"All cannot live on the piazza...
but everyone may enjoy the sun."
Italian Proverb

About the Author - Sandra Davis Lakeman

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Sandra Davis Lakeman was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, and raised in historic Marietta, Ohio. Weekly walks through the woods with her mother instilled in her a love of nature, and her grandfather's fine cabinetry expertise gave her a keen appreciation for craftsmanship and natural materials. She was the only female in her drafting class in High School, and her skills were noticed by two of her teachers who not only hired her to do professional work, but also encouraged her to pursue a career in Architecture. She attended the University of Cincinnati through the Cooperative Education program where she completed the first four years of a six-year Architecture program before the raising of her family of three children took precedence. 1977 was a banner year for Sandra; she completed her Master of Architecture at the University of Oregon and obtained her NCARB license. Instead of returning to Portland to work professionally, she started her teaching career at the University of Arizona. That same year, her eldest son was recruited by Arizona for being first in the nation in the High School mile. In 1981, she took a position at Cal Poly and in 1986 became one of the first tenured women in the Department of Architecture.

Her first awareness of the notion of light as a powerful design element was in the early 70's when her award winning design, a creative solution to conserve energy through the use of reflective surfaces, was installed in a commercial building in downtown Portland. At the University of Oregon, a theory class enriched her view of light as the coursework led her to analyze the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, a site that she had never forgotten following a two-month tour of Western Europe in 1966. At Arizona, as at Cal Poly, she worked with students in a theory course studying natural light in urban settings. The students built physical models of Mexican and Italian urban spaces, placed them on a device that duplicated the sun and earth relationships, and photographed them for further study. Some of the student work is part of this exhibition.

In 1983, she began a long-standing relationship with the city leadership of Siena where in 1992, the exhibition was showcased in the local Town Hall. The exhibition catalogue 'Natural Light and the Italian Piazza' was published in Siena at that time. She worked closely with Mark Lakeman, her son and designer, who sketched the majority of the illustrations in the book. In 1994, the exhibition was showcased in Portland, Oregon under the sponsorship of the local AIA chapter. Jennifer Lakeman, her daughter and a Cal Poly Graphic Arts and Design graduate, assisted in the second edition of the catalogue that was published to accompany the Portland event.

Ms. Lakeman was awarded several grants from Cal Poly from 1983 to 1992 to assist this quest in documenting the Italian Piazza. Subsequent grants from notable organizations, such as, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Skaggs Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, supported her professional efforts and transformed her artistic endeavor into a life-long journey of capturing on film the impact of natural light in an urban setting. This scholarly work documents the dynamics of natural light, architecture and people in the Italian piazza. The artistic endeavor tenderly remains at the core of the work: it portrays one person's love of Italy's strong sense of history and community. This unique dialogue, to put it simply, is Bellisimo!