THOM 5 | Fall / Winter 2015

I ask architect Keith
Summerour to paint
me a picture of his
earliest influences
drawn as a boy
summering on a dairy
farm in the rolling
prairie lands an hour
outside of Selma,
Alabama.
“There wasn’t anything to do,” he laughs, considering
the avid outdoorsman he’s since become. “There was
no television, no air-conditioning. We’d come up with
ideas like climbing my grandfather’s silos, or when
a silo was empty, going inside, looking up and seeing
the sky as a big round oculus.”
Many years later, he says, he was standing in the
Pantheon in Rome and looked up. “There was this
flash of seeing the same thing in South Alabama—
the memory of this rustic childhood mixed with
the realization that these forms, these shapes—the
architecture of man repeats itself.”
An architect of international acclaim, Keith has
earned a name among a group dubbed by historian
William R. Mitchell, Jr. as the “Georgia School
of Classicists,” descendants of, among others,
Lewis Crook, Ernest Ivey, and Philip Shutze. His
predecessors graduated from Georgia Tech and then
traveled to Italy, returning to design projects that
were uniquely Southern and classical.
“I didn’t go to Georgia Tech,” Keith says, “I went
to Auburn and studied in Italy for a while. I’ll
never forget how I came back and saw the world
differently. From that moment forward, I was
compelled to design things that had a more
permanent quality to them.” He says this doesn’t
mean that everything has to have columns, but
rather, must be designed with a certain attention to
proportion, order, form, and materiality.
“Permanence” and “classic” are words used
frequently to describe Keith’s projects, which are
largely concentrated in the southeast, although he’s
built across the country. His process, however, is
anything but traditional.
Looking at his designs, it’s not difficult to see that
the surrounding land plays a significant role in
shaping how they’re conceived. Before anything
else happens, Keith walks the project site. “The
first discussion,” he says, “will involve how the
architecture will grow from the land: where the
buildings fit and how it will respond to the property.”
The next day, he sits down with the client and
holds a design charrette where he puts together
an esquisse, a rough sketch of the property, based
on what the client describes. “Seeing it actually
come to life in front of them,” he says, “with a lot of
char·rette
SHəˈret/ (pronounced [shuh-ret])
is an intensive planning session
where citizens, designers and others
collaborate on a vision for development.
It provides a forum for ideas and offers
the unique advantage of giving immediate
feedback to the designers. More
importantly, it allows everyone who
participates to be a mutual
author of the plan.
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