McClure, Ursula Emery & McClure, Michael A.
McClure, Ursula Emery & McClure, Michael A.
Bio Sketch
Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure are American architect-educators and founding partners of emerymcclure architecture, established in New York City in 1996 "as a vehicle to explore the role of design as an active agent in social effect," later based in southern Louisiana. Ursula Emery McClure (FAAR, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, NCIDQ) served for some twenty years as a professor in the LSU School of Architecture (A. Hays Town Professor; now listed among its emeritus faculty), held the Ralph Hawkins Visiting Professorship at the University of Texas at Arlington, was named on ArchDaily's list of thirteen leading female architects, and is now on the faculty of Kansas State University's College of Architecture, Planning & Design. Michael A. McClure (FAAR, AIA; b. 1969, Pryor, Oklahoma) taught at the LSU School of Architecture and coordinated the graduate program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette before being named Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at Kansas State University. Both are Fellows of the American Academy in Rome; the firm's practice and research work on the confluence of "multiple, seemingly contrary systems," including Louisiana coastal and climate adaptation.
Key Works
- *Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect* (2018) — chapter 12 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge): the definition of the prospect of the aspect, the hermetic-seal counter-position, and the Pantheon/Säynätsalo/Pompidou exemplars.
- emerymcclure architecture (practice, 1996– ) — design-research practice exploring design as "an active agent in social effect" (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with these authors that have pages in this wiki:
- prospect-of-the-aspect — their central concept: experiential multiplicity, recursion, and simultaneity of interior and exterior
- hermetic-seal — their counter-concept: the air-conditioned, code-completed, discipline-isolating absolute boundary
- axis-mundi — the Pantheon's vertical instrument: the oculus collapsing interior, building, and exterior
- obsolescence — the temporal stake: the Walmart's seventeen-year useful life against the persistence of inclusive spaces
- inside-outside-dialectic — the parent boundary-problem their chapter re-poses
- interdisciplinarity — the disciplinary diagnosis: "Only the design disciplines separate an interior from an exterior, from a landscape, from an urbanism"
Relevance to the Core Research
The McClures give the wiki's interior-architecture cluster (Marinic's Reader) its thirteenth self-conception — the scalar-inclusivity conception: interior architecture defined not against architecture but against disciplinary isolation as such, with the interior/exterior/landscape/urbanism continuum experienced as connected conditions. Their chapter also supplies the wiki's most explicit temporal criterion for spatial quality — persistence against obsolescence, evidenced from corporate financial disclosure — connecting the interior cluster to the wiki's sustainability and everyday-vs-iconic concerns, and their Pantheon/Pompidou analyses link the prospect/aspect condition to the wiki's perspective and centering lineage (La Coe's Pozzo, the axis mundi).
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from these authors' work:
