Johannes Knoops, Liz Moore
Aldus Pius Manutius and the Boy Scouts
Architect/designer Johannes Knoops, AFAAR 1991, FAAR 2000, has returned from a 3-week residency at the Branca Center of the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the island of San Giorgio in Venice where he clearly illustrated the true location of the 1500 AD printing press of Aldus Pius Manutius. His analysis of various historical maps and a digital reconstruction of the Campo San Augustino in the 16th century now clarify a misunderstood context.
“Aldus was a humanist, educator, and printer credited for inventing the first italic type, establishing the modern use of the semicolon, and essentially popularizing books in the form of the octavo, yet existing memorials celebrate his achievements at the wrong location,” writes Knoops. “With the true location of the Aldine press firmly established, proposing a new memorial at the correct location is my next challenge.” That building is currently the home of a popular restaurant.
Knoops is a professor in the Interior Design Department at FIT. His Venice travel costs were offset by a grant from the FIT Faculty Development Grants Committee.
Knoops has also been working with the historic Boy Scount camp which was founded by FDR in 1927. After a year of planning and installation, Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camps Museum opened with complete re-design in August 2017 on the occasion of its 90th anniversary. Knoops developed and implemented the exhibition design. The camp's history is illustrated through scores of images and hundreds of artifacts and memorabilia. It is located in Narrowsburg, New York, and open to the public. Admission is free.
This fall Liz Moore, FAAR 2015, will be Writer-in-Residence at Temple University in Philadelphia. She will lead a graduate-level fiction workshop. Her latest book is The Unseen World.