Remembering Julia Moore Converse

Penn was a turning point in my journey in architecture, and Julia was an important part in that. I joined the PhD program in 1991 with a somewhat determined plan but also a vow that I will have nothing to do with Louis Kahn. Growing up in the shadows of Kahn’s most monumental work (in Dhaka), working with people who were close to Kahn in Dhaka, having written about the work, I thought I should move to a new direction when I arrived at Penn.

But then a big part of the School of Design is the Archives, a treasure house of all things Kahn which Julia built up as a pilgrim site for architectural scholarship. I did start to work there as a researcher, initially double-minded…‘work with Kahn stuff but be detached’, I told myself. Julia was the boss of the archives, the guardian of architecture’s most important and treasured documents. Well, in a few years, with Julia’s gentle encouragement, I literally looked up all the diagrams, drawings, sketches of Kahn’s Dhaka projects, worked through the work of many architects, and immersed myself in Kahn again, with new twists, and the boss became my friend and greatest supporter.

The many years I spent at Penn, as a doctoral student, researcher at the Archives, exhibition curator, and occasional teacher, included Julia Moore Converse. I now see that Julia’s enthusiasm was crucial in all my undertakings. She may have been like that to all arriving researchers and scholars, but I took on the idea that with her I was special. Julia could make people feel that way. Such things went beyond the rigmarole of scholarship and research. Julia kept us human all along.

She became less the boss than a friend, confidant, supporter, and well-wisher. Her infectious energy, her inimitable laughter, and her natural generosity marked most of my time at Penn. My memory of Penn and Philadelphia will indelibly be of Julia Moore Converse.

I knew Julia first as a mother. My son and her sons were in the same school and ours was invited over for a play date which was rare for us among Chestnut Hillers. When we came to the house to pick him up there was this truly beautiful young woman – Pre-Raphaelite in looks – who turned out to be their mother. I immediately felt this was a person I could talk to. Bob and I enjoyed meeting her and were surprised and happy to learn that she soon became the head of the Architectural Archives at Penn. We enjoyed being invited to her home for dinners. Those occasions were charming and fun. We very much liked the people she brought together.

She surprised us again with her professionalism and we loved the care she gave to our archive. Working with Julia was a great joy and privilege as Penn’s Architectural Archives grew and developed. I felt it was a dream home for our archives and was happy to be involved in making changes to its physical spaces as part of our restoration of the Furness Library. 

Julia was a wonderful trainer and organizer of people. That she did this with wholehearted enthusiasm should not be lost on Philadelphians. She was responsible for bringing many people to Philadelphia, to engage with its architecture, to consult the archives, and to learn from its lessons.

She was a beautiful person outside and in and she certainly added much to cultural vitality of Philadelphia.

From a conversation with William Whitaker

Professor of Architecture, and Dean, Faculty of Architecture, İstanbul Kültür University, Turkey

After completing my undergraduate and graduate education in Architecture at Middle East Technical University in Turkey, I was awarded full scholarship for a Ph.D. education in Architecture and came to University of Pennsylvania as a research assistant in 1981. I still remember my happiness when Dean Holmes Perkins asked me to work in the Kahn Archives. The Archives was a great source of inspiration for me. All students graduating from METU in Ankara, used to have considerable knowledge on Kahn because many of our professors at school either had been students of Kahn or had worked in Kahn’s office

After working for a while in different projects with other graduate students from Architecture and Art History Departments at Penn, I was assigned as the main researcher in a book project on Kahn, which lasted from 1983 to 1986. In the Kahn Archives, in addition to boxes of correspondence, models, memoirs, medals, prizes, etc., there were over 30,000 sheets, both hand drawings and office drawings, including the 6,363 personal drawings that were published in The Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings in Seven Volumes by Garland Publishing.

One of the most unforgettable memories in that period was the day when Dean Perkins came into the Archives and introduced Julia to us as the new curator of the Archives in 1984. She was shining like a star!  We were a great team, Julia and the graduate students, with Dean Perkins supporting us whenever we needed. And Julia was always there to solve our problems. And the result was great. We completed seven volumes of Kahn’s Personal Drawings. Julia and I were colleagues, but we also became friends forever. Not only the two of us, but our families became friends. After going back to Turkey, we never lost touch. Whenever I went to the USA for a visit, Julia and Richard was always on my program. They opened their house in Chestnut Hill not only to me, but also to my son, who became an architect. Julia was always a great organizer. Whenever I was in Philadelphia, she invited all my close friends to dinner in their house, thinking of all the small details. There are so many memories of her…

My dear Julia, I will always remember you with affection…. Rest in peace….

Principal, Atkin Olshin Shade Architects

I’ve only ever had six jobs in my life. For one of those jobs, I was incredibly fortunate to have been able to call Julia “boss.” She was, of course, so much more than that. I showed up to Penn without even visiting Philadelphia (can you imagine?) and Julia immediately took me under her wings and was an incredible support as I learned about life in the big city. She taught me more about Philadelphia architecture than any of our professors and looked the other way when Bill Whitaker and I roamed the Archives’ flat files soaking in as much Lou Kahn, Wilson Eyre, Aldo Giurgola, and C.Z. Klauder as we could. We learned more from those drawings than we could in a lifetime of lectures. Julia loved our youthful excitement and hearing about the connections we saw in those drawings. But we learned more than architecture from her - the most important lessons were about life and love and family. After school, she followed my career and celebrated my accomplishments. A few years ago, I was delighted to see her and Richard and a gaggle of her Smith classmates on a tour of New Mexico and I took them to see some our Pueblo preservation work. It was thrilling to spend time with her after all these years. Alzheimer’s is a cruel, cruel disease but her spark was still on fire. I know she made a profound impact on many and am blessed to be one of them.

Estate Historian, Winterthur, and Executive Director, Wyck Association, 1990-2006

In 1990 I became Executive Director of Wyck, the notable house and garden in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.  The main fundraiser for Wyck each year was the Wyck-Strickland Award Dinner which began by honoring notable architects, then landscape architects and historians.  The event took on new energy, and as so many of you can imagine, became a must-attend party after Julia joined the Committee. Soon she was co-chairing the evening, reimagining it, drawing in friends and colleagues, and making it even more beneficial to Wyck.

She also brought great ideas and knowledge as a member of the Wyck Board as it undertook strategic planning, architectural conservation, cataloguing projects, and added new facilities. For much of the 1990s we were still in an analog mode.  The internet and email were just gearing up.  So that meant Julia and I spent a lot of time on phone calls which were productive, but amusing because of all the things we would end up talking about.

Julia was so sophisticated and at the same time down to earth.  Her world seemed so big to me—all the people she knew, her fascinating background and family. Yet she clearly loved Wyck and working with the dedicated staff and her fellow Board members, and faithfully attended its programs. I have no idea how she found the time!

The run-up to the Wyck-Strickland Award was always a bit crazy.  Julia often hosted a reception and tour at the Architectural Archives for the Committee. The week of the dinner there would be last minute changes.  Cancelations.  Substitutions. Julia was not only co-chairing the event but keeping an eye on the out-of-town guests who were coming to honor people like Vincent Scully, David DeLong, Laurie Olin, Judith Rodin and so many others.  Who should be seated next to each other?  Who definitely should not be at the same table! Who would offer toasts?  Who would tactfully cut them short when they went on too long?  Many of you probably attended some of those dinners and remember Julia greeting everyone with a big smile and keeping an eye on all the proceedings. The dinner was often like a reunion for many who attended.  People were reluctant for it to end, and slow to leave. The morning after we would talk at length, review the evening, laugh at some of the small glitches, and then it was time to start planning the next year.

I remember the memorial service at Germantown Friends Meeting for Hermine Mitchell, the wife of Erhman Mitchell, the first Wyck-Strickland honoree in 1988.  Julia spoke with great affection and admiration for Hermine, noting that she was a role model for her in many ways—smart, talented, always so stylish. That is actually the way I think of Julia.  She was very special to Wyck and to me.

Former Dean and Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design

Julia Moore Converse was a global citizen, spending her early years in Lima, New York, Paris and Dublin, but I think of her as a quintessential Philadelphian.  Shortly after she agreed to become assistant dean of the graduate school of fine arts, she announced that she wanted to introduce me to the Philadelphia establishment, and we attended the annual Lincoln Day lunch at the Union League. After an inspiring talk by James Earl Jones she introduced me to a cross section of the city’s influentials, all of whom she knew by name. She considered it equally essential to show all the newcomers on our orbit the iconic places of the city, organizing board of overseers dinners at the Korman House, Robert Montgomery House, and Ardrossan, and touring dozens of places with visitors and potential donors. And she made us all contributors to her beloved Wyck historic farm.

Julia was also the curator of the school and its illustrious history, mentored by G. Holmes Perkins, and assembled the remarkable Architectural Archives that she continued to nurture while she was assistant dean.  The collection is unparalleled in an academic institution, and she ensured that the work was constantly rotated in shows that travelled throughout the world.

Julia was my invaluable partner in identifying potential supporters for the school.  She led in persuading Peggy Nathan to allow us to sell the Buck’s County farm that she had given us but had sat unused for years, providing the first endowed funds for our fine arts programs.  She cultivated Lady Colyton to ensure that her gift for Charles Addams Hall was shifted to the current building after the church she loved burned to the ground while being renovated, and Julia identified donors to complete its funding. She was responsible for a significant increase in student scholarships in all our programs. And when we decided to rename our school as the school of design to better reflect its new character, she led the effort to explain the changes to alumni and the world.

Most of all, I remember Julia as my colleague who arrived each morning with new ideas about how we could better our resources and add new life to the school.  And she lifted our spirits with her irrepressible optimism and love of design.
 

Director of Facilities Planning, Northerwestern University Libraries

When I think of the School of Design – or the Graduate School of Fine Arts as we called it back then – I think of Julia Moore Converse.  She was an outsize presence during my years at Penn, both in grad school and later when I returned as an employee, and she lives on in my memory as a very significant part of my Penn experience.

Julia provided two essentials for her work-study students in the Architectural Archives: income and refuge.  At the Archives, we could immerse ourselves in the work of great architects – and get paid for it!  Louis Kahn’s developmental sketches on yellow trace, Anne Tyng’s model of the space-frame City Tower, exquisite watercolor renderings and analytiques from Penn’s Beaux Arts era, were all available to us, as we helped organize them for visiting researchers and other Penn students, and helped catalog them for the Archives’ own records.  And Julia presided over all of it, and over all of us, seemingly effortlessly and with joyful, graceful élan.

Her Penn legacy stands in bricks and mortar as well, for the successful renovation of the former faculty club, Skinner Hall.  Over a period of several years, and against enormous odds, she led the successful fundraising campaign to transform that building into the Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall, an immediately popular and intensively used studio space.

Thirty years ago universities did not offer services to improve wellness or quality of life, and then (as now) graduate studies in architecture are grueling.  My respite from the studio was the Architectural Archives, and I am grateful beyond words for the friendships that grew out of those years, with Julia, her husband Richard Bartholomew, her sons Andrew, Denis and Alex, and her wide circle of family and friends.  Knowing Julia was transformational, and counting her as a friend is one of the greatest pleasures and privileges of my life.

Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Museum of Modern Art, and Former Director of Research, Architectural Archives, 1989-1992

My fellow graduate students from the 1980s will no doubt agree that when Julia (who needed no last name) arrived on campus, an unusual force of nature with unbounded energy had landed in our midst.  The hitherto quiet and remote architectural archives, then tucked away on the 2nd floor of the Furness building (some years before its glorious renovation and transformation into the Fisher Fine Art Library), would emerge under Julia’s leadership into a hive of activity. The archives quickly became a magnet attracting a regular beat of work-study students and a home for seminars led by enthusiastic professors who were as excited by primary document research as Julia herself.

We witnessed a consummate multi-tasker at work. Julia ensured that the Archives would be in active use at all times.  That meant acquiring and cataloging new and existing collections, publishing books, planning and designing exhibitions. Julia was not happy unless there were simultaneous projects afoot.  In the course of just a few years, the results were astonishing by any measure. To name just some of the accomplishments:  a 7-volume publication on Louis Kahn’s drawings; an exhibition and catalog on Friedrich Weinbrenner; assisting Dean Perkins and others with the sweeping survey, Drawing Toward Building: Philadelphia Architectural Graphics at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a major retrospective Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture that enjoyed a world tour after its debut in Philadelphia in 1991. These and other projects were punctuated by regular field trips in the Philadelphia region to visit notable buildings and collections, and to interview architects and clients, that usually resulted in more stuff for the archives. Visitors and researchers from around the world were also drawn to the Archives – who could forget the visit from Jonas Salk who spoke about Kahn and the Institute.

It should come as no surprise that Julia was the daughter of a diplomat.  Her hyper-activity was matched by a magnetic personality, a sense of grace and her innate ability to bring people together.  She regularly hosted the extended architectural archives family – students, professors and friends -- to her house.  And on more than one occasion she provided solace and moral support to students who had simply had a bad day in the classroom or studio.

In later years, new deans recognized her talents and not surprisingly, they “poached” Julia to take on leadership roles in the Design school.  I expect she could justify stepping out of the Archives only because she had identified a brilliant successor in Bill Whitaker who has continued her legacy of making the Archives a jewel in Penn’s crown renowned the world over.

Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of the History of Art

I was very fortunate to live for several decades in the vibrant world created by Julia Moore Converse at Penn.

Julia had the imagination to envision a world defined by the convergence of interesting people, beautiful things, and important ideas. And, significantly, she also had the abilities needed to create it: a diplomat’s skill in working with people, a curator’s facility for managing objects, an intellectual’s confidence with marshalling ideas, and an artist’s sense of style.

It took some doing!  When Julia was hired to head Penn’s Architectural Archives by Holmes Perkins, the brilliant talent scout who as dean had assembled the brain trust that came to be called the “Philadelphia School,” the collection comprised a marvelous, neglected miscellany.  The warehouse-sized, uncatalogued archive of Louis Kahn’s office papers had recently been deposited at Penn by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and hundreds of beautiful but unstudied American and European drawings filled unlocked cases in the shabby, un-airconditioned reading room of the “Furness library.”

Julia turned this cacophony into a symphony. Cataloguing and presenting the Kahn collection was the highest priority, but to establish Penn’s credentials among the world’s architectural collections, she chose to focus first on the several hundred gorgeous drawings by Friedrich Weinbrenner, the chief architect of early nineteenth-century Karlsruhe. An NEH grant was won (and two dozen other grantors said “no”), and in doing the work Julia established the pattern for future projects, with a team of grad students collaborating with faculty (I am happy to say that this was me) to study the drawings, write a book, and mount an exhibition. The Weinbrenner show opened in the new Ross Gallery in 1986 and then traveled to Washington, Cambridge, Chicago, Montreal, and (of course) Karlsruhe.

Hard on the heels of this, the first big installment of Kahn research was completed in 1987, with the publication by Garland of seven volumes of Kahn’s personal drawings. The cataloguing of these in turn paved the way for the monumental Kahn retrospective exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which debuted in Philadelphia in 1991 before touring the world. A dozen students, led by Peter Reed and guided by David De Long and me, did the research and wrote the catalogue entries. The collegial spirit of this international, inter-departmental community of young scholars came to define Penn.

The daughter of an ambassador, Julia worked tirelessly to negotiate the donation (there was not much money for purchases!) of major collections to Penn. There were many successes, none greater than the gift of the huge collection of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates. As that transfer was being worked out, Julia worked her “usual” magic with students and faculty (again David De Long and me) to mount a VSBA retrospective exhibition. Debuting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2001, the show was called “Out of the Ordinary,” and that title can be correctly applied to Julia as well.

Julia Moore Converse stood out among her peers by virtue of what she accomplished in collecting, curating, and presenting internationally important material. But those of us who worked with her will remember her best for the way in which she accomplished those mighty things, by nurturing a community of younger and older scholars from around the world and imbuing us with her own intellectual curiosity, kindness, and flair. 

Founder and former director,PennPraxis; executive director, Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, Drexel University

Julia was a force of nature
Kind, generous, smart.
As the heart of the school
Julia grounded us with her elan and brio
Tapping vast wells of empathy
To create magic between people.
I am forever indebted to Julia.
She connected Gary Hack and me
Breathing life into PennPraxis.
I miss Julia dearly.
She was once in a millennium.