Letter from Nancy Shapero '81

 S H A P E R O / M c I L R O Y D E S I G N 

21 Rodman Street 

Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 

(617) 522-4247 

shapmc@rcn.com 

January 12, 2011 

Professor William Wagner 

Dean of the Faculty 

Williams College 

Williamstown, MA 

Dear Dean Wagner, 

As a member of the class of 1981, I am writing to you in support of Sheafe Satterthwaite and to urge you to consider extending his contract for teaching at the college. Sheafe was a very influential teacher for me while at Williams and I have kept in contact with him in the years since. 

I took Art 201, his course in American landscape history, the fall of my senior year. Taking this course and an additional seminar in the spring changed my career path and brought me to my chosen profession, landscape architecture. At the time I was a biology major. Plant ecology and field biology were my areas of interest. I had also taken many art history and history courses, and was studying Chinese, having spent a winter study in China, and the fall of my junior year at Chinese University in Hong Kong. It was in Sheafe’s class, and through many hours of discussion with him in his office, that I realized that I could bring all of these interests together in the field of landscape architecture. After each talk we would be surrounded by books and images from his extensive slide collection and I would go away with my head full of potential research topics and the germ of an idea of how I would spend my professional life. 

I still remember reading many of the texts that were on Sheafe’s reading list for Art 201. They are all classics in the field of landscape history. Many of these books appear on reading lists in graduate school programs in landscape architecture, but are not often found in liberal arts college courses. The list included books and the magazine Landscape by J.B. Jackson, Streetcar Suburbs by Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The American Home by David Handlin and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. 

Sheafe is a dedicated and hard working teacher who is extremely committed to his students. His form of pedagogy is different from many other faculty members’, but one that is very important to have represented on campus. Sheafe teaches students to look at the ordinary landscape around them and to question what they see through direct observation. He has traveled the USA extensively and amassed a personal slide collection that is an important record of the built environment in the late 20th century. He also uses the backgrounds of all the students in the class as a basis for discussion. 

His well planned field sessions are another one of his great teaching tools. Periodically I have assisted him in conducting a session in Boston for his course The North American Park Idea. Every session includes a visit to the Boston Athenaeum to look at original maps of the city, a visit to the 17th century Granary Burying Ground, and then a walking tour of the 19th century Boston park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. At each place Sheafe has organized experts to field questions and comments from the students. Each session also includes a visit to new parks in the city, places I know well that might help the students understand how current designed spaces are created and how this might compare with historic parks and open space. 

Sheafe’s teaching methodology owes a debt to the late, great J.B. Jackson, who taught for decades at Harvard and Berkeley and whose books are still some of the most important theoretical work in the field of landscape history. John Stilgoe, in the department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where I went to graduate school, is another of Jackson’s protégé’s. There are very few teachers in the country with direct ties back to Jackson. Williams is fortunate to have someone such as Sheafe on their faculty. Sheafe’s personal connection with Jackson allowed me to meet Jackson at his home in New Mexico in 1991 only a few years before he passed away. At this meeting Jackson told me that Sheafe is an important figure in the field of landscape history. 

To a future planner, architect or environmentalist, Sheafe’s classes are invaluable. To some, his teaching style might seem didactic. To all, his classes are a great introduction to the history of the built environment that should make them more thoughtful about the places they will inhabit. The future stewardship of our built environment is one of the pressing issues of our time. 

In my experience Sheafe was the most accessible and caring teacher I ever had as a student at Williams. He is still as capable and as hard working as ever. Never has a teacher spent more time commenting on student papers and nurturing the intellectual development of his students. I hope for the sake of the college that you consider reinstating him and allow Sheafe to teach for as long as he feels committed to his students and to Williams. 

Yours sincerely, 

Nancy Shapero ‘81 

Landscape architect 

cc: Adam Falk, President, Williams College