CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Retired University of Illinois architecture professor and inveterate traveler James P. Warfield has spent more than 45 years trekking the remote regions of the world and documenting in photographs, travel sketches and in writing rustic villages and their charming inhabitants, stunning countryside and intriguing wildlife. He and his travelling companion, wife Chelle, have explored China’s ancient ruins, ghost towns in the American West and fishing villages in Newfoundland. They have worked as elephant handlers in Thailand and visited with tattooed women from the Chin tribe in Myanmar and headhunters in Borneo.
Ortahisar, Cappadocia, Turkey
“SEVEN,” an exhibition of photographs and sketches from Warfield’s four decades of travel and research, will open on Tuesday (Oct. 19) in the West Gallery of Temple Hoyne Buell Hall, 611 Lorado Taft Drive, Champaign.
The title of the exhibition refers to the seven projects that Warfield undertook in as many years since his retirement from the architecture faculty at Illinois. Warfield’s first project, “The Art of the Travel Sketch: Dancing Lessons From God,” a set of “exploded” – or enlarged – sketchbook drawings began as a “guerrilla” exhibition in the picture windows of Flagg Hall, where Warfield has his campus office.
Warfield’s impulsive decision to enlarge and display his sketches in Flagg Hall’s 65 windows one January day in 2004 generated such an enthusiastic response from students in neighboring dormitories that the sketches stayed up through April. “Dancing Lessons” later went on view at the Bourdon Gallery in the Glasgow School of Art, in Glasgow, Scotland and evolved into a book published this year by Martin Press. He was invited by Alpha Rho Chi, the fraternity for students in architecture and related disciplines, to do a similar exhibit for the fraternity house windows. Warfield created the exhibit “Everyman,” composed of 120 portraits, which was displayed in the window panels of the fraternity house during the Boneyard Arts Festival.
“SEVEN” also includes works from “Inalterable Dreams: The People and Architecture of China’s Folk Environments,” a retrospective of Warfield’s research on traditional folk architecture in rural Chinese villages. The original exhibition, organized in 2003 was a tribute to the Tongji University/U. of I. study abroad program that Warfield has led since 1987, taking groups of U. of I. students majoring in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban and regional planning on six-week explorations of China’s ancient and modern cities and its cultures.
“Roads Less Traveled,” another segment of the exhibition and the title of his other recent book, published by the Shanghai architectural firm UN+Architecture in 2009, presents some of the 400 photos that he has taken of 34 distinct world culture areas and also includes excerpts from his travel journals.
Some of Warfield’s many portraits of indigenous people will be on view as well along with selections from two black-and-white photo collections: “Stone Poems: Architecture and the Land,” which explores the relationships among people, culture and nature, and “Architecture of Occasion: Time+Place,” slice-of-life photos taken at markets, villages, riverfronts and other sites in India, Italy, Mali, Mexico and other nations.
“I’ve researched what interested me in life, documented it and then interpreted it through photos, sketches and words,” Warfield said. “These are very personal and meaningful exhibits.”
Warfield is the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Architecture, which is a unit in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. His area of expertise is vernacular architecture, or what he calls the “architecture of the people” – site-conscious buildings constructed usually from local materials and without the involvement of architects or professional builders.
The landscape in Central Illinois is dotted with more than 160 buildings of Warfield’s design, including churches such as American Lutheran in Rantoul and Temple Baptist in Champaign; banks and office buildings; a fast-food restaurant; apartment complexes; and schools in numerous towns, including Dunlap, Gibson City, Mount Zion, Rantoul and Robinson. His design of the Friends Meeting House in Urbana won the 2005 Heritage Design Award from the Preservation and Conservation Association of Champaign County for its environmental and historical sensitivity.
This semester, as he has every fall for the past 16 years, Warfield is teaching a course for Campus Honors Program students, which comprises a series of field trips to architecturally significant sites on campus and beyond, including Assembly Hall and the Siebel Center, the Dana Thomas house by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Springfield, and the architecturally rich community of Columbus, Ind. Over the years, he also has taken groups of students to sketch in the Greek islands and led study-abroad trips to Boliva, Mexico and Turkey.
“SEVEN” will be on view at TBH’s West Gallery through Oct. 29. Warfield’s photos may also be viewed on his website.
