Features
The 25 – David Neumann
A leading voice for advocating traditional design, David Neumann is the founder of two award-winning firms—Versaci Neumann & Partners (1986-2006) and Neumann Lewis Buchanan Architects (2006 to the present) that have received numerous local and national honors, including over two dozen AIA design awards and multiple Palladio and John Russell Pope awards.
He creates acclaimed buildings that are respectful of place, well-tailored to modern life and expressly connected to memory and meaning. His designs respond to context and seamlessly meld modern function and sensibilities with an unfailing commitment to continuity.
At the core of his approach is a careful search for the appropriate response to context and the client’s program. In new work, whether it is in pristine rural landscapes or garden suburb settings, he creates structures that embrace and contribute to the qualities that make place. In renovations and restorations, whether through subtle intervention or transformative alteration, Newmann’s designs exhibit careful attention given to solving functional requirements while enhancing and extending the best qualities of the context.
Neumann’s passion for classical, traditional, and vernacular architecture led to his playing an instrumental role in the founding of the Washington Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 2005.
Through classes, lectures and tours, Neumann, a past president and longtime member of the board of directors of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, has championed the continuing education and training programs of the institute to broaden the understanding of traditional architecture for the profession as well as the general public.
As a member of the board of the Washington Architectural Foundation for six years and vice president for one year, Neumann played an active role in board-member development, fund-raising, and teaching in the foundation’s signature program “Architecture in the Schools.”
His work, which has been featured in numerous prominent publications ranging from House Beautiful and New Old House to The Washington Post, is rooted in the principles of design and craft from historic and vernacular precedents of the Mid-Atlantic’s Piedmont and Tidewater regions.
A staunch advocate for design excellence that embraces the future and the past, Neumann has written a substantial and consistently excellent body of work that is true to and expressive of place and purpose.
