Graduate Thesis

Location: DuPage County, Illinois (Chicago)

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Daniel DeGreve's graduate thesis project is an exploration of the Catholic suburban parish church as a catalyst for traditional neighborhood development in an automobile-dependent environment. Taking an existing 15-acre Modernist parish church property in a Chicago suburb as the project site and the land-lease model of eighteenth century London residential squares as a project precedent, Daniel formulated a pattern for incremental residential development clustered around a parish campus consisting of a 1,500-seat Renaissance Classical church, parish school, athletic field, and rectory.

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By laying out the parish parking lot as a grid of empty blocks connected by streets double-loaded with parallel parking spaces, the required parking capacity diminishes as residential development expands within those blocks. The final stage of neighborhood development shown in the project depicts a condition wherein adjacent property owners expand the pattern of the parish development to allow a more substantial neighborhood to take shape.

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This project was awarded First Prize in the Professional Category at the symposium entitled "A Living Presence: Extending and Transforming the Tradition of Catholic Sacred Architecture", which was held in 2010 at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C in partnership with the University of Notre Dame.

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