As a design professor, Seligmann’s studios were inevitably accompanied by an intense series of lectures in history and theory, often in the early evenings at the start of a semester. Untitled and improvised, they were whirlwind introductions to diverse strains of modernism, their ideological formulation and their descendants, beginning sometime in the nineteenth century with Wagner, Olbrich, Perret, and Sullivan, Klimt and Cézanne, occasionally back to Soane and Schinkel, veering off to Häring, Guimard, Gaudí, and so on. Despite these exhaustive (and exhausting) lectures, there was always enough time for a glance back at a vestibule by Michelangelo, a loggia by Vignola, piazzas in Venice and Siena, gardens in Bagnaia and Settignano.

At the same time, he was familiar with all sides of the modernist debate as it flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century. He demonstrated a knowledge and, often, an admiration for many of modernity’s more manifesto-like projects: Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt project, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Ron Herron’s Walking Cities, Kisho Kurokawa’s Nagakin Capsule Tower, and so on.

All of this underscores the irremediable value of precedent, of building upon and beyond the thoughts of others, and of developing an architecture that is inevitably and intensely dialogical.

Cadenza

For those accustomed to going there, it was necessary to enter Werner Seligmann's Homer Avenue studio sideways, and by carefully stepping over an exaggerated threshold. This entrance—solid wood with a secondary screen, only about 17" wide, was both like and unlike a door, perhaps more of a window than a door, or perhaps more like one of Le Corbusier's ventilators, or like the door into Le Corbusier’s Petit Cabañon from the neighboring café, hidden within a mural: a door into a secret and private world. Next to this “door” was a source of daily inspiration: a stained glass window salvaged from a Frank Lloyd Wright house during its demolition. This studio, a single story of brick and wood, stood physically and materially between a brick house and a wooden one.

The brick house, situated on a corner, was two-stories tall and a truncated square in plan, or perhaps a fragment of an octagon; unusually, it aimed its symmetry toward the corner, to be entered ambiguously on both of the streets to which it formed a corner. One such entrance led to a receptionist's station, and then to a small office/library. The other led to a residence. The brick house was connected to the studio building, on a slightly different grid, by means of a passage lined with a blackboard on the east side (for sketching full scale details), and a simple acrylic wall of exposed 2 x 6 studs on the outside (a sort of brise-soleil américain), but with a proper, solid door, protected from the street by a short brick wall forming an entry court. This passage was a bit like an enclosed breezeway, although no one would dare call it that. Its door was probably opened only when moving furniture, or in a hurry.