Professor Emeritus James Warfield Receives Chancellor’s Scholars Award

Professor Bruce Michelson, Director of the Campus Honors Program, has announced that Professor Emeritus James P. Warfield has been named recipient of the 2008 King Broadrick-Allen Award for Distinguished Service to the Chancellor's Scholars Program.

In 1995, Professor Warfield was invited by the Chancellor to prepare a special course in architecture for non-architecture students. Professor Warfield proposed a unique seminar to be conducted in a 15 passenger university van where twice-weekly students would visit significant works of architecture in Central Illinois and Eastern Indiana. The intent was that the course be taught for “one or two semesters.” Now, 13 years later, the course “Experiencing Architecture” is a cornerstone offering in the Campus Honors Program.

Sites visited by Warfield’s students include the work of many past and present architecture faculty: Jack Baker, Jack Swing, John Replinger, Dick Williams, Jeffrey Poss and Granville Keith. They range from historic buildings such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana Thomas House in Springfield and the David Davis Mansion in Bloomington to vernacular sites like the UIUC Round Barns to the Flatville Grain Elevator. They include significant landscapes: the Robert Allerton Park, the quads of the University of Illinois, and Meadowbrook Park. UIUC campus visits include the Assembly Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, the Erlanger House, the Siebel Center for Computer Sciences and our own Temple Buell Hall. And they include a field trip to Columbus, Indiana to see the works of Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roach, I. M. Pei, Paul Kenyon and other leaders in our field.

In presenting the Broderick-Allen Award to Professor Warfield at the CHP graduation reception, Professor Bruce Michelson said, "Professor Warfield courses have been standouts for substance, vigor and intellectual adventure; and they have broadened and transformed the aspirations and cultural literacy of hundreds of our best students. One of the hopes for the Campus Honors Program is to provide experiences like this, that take our Chancellor’s Scholars in new directions, drawing upon their strengths for independent work and vigorous classroom participation -- freewheeling adventures with no compromise in content. Doing this kind of teaching and mentoring well is quite a trick -- and the record is clear that for many years Professor Warfield's efforts have won the highest praise from a tough and brilliant young audience.”