This week we have one of my former teachers – a great architect and mentor who I now can call a friend Joe Biondo. Joe is joining us to talk about his lesson “Empty Your Tank”.
I met Joe as a 4th year architecture student, he was my professor. At the time, I knew very little about his background or his amazing talent to teach and inspire, design and mentor. I suppose the best teachers are usually like that – their most profound lessons happen long after the course has ended. Somehow during our short time together, Joe impressed an idea about Architecture that was interwoven with something much deeper. Joe talked about Architecture and life interchangeably – as if to cultivate a passion within us to give our best to the world.
After that studio, Joe continued to build beautiful buildings across a Post-Industrial Pennsylvania landscape. And I began to trace his footsteps in my own career – working at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson the same place he started over a decade before. Joe practices in Bethlehem PA – a place defined by its industrial history and legacy of its namesake Steel company. His built work as a sole practitioner is a collection of handsome, timeless, well-crafted, and site-specific works – each with their own story and material narrative. In 2009, he completed perhaps his more enduring and profound work – his own home called the “house of equanimity”. A multi-year project concluded with a dwelling so magnificent that it was given its own monograph in 2018.
Joe is someone who is gifted beyond measure but would never let you know it. He is kind and generous, thoughtful and determined.
Beyond his amazing ability to design, is his insatiable wisdom, something that continues resonate with me. I will never forget the day he asked our class “how do you want to be remembered?” A question that still rattles around in my soul.
Joe has a way of leading you down the right path, but seldom giving you the answer. I guess that is the genius of the sage – showing you where the water is, but knowing you have to make the journey to drink it.