They call the neighborhood “Sweet Auburn” because Auburn Avenue is the heart of it, stretching more than a mile from Woodruff Park downtown toward residential Sampson Street in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward.
A casual visitor might view this progression from urban density to single-family comforts as a loose collection of buildings: some monumental, many humbler, some in better repair than others. But Sweet Auburn is more than the sum of such parts. It’s a living place, a vibrant blend of past and present growing into the future.
Stroll Auburn Avenue and you’ll pass some of America’s great landmarks: the first home of the Atlanta Daily World, established 1928, among the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the United States; Big Bethel AME Church, “Sweet Auburn’s City Hall,” where former U.S. President William Howard Taft orated in 1911 and Nelson Mandela, recently released after 27 years in prison, spoke in 1990; Ebenezer Baptist, where Michael King Sr. took the pulpit in 1931 before changing his name to Martin Luther; and the modest, yellow Queen Anne where his son was born in 1929. The district’s “mayor,” an Atlanta political dynamo named John Wesley Dobbs, coined its nickname from a Goldsmith poem, and the place it described was for decades known as one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the world.
Rising six stories in Jacobethan stone and red brick above it all is the Odd Fellows Building, a fraternal lodge built by a Black contractor and dedicated by Booker T. Washington. From 1912 on, the building supplied local Odd Fellows with their headquarters and Sweet Auburn’s professional class with coveted office space. Next door, the lodge’s auditorium hosted up to 1,300 people for political rallies and entertainment. It was long the only theater in the city where Black audiences could sit on the main floor.
In 1915, atop the “tower,” the lodge constructed an open-air garden venue for music, dining and dancing — a tradition that lasted until a 1937 fire swept the roof structure into ash, while somehow leaving the building below it intact.
That resilience is a symbol of the neighborhood’s resilience. Nothing took the Odd Fellows Building down. Not Jim Crow, not the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917, not the years of abandonment; not the bulldozers of “urban renewal” or suburbanization or the tornadoes of 2008. Not even the erection of Interstate 75/85, which razed thousands of structures in the city in the 1950s and ’60s, displaced some 30,000 people and cut Sweet Auburn in half, devastating its culture and economy in what many historians and neighborhood advocates consider an act of “intentional harm.” Today, the estimated 700,000 motorists and passengers traveling the elevated, 12-lane corridor daily can see the Odd Fellows Building and the John Lewis “Hero” mural across the street from it if they glance west down Auburn Avenue.
A 2024 renovation revived the building for local businesses and an Atlanta nonprofit that provides transitional housing and education for chronically homeless men. But that rooftop where the likes of Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith performed, and prosperous Black Atlantans made memories with their feet? Well, someone’s got to figure out what to do with it. And no one has given the matter more thought than a young Kenyan architect, construction manager and historic preservationist named Charles Ghati ’25M.S.
The Master of Science in Historic Preservation program at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture graduated its second class of five students this year, but the program is in important respects much older, the outcome of 13 years of thought, scholarship, planning, trial, revision and retrial, and it is now poised to make a statement in architectural education. Already its first student cohort won a national award for its urban conservation plan for South Bend’s Near Northwest Neighborhood under the guidance of Professor Nick Rolinski ’17M.Arch.
The vision, says Professor Steven Semes, the program’s mastermind and the founding director of the school’s Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability, is to take working professionals like Ghati and fashion them over two intensive years into the “complete architect,” one who knows not just how to design at the scale of the building, the neighborhood or the city as a whole, but also how to interpret the existing built environment at each level: to research and document it; to photograph and scan it; to draw it by hand and thus truly see and think about it inside and out — with the goal of determining how to build new things well in older cities.
The classical grounding of Notre Dame’s curriculum is a decisive difference from the modernism dominating architectural education the world over. “Classicists can understand the thinking of the original architect and builders,” says Semes, who trained as a modernist, worked for such modernist icons as Philip Johnson and now teaches students the classical orders — the Greco-Roman grammar of architectural proportion, style and form. “And while they need not be bound by that thinking as they plan their own restorative interventions, they may be guided by and respectful of it.”
Semes prefers “conservation” when speaking of that desirable continuity between past and present in our built environment and teaching nonarchitects to think of cities as living traditions: You “conserve” resources, he explains; you “preserve” fossils, the archaeological fragments of dead cultures. The familiar term for the work is historic preservation, but here again Semes would have us think differently. “Preservation” is less about time, he says, and more about place.
“The modernist’s first obligation is to innovate,” he says. Newness before all else. “In preservation, the first obligation is to know where you are.” That requires attention, observation, respect for what you see and for the people who lead their lives in a locale. If Semes thinks of the endeavor in terms of managing a nature preserve, critics of his approach protest any inhibition of their artistic integrity.
“My point is, look, 85 percent of Manhattan doesn’t operate under any historic designation,” he says. “Go innovate there. Is it too much to ask that in this historic area you use your artistic skills in service to the collective interest in preserving our collective heritage?”
In short, what the complete architect Notre Dame seeks to train can do for the buildings, boulevards and plazas we love is what the doctor can do for bodies or the botanist can do for gardens: heal their wounds and help them flourish.
Last fall, as Ghati and his four classmates landed in Rome to begin their second year, the five first-year students in the program embarked on a humbler assignment — a semester spent with an unostentatious, two-story brick building that stands alone on a distressed segment of South Michigan Street in South Bend. The headquarters of the United Auto Workers Local No. 9, a modest Art Deco structure erected in 1928 to serve as a lumber retailer, it provided the focal point for two classes: the cohort’s first dive into research and documentation, led by Professor Todd Zeiger, and a traditional design studio taught by Professor Paul Hardin Kapp, in which each student would propose a vision for the building’s restoration.
The interrogations began immediately. “You walk up to this building for the first time. What are the questions you’re asking yourself?” asks Zeiger, who directs the northern regional office of Indiana Landmarks, the state’s nonprofit preservation organization. “What is causing the front façade to bow out several inches? What’s it built out of? How is it anchored back?”
Documentation means measuring, drawing, taking photographs, capturing the building in its historical and current conditions from every useful angle — elevations, site plans, studies of ornamentation and fenestration. This activity, essential for understanding, here started from scratch because no existing drawings of the building could be located, a problem preservationists often face. The class visited four times, spending maybe 20 hours there, returning as new questions came to mind. “The students enjoy reality,” notes Zeiger. “We could have given pictures of an old building somewhere and said, ‘OK, pretend.’ But being able to crawl around, to see it and measure it and smell it?” He smiles. “To really understand it, it’s so helpful.”
Considered carefully, the building speaks to the local history of commercial activity and labor organizing, especially in its colorful terracotta axes, hammers, saws and trees, and later in the union’s interior remodeling, “straight out of 1948,” Zeiger says. The students discussed the building’s “period of significance” — when it was built or when it was a union hall? — a vital question when seeking a landmark designation, tax credits or grant support.
Semes, attending the end-of-semester review, pointed out how the students’ proposals worked the spectrum of the technical to the aesthetic, covering everything from plumbing to weather intrusion to the design of a park or building next door, one “in character and in harmony with the old building without necessarily imitating it.”
Old South Bend offers many such lessons, both through what preservationists call the “tangible heritage” of structures and materials and “intangible heritage” — the culture of building; the knowledge and skill with which tradespeople realize an architect’s design. “Once you erase it,” says Eric Stalheim ’17M.S., the program’s first alumnus, now director of historic preservation for Kil Architecture & Planning, “it’s gone.”
Stalheim’s preservation portfolio includes the 1896 St. Joseph County Courthouse downtown and St. Adalbert Catholic Church on the city’s west side. He’s eloquent about the satisfactions of his work, and about the pain felt when an old building is lost. Soon after he was hired by the firm’s principal, Greg Kil ’87M.Arch, he toured the vacant South Bend Brewers’ Association building on Lincoln Way, a quirky Victorian-era structure. He poured hours into documentation, but the proposal didn’t win state housing tax credits. The building went to tax sale, and the new owner let the property degrade. Eventually the city condemned it as a safety hazard when chunks of masonry began falling to the sidewalk. “Now it’s a vacant lot that has a lien on the owner for the cost of demolition, which probably will never get paid off,” Stalheim says. “So now it’s a problem in a totally different way.”
The UAW building is fine now but won’t last forever. Two blocks away, the Studebaker Administration Building received the same loving scrutiny from Ghati and his classmates one year before. “It has some damage, but still-beautiful interiors,” says Semes, the studio critic for that project. One proposal reconceived the building as a school for the traditional building arts — carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, plasterwork and the like, a critical need for preservation and architecture in general as artisanal demographics trend older. Zeiger is hopeful that what remains of the built heritage along this tattered section of South Michigan has a future. With motivated ownership and the right infill development, “that stretch has some real potential,” he says.
“Historic preservation” may conjure images of beloved buildings spared from the wrecking ball. The words have an antiquarian ting. What is worth saving? What’s expendable? What is “historic” and what’s just old? We may be thankful for the Philadelphians who acted 200 years ago to save Independence Hall from the clawhammer and crowbar, or to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for standing up in the 1850s to save the place where George Washington truly slept more than any other. But it takes nothing away from our love of the unifying symbol, the habitat of the famous person or our affection for time-honored, beautiful things to say that the reasons for conserving our built environment have expanded — and taken on real urgency.
Nor is preservation, understood this way, particular to America.
Ghati’s classmates include a fellow Kenyan, Benson Kinyanjui ’25M.S., and students from Costa Rica, Iran and Syria. Ghati traces his own interest in architecture to childhood and some “old boys” from his high school who gave talks about their work in the profession. What deepened his heart for preservation and the lessons that durable, useful, beautiful buildings can teach was Lamu, a village on Kenya’s coast that dates to 1370 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While Europeans were recovering from the Black Death, the Swahili people were building such port towns that would foster trade among African, Arab, European, Indian and East Asian merchants for centuries.
Ghati visited Lamu as a student at the University of Nairobi and found stone buildings, tidy streets, whitewashed walls, courtyards and verandas, and roofs of clay tile and thatch that reflected all these cultural influences. He also observed sprawling development around Lamu’s Old Town. That new “urban fabric” is “incongruent” with the old, Ghati says. “Nothing is borrowed from the practices in the historic part,” and the city’s preservation plans are ignored. What he saw in Lamu, he says, “contributed to me being here.”
The fact that “here” meant not just South Bend but also Italy and Greece during the fall semester of his second year was, for Ghati, part of the program’s attraction. Professor Paolo Vitti led the students to a 16th-century church on the island of Sardinia to learn by sketching the building and its context, “really taking it block by block,” Ghati says, “trying to understand every part of how everything came to be.” Sketching attunes the eye to detail, prompts questions of how something fits together, functions. “And by this understanding then it goes into informing a well-understood proposal for intervention,” he says.
The documentation involved digital scanning, a technique pioneered at Notre Dame by Professor Krupali Krusche, whose Digital Historic Architecture and Material Analysis Lab (DHARMA) has performed extensive scans of the Roman Forum, a Vatican courtyard and the Taj Mahal. The tool is taught by colleagues like Professor Selena Anders ’09M.Arch. Scanning, some of it drone-based, helped Ghati’s class get “the whole, broader picture” of the Sardinian church, capturing details they couldn’t see like the top of the bell tower and helping them map damage.
The Sardinia project offered ready access. “Monuments in and around Rome are so intensely monitored and protected that it’s actually very difficult to have students study them closely,” Semes says. Still, Rome itself offers firsthand lessons in the tension between old and new that will sharpen students’ insight in locations as superficially diverse as Atlanta and Lamu. The decisive break with local building traditions that reshaped the global construction industry after World War II encouraged developers worldwide to build upward in the form of skyscrapers and outward in that of sprawl, trends rewarded by swifter returns on diminished investments in labor and materials. North America holds no monopoly on such trends — nor on the attitude that architecture is disposable. Every continent exhibits them.
According to the American Institute of Architects, “In the U.S. alone, nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gases can be attributed to carbon produced by buildings during construction and everyday heating, cooling and lighting,” which doesn’t account for the emissions and other forms of environmental degradation attributable to sprawl’s land consumption and our reliance on automobiles and highways. A 2018 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report figures demolition debris alone as more than doubling the tonnage of standard municipal solid waste each year. As Semes, Vitti and Jonathan Weatherill have written, “sustainability” didn’t enter common parlance until human practices stopped being naturally sustainable some decades ago, once “we became aware of the negative consequences of unthoughtful progress” based on what Pope Francis called “throwaway culture.”
“We are at a moment of crisis,” affirms Stefanos Polyzoides, the Rooney dean of the School of Architecture who is a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and of the firm Moule & Polyzoides in California.
He elaborates: “The way we live is upside down, and architecture is at the core of it, development is at the core of it, lack of public administration, of public care, is at the core of it.”
Launching the graduate program and the Duda Center became priorities “because we live in a world that is so overbuilt and under-cared-for, the quality of building is so terribly low and the resources we’ve used are so irreplaceable,” he says, that we can no longer afford to keep tearing down what we have and constantly rebuild from scratch. “We’re going to have to modify it,” he says. “Even the trash buildings need to be kept and modified. Whatever is salvageable.”
“I always say the greenest building is the one that’s already built,” says Stalheim, the South Bend architect. The phrase is so common in the field that Semes jokes it should be the Duda motto. Realizing that vision, he says, begins with recognizing that preservation and new construction are inseparable. The lessons of the first must become gospel to the second.
The godfather of this approach is Gustavo Giovannoni, founder in 1919 of the University of Rome’s School of Architecture and editor of Italy’s leading architecture magazine. After his death in 1947, his modernist detractors all but erased his name and influence by hypocritically maligning him as an abettor of the fascist Mussolini regime. Yet it was Giovannoni who effectively ended his own career by standing up to the dictator’s long-term project of deleting Rome’s historic fabric in favor of broad, straight-line avenues and the creation of disproportionately massive approaches to signature buildings. Some of that happened, some of it didn’t. The architect would outlive Mussolini, Semes notes, but his memory would truly suffer for his service as the principal Roman spokesman of those architects who resisted the advance of modernist dogmas in the 1920s and ’30s.
As he prepared to retire in June and hand over the reins of the program and center to Paul Hardin Kapp, Semes translated and co-edited New Building in Old Cities, the first collection of Giovannoni’s writings to appear in English. Introducing the book during a lecture last fall, he acknowledged modeling the graduate program on Giovannoni’s ideas and asserted the master’s tacit influence at Notre Dame since the School adopted its classical pedagogy in 1990 — without even knowing who Giovannoni was.
The Italian was no purveyor of rigid laws but an elaborator of guiding principles, a man more of the spirit than the letter. It is to him we owe the concept of “urban heritage,” the idea that a whole city could be an architectural monument. He held, in Semes’ words, that old buildings “shape the city as a whole and contribute to the cultural identity of its citizens.” He believed in research-driven, scientific restoration tempered by a “sense of art.” He fought the inclination toward sprawl already gnawing at the European and American hinterlands, preferring the thoughtful design of discrete “satellite towns” to freehanded suburbanization without end. And he favored botanical metaphors. Cities were gardens, forests, orchards to be pruned, thinned or trimmed as opposed to the clearcutting championed by adversaries like the French modernist Le Corbusier; cities were also plants to which might be grafted new shoots — modest additions with “a minimum of contrast between new and old.”
“Contrast” is a matter of controversy within the preservation community. Some believe additions should announce themselves loudly and be “of their time.” Giovannoni counseled harmony; he knew the way to achieve it was through careful study of context and appreciation for the modest buildings that make up a city’s fabric. An architect’s genius would be expressed through conversation with tradition — not in self-aggrandizing flashiness or mere invention.
“Learning how to document is one of the most important things I use every day,” says Stalheim, standing on the roof of the county courthouse and explaining Kil Architecture’s role in restoring it.
The firm, which has a reputation as a leader in preservation work, was called after workers found water damage on interior murals depicting local history. Art restorationists recommended the county get the roof fixed first. But why hire an architect to fix a leaky roof?
The courthouse project is no simple matter of replacing asphalt shingles. The dome has an oculus — a circular skylight. The materials are irregular. While the original, 1896 dome was protected by terracotta tiles, a 1997 restoration replaced them with 16 interlocking panels of fiberglass-reinforced concrete that need surface treatment, reworked sealant joints and a water-repellant coating. The pitched roof segments require new underlayments and will get new tiles, and the project includes repair of the terracotta block at the base of the dome. “We want it to be another hundred-year roof,” Stalheim says.
Stalheim reviewed the 1997 drawings, then took his own measurements and photographs, flying a drone and running a Matterport — a “less high-end version” of the digital scanning equipment in service at DHARMA. “Most architects,” he explains, “like to do our own drawings from scratch. That way . . . we can verify what we’ve seen in the field.”
Courthouses have long made county seats like South Bend somewhat seedier than other towns by attracting people as they deal with bad stuff in their lives. But Paul Kapp says the flip side is the stabilizing effect courthouse architecture can have on residents, the subject of a preservation conference he is organizing as Semes’ successor.
One such courthouse launched Kapp’s preservation career: the one his parents bought in the 1980s when he was an architecture student. Abandoned in the 1840s when the seat of local government moved from his hometown of Galax, Virginia, it has served as a hotel, boarding house and barn. Young Kapp needed a project while looking for a job, so he remodeled it into the family homestead.
Since then he’s restored historic hotels, courthouses and college buildings all over Appalachia and the Piedmont. One abandoned hotel had so many pigeons living in it that the smell was overpowering; today it is featured in Southern lifestyle and travel magazines.
Across his career Kapp has noted a shift in preservation’s aims from a mostly boutiquey affair led by homeowners and well-heeled nonprofits toward becoming a matter of public exigency with far-reaching economic and environmental implications. He repeats a story a friend told him about a long-ago dinner conversation with the legendary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who designed “glass boxes,” as Kapp puts it. One student asked Mies whether he ever worried about “heat gain and cold and air circulation.” Mies, it is said, took a pull of his cigarette and dismissed the matter: “That is a technical problem.”
“I think we’re the antithesis of that story,” says Kapp, who flatly states that he is not a classical architect but a preservation architect comfortable in the classical tradition, and who arrived at Notre Dame last fall after 21 years teaching architecture and preservation policy at flagship public universities. “We’re not going to just say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a technical problem; we’re going to let somebody else solve it.
We understand these ideas that have been part of the tradition since humans really started building buildings.”
Talk about the environment, about designing buildings and cities that relate to people, is common in architectural education, Kapp says. But “at Notre Dame, it’s a byproduct of what we do: restoring reason, beauty and trust in architecture.”
The research-driven nature of Notre Dame’s graduate historic preservation program was evident during the spring thesis review. Ghati and Kinyanjui both offered deceptively conventional design projects, but in all cases the guest critics, one a preservation architect and the other an architectural historian for the National Park Service, praised the quality of the research driving the ideas.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Salazar Aguilar ’25M.S. turned his exhaustive study of South Bend’s Monarch Printing Building into an “Illustrated Handbook for Historic Commercial Buildings,” designed to help owners of such properties understand what they have and know when to call a professional. Mozhgan Pakcheshm ’25M.S. used a 15th-century mausoleum dome in her native Yazd, Iran, as a case study to teach her peers and professors how to revive graphic statics, a geometrical technique for structural analysis and design. It was known to ancients but displaced by modern methods, and it is especially useful in the absence of digital technologies. And Mulham Alkharboutli ’25M.S. documented adobe barns in New Mexico with an eye to assessing their seismic vulnerability, but he performed an equally essential task by advancing knowledge of an under-studied structural type and its cultural significance.
Ghati’s project arose out of his summer 2024 internship, during which he spent “nearly every day” inside Atlanta’s Odd Fellows building. His employer completed an exquisite restoration of the building’s south and east façades, but Ghati considers the rooftop unfinished business. Work in the 1990s included the addition of an enclosed, single-story structure on the roof that bears no resemblance to the 1915 edifice in design or purpose. Its windows don’t align with the building’s windows, and it is noncompliant with the drawings approved by the local organization that holds a preservation easement on the building.
Ghati proposed to rehabilitate the rooftop with a structure inspired by the building’s period of significance in the 1920s. His vision relies in part on a single photograph taken from the ground. The professors and guest critics debated whether it might qualify for those helpful preservation tax credits as an addition or as a restoration — an important question when pitching an idea to profit-minded developers — but had to leave the question without a firm answer. Regardless, they agreed, Ghati’s proposal was “just professionally done.”
Still, what makes his rooftop a preservation project? What lessons might he take from Atlanta to Lamu?
He stresses the word “rehabilitation.” He knows he cannot bring the original garden structure back as it was, but he can revive its symbolic and cultural function, restoring not the form but the building and its rooftop garden as cultural assets in a neighborhood determined to thrive.
Or, to speak the language of Gustavo Giovannoni: a little diradamento, a little innesto — prune here, graft there — and what you may have is a restauro, a well-researched, artful restoration of a place where the new tenants of the Odd Fellows Building and their neighbors around Sweet Auburn may make new history together.
John Nagy is managing editor of this magazine.