Thomas Barrie
Download MP3Gatley Stone 0:00
Hello. Today we're interviewing Thomas Barrie. Did I pronounce that right? He recently received the Holladay medal for excellence, which is the highest faculty medal that NC State gives out. And he's got many, many other awards that mostly involve education, outreach and also his research, and he is the director of the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities initiative, so I'm excited to talk with him today. So the first question is, what is your job title?
Thomas Barrie 0:38
Well, I'm a professor of architecture and and so I'm, you know, a tenured faculty member in the in the School of Architecture, so that's the title, the job description is probably part of your question. And in terms of, what do I do? Because every professor does something different. We all teach and we all do research. In my case, I teach at both ends of the curriculum. I teach our freshmen in our undergraduate program. I teach a course called Introduction to architecture, which is just what it sounds like. It's an introduction to a full range of aspects of the discipline and profession of architecture. And I end up on the other side of teaching the very last studios in the graduate program we'll call the advanced architectural design studios, and those are the ones where I do a lot of my outreach studios, mostly teaching affordable housing. I also teach graduate seminars in my research area and and teach a beginning design studio for our incoming what we call track three program, as a three year program for students who have a degree in some other discipline who come in and do a three, three and a half year Master of Architecture program?
Gatley Stone 2:08
Yeah, I was, I was interested in possibly doing that, because I'm a structural engineer, so I couldn't get the two year one. Yeah,
Thomas Barrie 2:15
we'd be glad to have you.
Gatley Stone 2:19
So next question is, how long have you been teaching at NC State?
Thomas Barrie 2:23
This I just finished my 22nd year. Okay,
Gatley Stone 2:28
and now we're going to switch to more background. So when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Thomas Barrie 2:33
Well, I was, I didn't have any clear ideas, you know, as a kid, what I wanted to do when I grew up. You know that career decisions came, came, came much later. I was always a kid who though loved to draw. I identified myself as an artist in high school, and I was always a kid and a young man who loved to build things. I was, I would say, always, that kind of creative kid, building things, dreaming up things, and exploring the world, through, through, through artifacts and and and drawings and so forth so.
Gatley Stone 3:22
And where are you from?
Thomas Barrie 3:24
I nobody's from anywhere anymore, of course, right? And that's not such a bad thing. But I was born in Massachusetts, and that's where I I spent the first years of my life. I lived there till I was 16, and grew up in a small, typical New England town, south of Boston, quite close to Boston, seashore town and and so I, you know, I'm from Massachusetts, and, but left there and but eventually ended up back there after I'd finished my master, master of architecture degree, and that's where I started my work in practice, and where a lot of things happened to Me, including getting married in Boston and then. But since then, uh also my wife and I that have lived in a number of places before I ended up here at NC State, and those were just different academic appointments.
Gatley Stone 4:35
So it sounds like, based off your your childhood, that architecture was a pretty straightforward pass path between your interest to your major was that the case, did you have any like struggle to choose, to decide to become an architect? I
Thomas Barrie 4:55
mean, in retrospect, no. But like any. A or at least most young people. And I mean this quite positively. I wasn't sure. I didn't really know. I didn't have a clear picture. And I also was very interested in literature. And so I actually have a undergraduate degree in English literature. And it was during, you know, the course of completing that degree, which I really enjoyed doing and and still find very valuable, very valuable education, I decided that I it was really architecture I wanted to do, because at that point, I'm in my 20s, and I'm working a lot of construction jobs, which I really enjoyed doing. And so was that part? I thought, yeah, this is what I want to do. And so for me, the path was okay. So I'll finish this degree and then go to a three year, three and a half year, Mr. Program, like we have at NC State. So that was the path, but it was not clear at first. And I actually think that's, I encourage everybody to be unclear for a while, so you can explore and and and consider lots of things and perhaps end up with useless degrees that end up being very useful. Yeah.
Gatley Stone 6:28
So did you, could you go through what is, what are your degrees that you have? Yeah,
Thomas Barrie 6:35
so I have a a bachelor of architect. Sorry, it's a BA Bachelor of Arts in English literature, actually, from UNCG, and then I have a Master of Architecture from Virginia Tech, and that's what we call a professional degree. That's the degree that allowed me to go on and do internship and sit the exam and get licensed, and then I also have a Master of Philosophy degree in history and theory from the University of Manchester in England, where where I taught for a couple of years.
Gatley Stone 7:17
So you said that you worked in construction, was that between, you know, in the summers, while you were getting educated, was that between high school and college, like, when were you working construction?
Thomas Barrie 7:29
It was actually, I started doing that kind of work in high school and and then it ended up doing doing summers and so forth, yeah, and especially when I decided I was going to go to architecture school, I made sure that I had some construction job in the summer, until I got into architecture school, and then I did internships. I worked for architecture firms in the summer. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 8:06
uh, did, did both of your parents graduate from college?
Thomas Barrie 8:11
Yes, my dad was had a an electrical engineering degree, my which was a four year, you know, a bachelor's degree, and my mom had a two year degree that qualified her to be an executive secretary, and which is what she ended up doing for quite a few years. So, I mean, they were of the generation that really, first, you know, had a high percentage of of people getting college degrees before that, it wasn't so so common. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 8:54
did you so when you got your first degree and then you realized you'd rather actually be doing something else. Were you sort of nervous about going, like, spending so much time getting another degree and like, either the time or maybe, like, the finances?
Thomas Barrie 9:16
Well, it actually, in retrospect, who knows. I mean, memories are plastic, yeah, and it's very malleable. We always remember things from the present and But to the best of my knowledge, it didn't it. I wasn't nervous about that because I'd done the math. In other words, I saw that if I just went two more years in undergrad and got that degree and then went and did the three year master's program, it would actually be more cost effective and time effective than. Uh, transferring and doing a Bachelor of architecture, which would have taken me five years. Yeah. So I say, oh, in five years, I can get a Master of Architecture and and so that's, that's why I decided to finish it, besides the fact that I was really happy at UNCG and having a blast,
Gatley Stone 10:19
I'm actually, I'm from Greensboro so that's my old stomping grounds, yeah. So could you describe the difference between masters of philosophy and a Doctor of Philosophy? Yeah,
Thomas Barrie 10:35
it is. It's the history of it is in the English system was that it was the, you might say, that the retreat degree for PhD students who weren't going to make it right. So they, they, instead of the doctor, they get the masters. And at least that's how it was explained to me. Then it turned into, you know, a, you know, a degree in and of itself, yeah. And so the difference between them, and this is, I had explored doing a PhD. I because I, I very I decided when I was in grad school I wanted to teach. And in part, because of the Virginia Tech its culture at the time was very much oriented to educating future teachers, you know, future professors. And interesting, yeah, yeah, one of the
Gatley Stone 11:38
reasons you chose to go there, or did you find that? No, I just,
Thomas Barrie 11:40
I, yeah, I just, I discovered that after I got there, I mean, that's the way our lives are, you know, I went to UNCG to do English, and discovered that it actually had a real strength in in their English departments, a real luminaries in their English Department. And then I got in Virginia Tech, and it was actually different from what I expected. I went there because I thought this is a real practical place, and it was anything but a very experimental program. So, so, but I decided to go into teaching, and so I explored doing a PhD. A PhD is a very long program where you do a lot of coursework before you can focus on your research and ultimately your dissertation. You know, I was at the university, you know, University of Manchester, and and, and just had a conversation with the department I was there teaching full time. I was on a couple of visiting appointments. You
Gatley Stone 12:49
already there before you decided to That's right, that's right.
Thomas Barrie 12:53
And, and he explained the M Phil to me, which just absolutely clicked, because he said there's no courses, it's just research. And I basically said, When can I start so, so yeah, so I began it there. The other thing is, you could teach full time and work on your degree there. Much the English system is quite different, much more, at least at the time, much more flexible, than, than, than, than the American system. I'm not saying it was better, but it was better for me. And then I finished it after we moved back to that, back to the States.
Gatley Stone 13:40
Was there a you said you were more interested in research? Was there specific research that you were wanting to do that you had in mind when you got the offer of, like, being able to have the masters of philosophy? Yeah,
Thomas Barrie 13:55
that I didn't have any trouble coming up with a research topic. I I wanted to research sacred places. I wanted to learn more about learn in depth about places of significance, of cultural significance, of religious significance, of ritual significance and symbolic significance, which was really a product of my education at Virginia Tech, even though I didn't really know that. And and in talking with the department head in Manchester, who ended up being, you know, my, my advisor for it, for the degree, he guided me in a particular way that really helped me to frame my my topic. And so there really. Two components, one I brought with me, which was firstly interested in sacred places and a real interest in what I ended up calling spatial sequences and symbolic narratives. And that really came out of my teaching that I'd been doing back in the States on a part time basis, before moving to England, which was in a first year program where we taught a course a studio called Path and place, and it was all about how to navigate through space and end up at some significant ending point. And then my advisor, Roger Stonehouse, very good name for an architect, and whom I'm still in touch with, he introduced me to the case study method, and which looks at what we now. You know, we quite readily call precedent research, but it's really looking at it's beyond precedence as just examples illustrate one thing the case study method is you look in depth at case studies as a means to both explicate right your you know, your particular line of inquiry and validate, right, your your thesis. So between those two in residence, it didn't take me long to to feel like I was really on the track that I I wanted to be on.
Gatley Stone 16:38
Yeah, I think also for that particular research, you're much better suited to be in England, I would imagine, because they have so many fantastic cathedrals and things like that. So could you describe what your thesis, your masters of philosophy, thesis, was, and could you maybe explain it in like, simple terms? Yeah,
Thomas Barrie 17:03
well, it was about spatial sequences and symbolic narratives, you know, at sacred places. And it was based not only on the case study method, but on the on the comparative method. In other words, it's, it was looking at, you know, what also gets called pattern recognition, right? We're looking at, I was looking at this point, at similarities, repeating patterns that one would find, Pan culturally and trans historically.
Gatley Stone 17:44
So, yeah, so like, not just in England, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Thomas Barrie 17:48
all over the world, so and so it looked at examples from around the world and analyzed very specific examples in terms of the spatial sequences, how physically they were made, thresholds, nodal points, you know, steep steps, compression, expansion, all the things that we work with as as as architects, and how that related to liturgy, ritual, mythology, etc. So, for example, one one in this course. Now, in retrospect, it was a great choice because it's it's been a perfect excuse to do a lot of travel. I've traveled around the world, and, yeah, and, and we, as part of it, my wife and I actually, literally traveled around the world. One summer, we, we bought around the world plane tickets. That's awesome. Which are, they're, they're, you can, I believe you can. I think we looked this up just out of curiosity. I think you can still do it. They were flexible. You didn't have to, you know, just keep going, you know, you could. And they were good for a year, and had two different carriers that, so it was flexible enough. And so we did a lot of traveling, and ended up in Japan, and I had a connection through Manchester with a university in Kyoto, which was very fortunate. I had a professor I got paired with there, and had a master's student who was my guide and translator. It couldn't have been better. And I really focused there on, who knows how I found it. I betcha, I was led in some ways, by by by, you know, by my, my, the professor I work with in Japan. Or some of the professors back in Manchester, but I landed on one particular monastery in Kyoto, turns out, as one of the more famous the world heritage site called Daitoku-ji, and the Japanese Zen Buddhist monasteries are there's certain specific things about how they were organized. And they were organized according to what in English got called sub temples, in other words, an organization of a lot of different small communities of monks all with their own, you know, kind of place where they they practiced, you know, mostly meditation. This is all inside the same and all inside a quite large compound that had, along with it, the main temples for ceremonies that you know, periodically, you know occurred where, you know of the the monks, and particularly the the senior monks from the different sub temples would come together so, and I landed on a couple of the sub temples, and it just so happens that these, these temples, had remarkable past sequences just candy for architects in terms of how skillfully they were designed. So first of all, just looking at physically and spatially how sophisticated the design was of of these temples, one in particular, it's called Koto-in, and it's dates from the late 16th century. And it's a typical wooden Japanese domestic architect, really, based on domestic architecture, which takes up getting used to for Westerners to say that's a sacred place, and it certainly was, but not in the way we often understand a religious setting. By the way, when I first arrived at that monastery, it scared me to death because I didn't understand anything. I didn't know what I was going to do, because it all seemed wickedly foreign to me, yeah, but through the help you were
Gatley Stone 22:26
afraid that you wouldn't know what to analyze, or I wouldn't
Thomas Barrie 22:28
know what to do, yeah, I have no idea how to start, yeah. And so I started from, you know, a place of absolute emptiness and, and, and, and, you know, confusion, not a bad place to start, actually, yeah. So, so it in the end of the day. Of course, it became a very rich place to study. And the reason why I'm recalling this one is because it's a place I've, I've, you know, revisited in writing many, many times because of its richness. So because it's IT related this the whole, the entire past sequence, which you have to, you have to kind of understand, you know, look at some of my photographs and probably read my writing to really understand what I'm talking about. But it was fairly short. But what I was what I discovered was that spatially and temporally, it felt much longer, and I was bringing in research on environmental psychology. It's a very multi disciplinary study I ended up doing and human perception, how we perceive space, how we perceive time, and so forth. So that this, this started just it really opened up a whole world on how, ultimately, where I end up with sacred architecture, is the power of the built environment, how much it can affect us with a capital A and how important it's been, culturally, politically, throughout the ages, that is ultimately where my research has gone from gone To is recognizing that the built environment is extraordinarily important for a full spectrum of reasons, from the very practical, we need good housing. Everybody deserves housing right because home is so significant to our lives, to the symbolic power of architecture. I. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 25:01
something that I was thinking about that I thought related to your research, is so most religious buildings around the world, they are dependent upon like or they're sort of based on the architecture of their region. And like that, vernacular architecture is normally based on, like, what resources were readily available to make, like, make building materials, the
Thomas Barrie 25:31
types of materials. Yeah, yeah.
Gatley Stone 25:33
So I'm curious now that the we have such a globalized economy and every anywhere in the world you can build the exact same building. That is going to change, and it is changing the way that our temples and churches are looking. They're becoming more similar. Throughout the globe, they're looking more similar. How do you think that is affecting like our the way that our cultural and religious outlook is changing? Well,
Thomas Barrie 26:10
you know, once you you know, open up, once the whole territory opened up, of a flow of materials and a flow of design cultures and a flow of building cultures. Because if you look at, you know, medieval Japanese architecture, it looked the way it did, not only because of the materials that, you know, the local materials that they were using, but because of the building culture, but also the building guilds, the the organized guilds of carpenters who built all these places, yeah. So once that goes away and you end up, you know, what, with a much more globalized culture, right? Then, of course, that opens up, you know, a realm of possibilities, and and, and, and, you know what appears to be almost limitless choices, and without going into a long disposition on on how the discipline of architecture has responded to the conditions of modernization and modernity, ultimately, it's it, you know, it resulted in both some really remarkable architecture and some very confused periods of architecture, because it's new territory, and what we're discovering now is a return to the limits that produced some of the what we now kind of consider to be some of the great architecture of the world. You think about the Western Christian cathedral and Abbey churches and monasteries they came out of, actually, in some ways, a proto global culture. And Christianity, from its onset, was a cosmopolitan religion, was not based in any one place and and yet you can, you know, trace its its lineage from Roman architecture, the early Christian, Western Christian Church, of course, depended almost entirely on the legacy of Roman, Roman building techniques and building building organizations, in particularly the the the Civic hall of the Basilica, who in turn, borrowed from Egyptian sources, and then it, then, you know, changed and grew as it disseminated, initially throughout Western, Western Europe, so but it had similar limitations that you know, that I've already noted with the Japanese. Now what we're finding is in a world with what we erroneously believe are endless possibilities, we know that there's all consequences. So what we're now looking at, I think, quite rightfully, is, first of all looking at, where do your materials come from, and what is the embodied energy. You're shipping travertine from Italy to Raleigh, North Carolina. You are burning a lot of fuel, not only to extract it. I. But to but to ship it. We're also very concerned about so who's extracting this, this stone that's coming from this part of the world that we know has unethical labor practices, yeah, or child labor and so forth, right? So now, right? The you know, the you know, the limitations start to become self imposed, yeah, and, and so there's the kind of ethical realm of of self imposed or or, you know, self aware limitations. There's also design considerations of self imposed or self recognized limitations, where you may choose to to to to respond to the local building cultures, the historic building cultures, and work within those often a fairly practical thing to do too. Do you want to make use of of of the traditions that have you know existed for generations in a particular area. So, so that's, that's part of how, you know we've, you know, we're, we're the we're the profession, and the discipline is, at the moment, just as a brief introduction, somewhat complicated.
Gatley Stone 31:38
Yeah, I personally would like to see a, I mean, it could, um, I could tolerate, like, a, you know, a contemporary take, but I would like to see more references to, like, vernacular architecture and also using more regional materials, because I find that, like, I don't want to go to another country to see the same buildings that I see back how, you know, I want to see what makes them different than us. You know, I like that aspect of travel a lot. Yeah, so I have so I'd like to switch more towards housing policy. So you contributed to the Raleigh unified development ordinance. Could you explain, like the main changes that this ordinance brought to the city's urban planning vision, and what were the motivations?
Thomas Barrie 32:36
Yeah, okay, so the change to the Udo was that it became legal to build accessory dwelling units. How long ago did that happen? It happened in 2020,
Gatley Stone 32:57
okay, so relatively recent, relatively recently,
Thomas Barrie 32:59
and the short version of the story of how that came to be is, what I think is a is a good story, and that I I've been doing, I've been running housing studios and and got and had worked with the city before, and the person who ran, ran the the planning department had a Urban Design Center. And the director of that came to me and said, this was in 2013 came and said, you know, we just approved the new unified development ordinance, and at the last minute, they took accessory dwelling units out of the ordinance. And he said, Can you, could you help us with this, this one neighborhood in Raleigh that we know really supported this, and maybe we can work of them, and I and, and, of course, I said, Yes. Now just for your listeners, an accessory dwelling unit is a historic building type. In other words, it's been part of the American building culture for you know, for Well, for a very long time, and it is simply a either an attached smaller unit. In other words, it's a small unit in a larger house that has a separate entrance, or it's a standalone unit behind the house, what often get called garage apartments. It's the apartment above the garage, or it's without the garage, and they get named in law flats, granny flats, etc. So they had been legal in Raleigh up until the 1970s and. Uh, and you can find them throughout the inner city neighborhoods of Raleigh, you know, Forest Park, Oakwood, Mordecai, Boylan heights and so forth. And they have a lot of value because they're smaller. They tend to be more affordable because it's, it's giving, you know, a housing choice between a single family house and an apartment building, and also provide flexibility for families. Because your kid, if your kid moves back home and they're too old to live in your house anymore, they can live there. Yeah, your mom needs help. They want to live in her house anymore. She can live with the accessory dwelling. You get old and move in the accessory dwelling in it and rent out the main house. So these are part of the arguments for it. It just turns out that it, we were just hopping on that the national movement that is, I mean, it's like adu. That was what we call them now, accessibility, Adu madness across the states. And so we ran the project in the fall of 2014 and I ran it as a research all my Advanced Design scooters are research and design projects, and it's designed as research as well. So the students did a lot of research on what was happening with accessory dwelling units, you know, nationally, looking at cities who had gotten out ahead of this. We looked at local examples, right? We just made the argument in, you know, some of the public forums that we we ran, was, what are you all getting? You know, nervous about this, but there's accessory dwelling units all over your neighborhood. Yeah, we're not dreaming up anything new here. We're reviving a, you know, a historically significant housing type. So now to bring this, I'll just quickly, because we concluded this, and at the end of 2014 and ran a big public forum, we had about 100 people show up. A lot of excitement around the project, and we worked in the Mordecai neighborhood, and they were very enthusiastic. And it was a wonderful project. I had great students, all graduates. All graduate students, and we paired them up with people who lived in the neighborhood, who were obviously, who, who, you know, we sent out a survey, and we said, anybody want to work with these students? They'll design an adu for you. And so the students got clients. They were absolutely happy. We're all happy and, and so we concluded it and and then the students, of course, they move on. I mean, I can't hold them. They did. They did great work. They moved on. They graduated. But I ended up taking on the role of being an advocate for what now we more readily call zoning reform reforming the zoning to provide, in this case, greater diversity of housing. So the first thing that happened is that the Mordecai citizen advisory council petitioned city council to create a special condition where ADUs could be built in the Mordecai neighborhood. And that's what got the ball rolling. Well, as I like to say, it took us six years and two city councils until we finally got an ordinance that allowed accessory dwelling units citywide, what we call buy right? It's just like if you want to build a single family house on your property, that's by right? You don't have any special permission, as long as you comply with zoning and building code. Same thing with ADUs, yeah. So, so that, I think it's a good example on on the role that certainly universities like NC State can can play where we're we're a land grant, and we, we're here to provide high, high quality education at still not premium tuition to the citizenry of North Carolina and do research to serve the citizenry. Yeah, so, so that gives, you know, a wonderful kind of responsibility and opportunity for professors like me who see the power of the built environment to improve people's lives and can use my position as a professor to, first of all, give my students an enriched educational experience. I never lose sight of that. I tell everybody. Said, Okay, you want us to do this project for you, but the education of my students comes first, but we'll give you a good product, and you'll be able to do something with it, and then to to see policy change because of that, I think is that, you know, it's everybody wins.
Gatley Stone 40:17
Yeah, I think so. I think that's great idea. And I think actually more professors, it seems sort of underutilized that using, you know, your student researchers, to actually make an impact in the community. So I just like to close out with so if you had to give some advice to a student that's considering becoming a professor, what would you give? What piece of advice would you give to them?
Thomas Barrie 40:45
Well, love knowledge and be endlessly curious, and then put in a real large measure of care and compassion and and then top it off with a good frothy top of of optimism and vision for a better Future. If you put all those together, then you should teach,
Gatley Stone 41:25
yeah, that sounds, sounds like a good advice.
Thomas Barrie 41:31
We're in an optimistic profession here.
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