Duvall Decker featured in the Oxford American’s Summer Fall 2020 Place Issue

Peter MacKeith, Dean and Professor of Architecture
Oxford American 
Summer 2020 Place Issue

“We’ve adopted the idea of “A South Forty” as an armature for structuring the conceptual and geographical expanse of the proposition, invoking the agricultural term measuring and locating acreage on a farmstead or homestead, then employing the infrastructural organizer of Interstate 40, which begins in Wilmington, North Carolina and runs west through the American Southeast, intersecting the major north-south interstates of I-95, I-55, I-49 and I-30 along its path, until reaching a delimiting inflection point in Oklahoma City, and ultimately simply as a preliminary limiting number of practices and practitioners for initial inclusion in the survey.

The proposition for a contemporary, place-based, regionally-identified architecture of the American Southeast rests upon a literary and intellectual foundation as much as on a prolific period of constructed design excellence. The argument’s intellectual history can be traced back at least 80 years, with two particular points of reference, the first in 1941, appreciating and then advocating an architecture distinctive to the American South, and the second forty years later, in 1981, advocating for an architecture of “critical regionalism,” in an ever-expanding and seemingly general world culture, and with reference to an identifiable architecture of the new American South, rich on its own terms. The present moment in this fertile region, forty years on and in the middle of a new post-millennial period of architectural production, possesses an immense and still growing vitality, deserving of identification and valuation, but still set against a context of an abstracted assessment of the “countryside” and a “flyover country” perspective by many unfamiliar or distant from the region.”

You can read the full article here.