Newly Released: In Search of Spatial Scripts
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Author: Peter Waldman
Fall 2025
ORO Editions
In Search of Spatial Scripts by Peter Waldman is a re-collection of improvisational stories and stage sets that traces two construction sites: Parcel X Encampment (1994), Waldman’s self-designed home in North Garden, Virginia, and The Goodwin Memorial (2004) situated on the North Terrace of the UVA School of Architecture’s Campbell Hall. The latter pays tribute to former A-School student Eric Goodwin, who passed away during his final year of study in 2002. Waldman and his then students Sam Beall, Jennifer Findlay, and Justin Walton designed and built the memorial.
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Organized in three acts, the book’s structure draws on literary and theatrical precedents—Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night—reinforcing Waldman’s framing of architecture as performance and storytelling while guiding readers through the evolving scripts of place, memory, and construction.
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Waldman further orchestrates a call-and-response with the book’s contributors, allowing readers to encounter Parcel X and The Goodwin Memorial through multiple lenses. The narrative incorporates the photographic insights of former students Ben Small, Sofia Kuspan, and Patrick Sardo, reflections shaped by Waldman’s decades-long friendship and blog exchanges with David Turnbull, and his introduction to David Ireland’s House as Museum in San Francisco in 2023.
In Search of Spatial Scripts is the culmination of the author’s three-part research project, or trilogy, which includes Lessons from the Lawn (2019), on the significance of Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia, and Connective Tissues (2020), a collection of essays on American pragmatism. The release of In Search of Spatial Scripts marks the conclusion of a quarter-century curriculum effort at the scales of the A-School and the University of Virginia by William R. Kenan, Jr. Endowed Professor of Architecture Peter Waldman.
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About the Author
Peter Waldman is rumored to have quarried mica ever since his early childhood explorations of the wilderness of New York City more than half a century ago. He studied architecture from 1961-69, first at Princeton University, and later as a Peace Corps volunteer in Arequipa, Peru. He served his apprenticeship in the studios of Richard Meier briefly and more substantially with Michael Graves. Since the 1970s, he has been an architect and educator teaching first at Princeton, then at Rice University and currently at the University of Virginia, where he is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture.
Contributors
WG Clark
Ann Hamilton
David Ireland
Sofia Kuspan
Henry Moss
Patrick Sardo
Ben Small
David Turnbull
Karen Van Lengen
