The Campus as a Village
Updated: Sep 4
Remarks at the TASIS 70th Anniversary Celebrations, before a visit to the two new MacDermid buildings
22 August 2026
Note: The roughly twelve-minute video you’ll find below was slightly truncated at the beginning, so I’m providing the brief text that precedes what you will see and hear. The noise that interrupts me occasionally in the video is a blast from a nearby hot air balloon…
Everything you see on the hillside that we’ve built in the last thirty years, apart from the two new MacDermid buildings, is illegal. Later I’ll tell you how, and how TASIS got around the law. But first I have to tell you why.
When I interviewed for the role of TASIS's campus architect 30 years ago, at the end of the interview Lynn Aeschliman asked what I would do for them. They had a map on the table of the campus and the nearby village of Certenago, and I could see that the size of Certenago (about the size of my hand on the map) was the same size as the area around the building they had built in the 1980’s called Monticello. I put my hand onto the land around Monticello and told them they could build Certenago on that land and preserve the rest of the campus as open space. I was hired.
Over the last thirty years the campus size has grown, the school's needs have changed, the world has changed, and the master plan has changed with them. What has remained constant is the idea of the compact village, and preserved open green space as a consequence.
PS: I've made peace with the 8m setbacks by remembering that the via Giulia, the great Renaissance straight street in Rome, is 8m wide. At the MacDermid buildings the intervening slope and retaining walls effectively create two parallel streets between the two buildings.
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