Dr Stephen Gage

Dr Stephen Gage

 

Job Title
Lecturer in Architecture

Responsibilities
Teaching in History/Theory and Design Studio

Convenor for Second Year History/Theory

School Examinations Officer

Researcher

Qualifications
B.A. in Architecture (Summa Cum Laude), (Washington University in St Louis, 2007)

M.Arch, (Yale University, 2012)

M.Phil by Research (with Distinction), (University of Cambridge, 2013)

PhD in Architectural History, (University of Cambridge, 2017)

External Responsibilities
Active involvement in AIA UK Chapter

Areas of Interest

  • Urban planning and the history of cities and urban environments
  • History of landscape and the relationship between the urban and the rural
  • The architecture of cultural institutions and their role in shaping urban culture
  • Conceptions of the city in the 19thand 20thcenturies and the interaction between ideals and reality

Publications

  • “Compacting Civic and Sacred: Goodhue’s University of Chicago Chapel and the Modern Metropolis.” (forthcoming book chapter in Modern Architecture and the Sacred)
  • “The Pastoral Ideal and the Invention of Oxbridge: Transforming Pembroke and Balliol in the Nineteenth Century.” (forthcoming journal article)
  • Gray City of the Midway: The University of Chicago and the Search for American Urban Culture, 1890-1932 (PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2017)
  • “Classical Rotundas, Gothic Towers, and the Invention of a Modern Mythology for Yale,” in Mausolus(Summer 2017 Issue)
  • “Ecotectonics” in Perspecta 47: Money(MIT Press, 2014), 129-139, co-author, with Alejandro ZaeraPolo, Can vu Bui, Vincent Calabro, Erik Herrmann and Ian Starling
  • “The British Library Swindon: The Sound & Media Archive”, in Renewing Architectural Typologies: Mosque, House, Library (Nina Rappaport & Leticia Wouk, eds., Yale Press, 2014)
  • Repurposed Pasts? Architecture and Identity in the Gothic Revival University (MPhil Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013)

Career Path

I trained as an architect in the United States and worked for several years in practice at HOK in Chicago, contributing to large-scale commercial and institutional projects, and was lead designer on the award-winning Greenway Self Park.  While at Yale, I served as a Teaching Fellow in visualisation, structural, and environmental design courses.  I was selected as the inaugural Bass Scholar in Architecture in 2012, studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where my MPhil thesis on architecture and identity in Gothic Revival universities was awarded the RIBA President’s Award for Research in 2014. This led on to my doctoral work on urban culture and the planning of the University of Chicago.  After completing my PhD, I lectured at Cambridge, where I served as Director of Studies in Architecture at Clare College.

 

Broadly, my research interests concern the history of urban form in American and British cities, with an emphasis on the evolution of cultural institutions, landscape, and public space in the 19th and 20th centuries.  My work incorporates drawing and mapping as a primary research methodology, using archival sources to create new visual sequences that chart urban change over time.

In my PhD dissertation, Grey City of the Midway, I undertook an in-depth exploration of the University of Chicago, identifying paradoxical planning efforts that promoted both the dynamism of the modern city and the image of bucolic Oxbridge.  This resulted in a charged proximity of urban density and pastoral green space, or urbanised nature, something I believe is indicative of an overlooked but widespread effort to lessen the divide between nature and the industrial city.  My future research work will continue to explore these themes, including a look at Victorian Reading and the work of Alfred Waterhouse, a closer look at the planning of the Chicago Park System, and questions of urbanisation and nature in Inter-War London.