*A view of the Marina Grande Bay from the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, with the Vesuvio volcano and the city of Naples emerging from the morning mist.*

A New Year with a New Focus:

Building Beauty Courses for Everyone

This academic year will be structured a bit differently than the past two years, with less emphasis on the year-long program in Sorrento (while we had several students who applied, none could afford to pay the fees; we need at least a few students every year who can pay full fees). We are now focusing on offering several online courses in addition to a couple of shorter 3-4 week workshops that will take place in Sorrento. One of the online courses will be the Nature of Order theory class that will be held once a week from November to May, and another will be Duo’s HOME program, with students from the University of Hartford, Alfred State, and the University of San Francisco participating, in addition to students or professionals associated with Building Beauty.

The workshops in Sorrento will include tile making, stone carving, and carpet study, and we also plan to offer a separate 3-4 week building workshop where we will build another project in the Sant’ Anna garden. In addition, we plan to offer the summer school ten-day building program at the end of the academic year, and hope to do it again with the Associazione Canova, helping them rebuild the medieval stone town of Ghesc in the Italian Alps (see photos of our students attending this unique program at the end of this dispatch). Once we finalize the dates, we will send you info and hope that you can pass it on, or better yet, join us for one of the courses! These classes and workshops will be open to all who are interested, and the online ones will be FREE for professionals (there will be a fee for students who need the course for credit as they will be completing assignments, writing a paper, and receiving grades for their work). Stay tuned for more information and registration details coming soon!

Now that we have an agreement for credits with the University of Hartford, other universities have expressed more interest in Building Beauty, so we do expect to continue the year-long course in Sorrento for the 2020/2021 academic year with students attending from these institutions in addition to our other international students. While activities in Sorrento will be a bit more limited this year, there will be more BB action on a global scale. Please read on for some big news about an entirely new BB global program!

NEWSFLASH:

The Announcement of Building Beauty STAR

The work of Building Beauty as a non-profit Cultural Association continues, and its objective does not change: our mission is to radically innovate architecture education in the world, a change that is in all evidence every day more relevant, needed and called for internationally. In the last two years our program in Sorrento has captured an expanding network of high-profile international scholars and practitioners from all over the world (including you and other members of the American Advisory Board) who have committed amazing resources of time, money and energy to the project. And let us reiterate: the project is not that of only teaching an elite program to a dozen privileged and talented students in Sorrento, but rather to become part of and influence the face of architecture education globally, helping to establish “the new normal" worldwide. The times have never been more appropriate for this.

Working to achieve that aim, in addition to our graduate diploma program in Sorrento, the Association with its core group of networked people is defining and promoting another new model of delivering Building Beauty, named Building Beauty STAR. This new model is possible now because of the amazing feedback we have received in the last two years of the program in Sorrento, and the lessons learned along the way.

What is BB Star? It is the idea that rather than having just one BB program delivered independently in Sorrento, we would have a number of constellated institutions around the world offering their own BB programs as part of their portfolio of courses. The BB Star local programs will be based on a complete four-year undergraduate program in Architecture and Making, for which ACBB (Cultural Association Building Beauty) will provide coordination and monitoring, certification and strategic guidance, and a few teaching units common to all. This ambitious idea is currently making its first steps into reality, and our efforts in the next academic period will be focused on this important task. The idea is as ambitious as it is new, and we will not be running short of hurdles in the next few crucial months: we need the help and collaboration of all to bring this to fruition. If you are a part of or know of any institutions or programs that might be interested in participating in the BB Star program, please let us know – we are actively contacting various schools of architecture around the world to invite them to join us in this effort.

Beauty in the News

New articles and research are continuing to be published about architecture and beauty, the brain and beauty, and the importance of beauty as a fundamental requirement for life. One example from the Harvard Crimson: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/10/neuroaesthetics-cover/.

Summer School 2019 in the Italian Alps

Last May, our Building Beauty students spent 10 days in the mountain village of Ghesc. This abandoned medieval village in the heart of the Italian Alps is completely made of stone, and is now slowly being restored by the Associazione Canova through international workshops. Our work was to re-build a stone portal and to terrace the landscape next to it with dry stone walls, making it alive once again!