Jan Wampler has been coming to Block Island for more than 50 years and has owned a house on the island for 35 years. An architect and urban designer, he has designed projects in China, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Ecuador, Honduras, and the United States and has received numerous awards for his buildings. He has also written two books: “All their Own” and “Open Notes for Young Architects: Search on the Journey.”
Wampler has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor of architecture for 45 years and has recently been a guest professor at the University of South Florida for one semester per year.While studying architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), he also painted, and he recently resumed painting, specializing in watercolors on Chinese rice paper. “I find painting very rewarding,” he says. “You know within minutes if it is good, but with architecture you have to wait at least three years to know if it is good.”He paints the sky, the land, and the “space between” the two, an idea he also explores in architecture.
His exhibition is comprised of 25 paintings of landscapes and sky in four categories: known landscapes, imagined landscapes,
