Allan Greenberg, a Johannesburg native, studied architecture at Witwatersrand University. He worked for Jorn Utzon before coming to the United States, where he earned a master’s degree in architecture at Yale University and began teaching there. Allan’s practice grew to three offices in New York City, Virginia, and Connecticut, and his books include Architecture of Democracy and Lutyens and the Modern Movement. He received the University of Notre Dame’s Driehaus Prize in 2006.
It was a sunny spring day in May 1959 when I entered the nave of Notre-Dame de Paris for the first time. As I looked up into the seemingly weightless vaults, and then down the colonnade to the distant apse, the sheer beauty of the architecture took my breath away.