Student Project, Decatur Memorial Arch, Perspective

Early architectural education in the United States followed the model of the Parisian École des Beaux Arts and shared the French school’s focus on draftsmanship and neoclassical styles until well into the 20th century. Paul McCurry was a student at the Armour Institute in Chicago (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) a decade before the school’s transition to a modernist curriculum under the chairmanship of the German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Monumental sculpture was an integral part of the architect’s training, as seen in McCurry’s student exercise, a grand, domed memorial arch that was inspired by triumphal arches in Imperial Rome and 19th-century Paris, here removed to a garden setting, with high hedges instead of rows offlanking buildings.