by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Father Terrence Curry, SJ, AIA, is the founder of Szent József Stúdió Kollégium, a cooperative program of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus. Architecture students in his program work on projects with community service organizations, including the Hungarian Hospice Foundation, to conduct a feasibility study for five new hospices over the next 10 years and the Hungarian Red Cross for organizational restructuring and building renovation.

Curry is both a Jesuit priest and a practicing architect. He combines both passions to facilitate a better understanding of the role of architecture in daily life. He was previously director of design for the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, which he founded in 1994 as a center for applied research in architecture design and neighborhood development. Among his many achievements, Father Curry is the recipient of a 1999 AIA Young Architects Award, a Loeb Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship.

Profession: I am a designer, a craftsman, a teacher, and a priest, in that order. I really don’t make a distinction between being a priest and being an architect. It’s not a choice to be one or the other: This is the way I can be most fully who I am, so I don’t have to choose if I want to be a priest or if I want to be an architect. Things have merged so completely that I really can’t see the difference.

It makes a couple of people in my life nuts. For example, here in Budapest, I say Mass on Sunday. A lot of people assume I’m an ordinary, run-of-the-mill parish priest. I have to remind them that I’m not available as much as they want me to be, because I have my primary ministry, which is to be professor of architecture and to do architecture with nonprofits. I am a priest, but that’s my ministry. Then, the other way around happens too. I’ll be sitting at a table with somebody negotiating a contract, and they say, “I thought you were a priest.” Well, I am, but I’m a priest who knows how to use a Hewlett-Packard financial calculator.

Teaching philosophy: I try to use architecture as a means for developing a sense of community and trying to communicate the powerful impact that the built environment can have on culture and communities. It’s kind of an obvious thing. I don’t think there’s anybody who’s going to try to make an argument that architecture doesn’t have a strong effect on community, but what I’m trying to do is work with local folks who don’t think of architecture as a tool. They just think of it as buildings.

Mentors: When I was in college, there were several people who were very influential for me. One was a lovely man who died a couple of years ago. His name was Stanley Shelhov. He recognized that I had some talent and he was really good at nurturing me. There was another guy at Pratt, too. His name is Rex Curry. He really believes in the power of design and justice and the need for design to be related to justice and helping poor people get out of the cycle of poverty. He committed his life to it and I was very inspired by him. There’s also a dean of the school of architecture in Detroit named Bruno Leon. He’s retired now, but he helped found the school of architecture. He also was committed to the role that architecture plays in reinforcing and understanding ourselves as dignified beings. I’d say these three guys were super influential for me as professional mentors. There are private mentors too: my grandfather was a great craftsman and he helped me think creatively. He was a great teacher. I think I learned how to teach from him.

Hobby: Woodworking is more than a hobby. It’s very important to me. I’ve built quite a bit of custom furniture, but I also use the workshop to teach design principles. It’s one way I’ve learned that people can actively participate in making their own environment. It’s also a way that funding for nonprofits can go a lot further. One way I help nonprofits keep down the cost is to build for them. I often build at a very, very reduced rate with the expectation that they will participate in the finishing and assembly of the pieces in place. If they won’t participate in that, then I won’t do it. I’m not just going to do labor, but if you want to participate in making your place, I can help you do it. I love to do it.

On merging design and ministry: I grew up in a relatively traditional Catholic family where I went to Mass and there was nothing strange about faith and religion. There was this sense of meaningfulness that came from the belief structure, [but] I never felt this religious growing up. You went to Mass, you believed in God. It’s just what you did. I remember that when I was growing up, my godmother had this little sign in her dining room. It’s one of those hokey plaques that you could find at a five-and-dime store that said, “Who you are is God’s gift to you. Who you become is your gift to God.” It’s silly, but I was eight years old. What can I say? It stuck with me and I grew up with a sense that there was something more.

When I studied architecture at Pratt, the Pratt Center was very much involved with directly working with community organizations. I was really taken by that. Also, while I was in college, I volunteered at a school on the lower east side of Manhattan called Nativity Mission Center where I taught art to kids who lived in the projects, mostly Hispanic boys, junior high school kids. It’s an experimental school that the Jesuits run. That’s how I met the Jesuits. I took a course at Pratt where we did a neighborhood assessment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and were working with a community group to develop a master plan. I was taken by these guys who were working with kids that society tossed away and they were offering them a real education—and these were smart guys. They were impressive and they were normal. The guy who ran the place asked, “You go to that art school in Brooklyn? You know, our kids haven’t had art for years, would you be interested in teaching?” I said, “Sure, why not?”

So I developed a relationship with them and that started making a direct connection. The school runs a summer camp at Lake Placid. Somebody donated this beautiful old farm right on Lake Placid, so during the summertime they take all 60 kids up there for eight weeks. When I visited the place, I was struck by it and had this idea of building something together. I thought, “We can teach the kids how to build stuff, applying skills and leadership development.” Like [participating in a] school play, building something can get all kinds of kids with talents they never realized they have to work cooperatively. So we bought the tools, went up there worked with the kids all summer, and we built this really cool, interesting structure. We called it a study center. I learned early on that if you call it a gazebo, nobody is going to give you money. Call it a study center, you can get a little bit of money.

I use this process of working and envisioning together to try to communicate what to me is a basic tenement of my belief: that we are co-creators. Because we’re made in the image and likeness of God, we’re co-creators, and we have an obligation to do as good a job as we can, or at least to look at the job God did and try to create a place worthy of the human person.

Path to Hungary: I got a Fulbright [scholarship] four years ago. Several years before that, I was director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center. After that, I was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, and right after that I got a position as artist-in-residence at Fordham University. I’d been to Hungary a few years earlier as part of my Jesuit training and was intrigued by this transitional culture moving from a communist post-Soviet mindset into a democratic process and free market. The last time Hungarians were independent, it was an empire. It was intriguing to me. My Fulbright was to come here to introduce community design methodology and explore the relationship between architecture and the self identity of Hungarians in a post-Soviet environment.

Role in Hungary: When I got here, I ran a design studio with the students, and we worked with an emerging community organization in the city of Miskolc. We worked with this group of 12 community leaders: some people in the mayor’s office, bankers, local professors, students, and parents to design a community center. This group wasn’t even incorporated when I met them, but the first action they wanted to engage in was to build a community center that would cost $2-4 million. They had no experience raising funds and didn’t even know each other. We put together a program to establish objectives for the organization to make a commitment to build this building and incorporate as a nonprofit community development corporation.

The ironic thing for me was that one would’ve thought that socialism was government by the people [with] a lot of community effort and a sense of community identity. But, as it turns out, it’s really quite the opposite. Community service was more of an obligation that people were forced to do. They were “volunteered” to do it. People warned me not to expect them to come to more than one meeting and not to expect the students to do anything beyond the most minimum requirements, but I had a completely different experience.

We organized six meetings around a workshop process. Nobody else spoke English. Everyone else spoke Hungarian. I thought it would be silly to run a workshop in English, so at the beginning of the first workshop we were rehearsing and all the students knew what they were doing. We started the introductory comments with one of my students translating for me and I realized at one point that he was anticipating what I was going to say, so I threw him the marker and said, “Why don’t you give the introductory comments?” It was a great moment for me to see that the students were able to pick up basic ideas so quickly. Hungary is a very traditional culture. Students are not accustomed to taking a leadership role if there are any adults in the room, not to mention somebody from the mayor’s office and the headmaster of a school, but they did an incredible job. Throughout the whole workshop process they did great preparation and participation with the folks. In fact, at the end of the workshops, no one had even missed a meeting—students or people from the community.

Now they are an incorporated organization called Avas Community Development Corporation and have started doing some programs. I helped them to understand that they’re not going to get that much funding if they can’t prove that they have a track record, so they started a cultural program on an underpass. The communist regime built a lot of six-lane roads that you can’t walk across in traffic, so they dug tunnels underneath them like in the subways. All over Hungary you have these underpasses—and they’re terrible places. What [Avas] has done is claimed one as their own and they’re using it like a community center. They have small concerts there, weekend craft shows, and art exhibits. Now they’re moving forward and really learning how to be a community organization. They’re not ready to build, but the design process was quite successful because it gave them images to think about. It showed how to go about designing something, how it’ll work. But more importantly, it taught them how to establish goals and objectives and develop implementation strategies.

At the end of this process, my Fulbright was up, but the folks at the university asked if I could work with the students for another semester to do the technical development side, so I got funded for another semester. At the end of that year, it was time to go home, but my superior in New York suggested that, considering how well this first year went, I hang around for a couple of years and try to establish a center like I did in Detroit. So three years ago, I started what’s now called the Saint Joseph Studio College. It’s a small incorporated nonprofit. It’s a school that provides design studio courses and consulting for nonprofits here in Budapest. It has usually about 12 students on average. I am accredited to teach and am on the faculty at the Budapest University of Technology. Instead of taking their design studio classes at the university, my students come to my studio and work with nonprofits. In order to participate in the studio, they have to be willing to engage in civic service, commit themselves to doing quality design solutions, engage in a form dialogue about design and social issues, and do independent research.

[The school has] a big woodworking shop to get the students involved in making things. That’s another big cultural challenge. Here, if you go to the university, you don’t get your hands dirty. In the U.S., you almost can’t keep the students away from the workshop. Here, it’s really challenging, but I’ve found the best way for me to do it is just to build stuff and they become intrigued and want to help. We’ve got some great tools there. We’ve got a board. We’ve got alumni now, and we’ve got great relations with the local profession and the university. We have a weekly seminar and it’s happening. We’re building a community around design and that is the objective.

Next step: Next year, we are planning to organize an international design-build studio in partnership with Habitat for Humanity International. The project will be to develop several prototypes that respond to the complex social, cultural, economic, and technical requirements for housing that serves Hungarian Roma (Gypsies). We [hope] to attract architecture design students from Hungary, Western Europe, and the USA. The whole thing is privately funded, and we need as much help as we can get. These are the young men and women who will shape the future of the former communist block.

Next destination: I’ll probably stay [in Hungary] another year and a half or two years. It’s hard for me to say. Part of being a Jesuit is that you have to take a vow of obedience. If my superior in New York feels that I would be better suited or that my skills would be more useful someplace, then I’d go. So there is some talk about me going to China in a couple of years; as if Hungarian isn’t hard enough to learn!