Tracing Lineages: On Architectural Typologies and Spatial Networks with Peter Stec

Over the course of an academic year as a Virginia Architecture Fellow (VAF) at UVA, architect and researcher Peter Stec expanded his ongoing research seeded nearly a decade ago. Stec, who is interested in how architecture derives meaning from a cultural network of precedents, has focused his work on interconnected architectural types linked to the academic campus. 

His current research titled Stories on the Lawn picks up from a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Award he received in 2014 to study at Rice University’s School of Architecture. At that time, he visited the University of Virginia’s campus for the first time and began a deep dive into how the grounds have served as a precedent for many other subsequent academic master plans and contemporary campuses. 

Stec leaned into an analysis that not only examined texts and artifacts that documented the ideas Thomas Jefferson had for the University of Virginia’s campus design, but also rigorously developed techniques for drawing networks and connections that are inscribed, physically and temporally, into the constructed environment.

During his residency as a VAF from fall 2023 – spring 2025, Stec has evolved this body of work, with the help of current UVA School of Architecture students. Using drawing as a fundamental language and form of communication, he and his students traced the invisible networks present within the physical context of the academic setting at the University of Virginia — and how these networks support, or deny, opportunities for the free exchange of ideas and the advancement of knowledge. 

We sat down with Stec to ask him to elaborate on this longstanding research trajectory, its origins and future goals.  Through this Q+A, we gain insight into how the careful study of precedent, through a multi-layered tracing of lineages, can both reveal the patterns embedded in our environments and project new spatial opportunities for interaction.


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Peter Stec Lawn and Precedent Mappings 2
Stories on the Lawn precedent and spatial network mapping by Peter Stec.

 

This research goes back to a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship you received 10 years ago which established an exchange between your home institution at the time, The Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava in Slovakia, and Rice University’s School of Architecture, located in Houston, Texas. 

At that time, you visited the grounds of the University of Virginia for the first time. What were your initial impressions and how did those evolve into shaping your research interests focused on academic campuses?

At that time, I was just starting to map in my mind the complex cloud of references wherein the University of Virginia is an important nexus. I arrived on Grounds on a hazy day in March. The Rotunda was being renovated and inaccessible. I may have entered some pavilions inadvertently, thinking classes may still have been held there. 

I remember the impression of a domestic scale layered with hints of monumental precedents — as in a classroom that combined various scales of furniture for students and teachers. The irreverent game of diverse architectural clues, with the colonnade unifying them at the scale of the students, started to pull me in. 

The lawn appeared playful, a void at the center of the complex that seemed unique despite its relationship to courts, quads, and cloisters — a public landscape, or a green forum.


Your visits and observations of academic settings allows you to use drawing, through multiple tools and methods, as a way of distilling what the architectural idea of a building or landscape might be — Tell us more about those methods, and how you use drawing as a specific type of language.

The drawings trace converging ideas of campus environments as they transform over time within a project, between architects, and across different eras. They layer precedents and followers to create abstract “sculptures” reaching deep into the past and future. 

As architectural ideas are referenced in letters, plans or models, over time, they generate a network of spatial patterns — constellations of Malls, Mats, Lawns developed in different locations and configurations. These are creative copies, rather than heroic originals.

Similarly to a spoken language(1), these patterns carry varying content, depending on the site and scale of the campus, and yet they display a comparable structure. This similarity conveys a depth of meaning distinct from that of a pastiche, a traditional vernacular, or a canon, becoming a rich palimpsest of previous places(2).

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Mapping of UVA campus and other academic settings by Peter Stec - Detail view
Detailed (partial) view of drawing that maps and compares spatial and organizational relationships between academic campuses by Peter Stec.

The architectural projects are represented both as isometries, and as illustrative networks, to test various ways of mapping and comparing their spatial perception. The mapping, as a drawing method, hints at how we transpose our environment into layers of grid cells in our brain, creating its discreet image(3).

The topology of the networks enables a comparison
across campus fragments and conveys internal 
movement, information exchanges, spatial 
hierarchies and programmatic juxtapositions, 
from teaching to living, to learning. 

Still, in this closely-knit mix of all programs on a compact site, the original plan of the University of Virginia remains an exception in the unique spatial pattern it seeded.


How do you see the architectural and spatial lineages of academic environments related to other typologies — such as research centers or headquarters for tech companies? What connections have you uncovered?

This is a topic I plan to develop further in the next phase of my research. The campus drawings that I produced were, for example, retroactively influenced by Paul Baran’s network research at Rand Corporation(4), and by the related spatial organization of the former Rand building that John Williams, its director at the time, outlined as a “square lattice” to maximize interactions among its researchers(5).

The current distributed economy may appear malleable and adaptable to any spatial configuration, using the campus merely as a metaphor. At the same time, a transformation in terms of connectivity has been occurring, from global headquarters of central business district towers with their linear, rigid stacks of floors towards a loose, denser organization of ‘landscape’. The space planning of the Quickborner consulting group defined a non-hierarchical environment called “office landscape.” Later, the campus structure has been explicitly referenced for example by Facebook’s massive 2D field in Menlo Park or Google’s 3D hills in Mountain View. The next step in my research is to look closer at the lineage of such connective landscapes across academic and research environments.


This body of research was also supported by a recent research studio you taught called “Nameless Field”. Tell us about the framework for that studio and some salient discoveries your students made about academic spaces and landscapes, here at UVA.

“Nameless Field” is an intriguing, almost invisible site I first glimpsed over satellite: its lack of a proper name points to its blurred boundary as well as its undefined program. At once staging area, sport field, landscape, dry polder, it is also an important node close to Central Grounds and the growing Emmet/Ivy Corridor. 

Thomas Jefferson intended it to become the university’s botanical garden and its formal layout would have been a counterpoint to the Lawn. 

As a literal field, which is the original meaning of “campus,” 
it displays qualities specific to landscape in its loose connectivity across heterogeneous uses.

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Peter Stec diagrams of UVA Nets 2
Mapping spaces and programs across the Lawn by Peter Stec.

At some point, the University outgrew the spatial image of knowledge embedded in the Lawn once the pavilions no longer represented individual departments. At Nameless Field, the studio proposed to create a comparable, contemporary nexus where all of UVA’s schools would be spatially represented in a nod to the pavilions, or like embassies representing their respective countries. The students had to imagine and design ways to enable interdisciplinary collaboration across the schools in a shared “landscape” at the intersection of all the various professional fields.

It was fascinating to follow students as they were documenting how various spaces on Grounds support their search for ideas and collaborations, focused study or relaxation, outlining an architectural instrument catalyzing creativity. Their projects on Nameless Field became reflections of the historical Lawn’s radical, poietic potential.


The Virginia Architecture Fellows exhibition was an opportunity to exhibit your research during a moment of its evolution. What are some next steps or future goals for advancing this project?

It was a wonderful opportunity to teach the research studio at the beginning of the fellowship, and I look forward to concluding it by teaching a seminar on the topic in spring 2025. I hope these teaching opportunities will clarify the main outline of arguments, refine the modes of representation, and test them on further examples for a future publication on campus patterns.

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Virginia Architecture Fellows exhibition Photo by Tom Daly
VAF Exhibition in Elmaleh Gallery, Campbell Hall. Photo by Tom Daly.

This research evolves from an initial intuition aiming to distill elemental architectural ideas to explore their algorithmic recombination. As we import many tools from other disciplines, from modeling software in the 80s, through animation packages in the 90s to current image and text-based AI, it is inspiring to see how the architectural discipline has shared its inventions and design tools with other fields — the perspective, construction and organization techniques, pattern languages, parametric tools, and so much more.

How can architecture now contribute to a creative,
poietic understanding of spatial intelligence that
goes beyond the visual or text-based, to include
 its spatial, structural, material aspects?


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Peter Stec headshot by Tom Daly
 

About Peter Stec
Peter Stec is a registered architect, principal and founder of Place/pace, and one of the inaugural Virginia Architecture Fellows at the UVA School of Architecture. Across research and practice, he has developed longstanding scholarship and innovative design that looks beyond the material division of architectural envelopes to deeply examine spaces of exchange and interaction. 

Project Team
Lead Researcher: Peter Stec
Student Research Assistants: Atheeni Eacharath and Kirmina Sadek

Selected/Key Resources
(1) See e.g. Michael Dunn, Greenhill, S., Levinson, S. et al. “Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals,” Nature 473 (2011): 79–82, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09923. An additional influential source for the research concerning the increasing expressive power of mathematical languages is Ladislav Kvasz, Patterns of Change: Linguistic Innovations in the Development of Classical Mathematics (Birkhäuser, 2008).

(2) Similar to the memories of Rome described in Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, Civilization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).

(3) Edvard I. Moser, Yasser Roudi, Menno P. Witter, Clifford Kentros, Tobias Bonhoeffer and May-Britt Moser. "Grid Cells and Cortical Representation," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 15, no. 7 (2014): 466 - 481.

(4) Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” (RAND Corporation, 1964), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html.

(5) Michael Kubo, Constructing the Cold War Environment (Harvard University Thesis, 2009)

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The Virginia Architecture Fellowship at UVA School of Architecture supports emerging design practitioners and educators, with a focus on developing creative research and pedagogy at UVA.   
 

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