gaslight behind Trenton’s historic Mill Hill Playhouse on Front Street in downtown. 

"Architects Housing Company, Inc., set up by members of the Central Chapter of the New Jersey Society of Architects… in 1974, sought to demonstrate that architects could not only design, but develop and operate better housing than governments or developers. To this end, it organized a design competition with a brief that corresponded to federal housing guidelines for senior housing.

The jury, comprising the who’s-who of the New York City housing establishment at the time, voted unanimously to award the project to the Princeton-based firm Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham from a field of 27 submissions… The process was much lauded at the time. Paul D. Spreiregen dedicated more pages of his 1980 book Design Competitions to “Trenton Housing for the Elderly” than he did to far more prominent designs arrived at through competition processes, including the Sydney Opera House and the Centre Pompidou.

Bob Geddes was sharp, articulate, and unapologetic about the social goals of modern architecture. As he sketched the part of his proposal as it relates to other parts of Trenton, he insisted that a separation between good design and the so-called social responsibility of the profession makes no sense. It was under his leadership as the founding dean of Princeton’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning that sociologists and architects collaborated, that community design storefronts were set up not only in Trenton but in Hoboken and Newark, that research was coordinated with state institutions, and conferences organized on issues including “Cooperation of the Private and Public Sectors in Housing.”"

-Text by Susanne Schindler, via Robert Geddes Architect

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