Richard Chenoweth AIA
about
overview
Richard Chenoweth is a nationally recognized architect and illustrator who specializes in high design projects and architectural visualization. His award-winning practice blends design, drawing, watercolor painting, digital modeling and rendering, and digital post-production.
Richard is unusually adept in the forensic analysis and reconstruction of architecture resources. His detailed "computer graphic" (CG) reconstruction of the U.S. Capitol, from prior to the fire of 1814, can be found at his website The Computer Graphic Capitol.
architecture
Chenoweth designed a prototype steel and glass entrance canopy for the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority's Metro system (WMATA), winning a national design competition in 2001.
From 2002-2007, WMATA built twenty-eight (28) of the canopies throughout the DC metro region under the aegis of its Metro Canopy Program. Lourie & Chenoweth LLC was Architect of Record and Arup was the Engineer of Record. Grunley Walsh was the builder.
Richard also specializes in residential architecture and particularly enjoys using formal languages that are both modern and historical. Architecture simply needs to fulfill programmatic needs, adhere to structural reality and create of uplifting, beautiful spaces for people to live and work in. This is a typological approach to architecture, not necessarily a stylistic one.
The Gabriel Prize
In 2001, Richard won the Gabriel Prize for the study of French architecture. The Gabriel Prize, a national portfolio competition, funded a three month sabbatical to France. He stayed mostly in Paris, and graphically studied 18th century buildings, especially ones that were known to have influenced Thomas Jefferson, or ones that he may have known. French ideas appear in Monticello, the University of Virginia and the Capitol.
The Computer Graphic CapitolCurrently, Richard is working on a project to recreate the U.S. Capitol as it was built by Benjamin Latrobe from 1803-1814. Latrobe's client, Thomas Jefferson, hired Latrobe to undertake the biggest and most ambitious construction project on U.S. soil at the time. The initial research for Richard's project was funded by a U.S. Capitol Historical Society Fellowship. Richard began by analyzing Latrobe's original construction documents, which are preserved at the Library of Congress.
One of Latrobe's masterpieces was his first Hall of Representatives, which was in the south wing of the Capitol. Destroyed by fire in 1814, the Hall has never been seen before pictorially. Yet it received high praise, with Jefferson referring to it as, "... the most beautiful room in the world." The Hall's faux-painted ceiling with a hundred skylights was held up by a hippodrome-shaped entablature, masonry vaults and twenty-four giant columns based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.
As an architect reading and studying the drawings, many subtleties are revealed that are not evident to laypeople: the design's intricacies, interlacings, technicalities, problems, structure, detail, undocumented changes, inaccuracies, dimensioning, and most of all, volumes of missing information. The challenge of the project is to recreate one of Latrobe's missing masterpieces by trying to synthesize a determinant computer model based on what is known and what is unknown, while also understanding Latrobe's aesthetics, interests, and proclivities.
new media
The final product of Richard's research will be published, in part, as graphic and new media. It will be very useful to architects, historians and laypeople to experience the lost masterpiece as still images and as video. The Hall of Representatives deserves more than a verbal recantation of its principal attributes; it should be seen and felt on an emotional level. Latrobe was a Romantic at heart and attuned to the sublime; certainly he believed in the emotional power of architecture.
watercolor illustration
Examples of Richard's architectural illustration can be seen by following the link in the menu above.
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