The Trivium, where nature and technology meet the arts

By Jamie Murphy and Brian L. Massey
Special to the Florida State Times

In the hamlet of Lloyd, just east of Tallahassee, a yellow, early-Victorian couch sits in the hallway of a unique castle-like building.

For its current owner, retired FSU Professor François Bucher, it's a cozy reminder of Princeton University - where he sometimes sat on the same couch in Albert Einstein's home and chatted with the physicist about the "nonsense of nuclear weapons, the speed of light and Gregorian chants vs. Jewish music."

Bucher bought the couch from Einstein's estate. It's now a revered icon of his Nautilus Foundation, a scholars' retreat he's woven into the untamed North Florida forest to keep alive the light of those long-ago musings about human existence.

Today, the foundation is Bucher's $3.1-million gift to FSU, the taproot of an avant-garde educational atmosphere, and Bucher's hope of salvation for an ever-more-crowded, polluted and chaotic world.

The foundation puts a forward-thinking face on the ancient concept of the scholars' village.

"We have created a kind of think tank, a place to promote creative thinking of ways to build a better world," said Bucher, who taught medieval art and architecture at FSU from 1978 until last spring. "The work and scholarship done here are focused on the future to ensure that our grandchildren will live in an acceptable world free from environmental hazards and pollutants."

It's after Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study that Bucher modeled the think tank he nurtures on 400 woodland acres 18 miles from Tallahassee. Here, he expects that some of the planet's brightest minds will live and work in a solitude not possible on a bustling university campus.

The scholars will share their thoughts, visions and hopes for humankind's future through seminars, research and publishing. But perhaps more important, FSU's Nautilus village will offer them freedom, quiet and time to ponder the world's pressing problems.

"This is very exciting for those of us involved in education of this type,"said Jerry Draper, dean of the School of Visual Arts and Dance, which will manage the foundation. He said Nautilus scholars will tackle such woes as urban ecology, nuclear weapons proliferation, pollution, global warming and over-population.

Before he came to FSU, Bucher spent time at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. His collaborations there with such legendary thinkers as Einstein inspired the Nautilus Foundation, he said. An engaging philanthropist who speaks six modern languages plus Latin, Bucher earned his doctorate in his native Switzerland. Yet his career has been American: He's taught at the State University of New York (Binghamton), Princeton, Brown, Yale, the University of Minnesota and FSU.

At Yale, Bucher taught Draper. "He has phenomenal energy," Draper said, "a great sort of inner clock and way of working so that he can sort of dedicate one hour a day to a single project and three years later that project is accomplished."

There may be no better example than the Nautilus Foundation. It began in July 1980 with a covenant to protect the environment and opened officially in 1990.

Today, the foundation holds an observatory, an experimental audiovisual building affectionately called "the turtle," an open-air theater, and the Trivium - the home of Einstein's couch - named for the lower division of the seven liberal arts.

Now being built are the Quadrivium (for the higher division of the liberal arts) and housing for the scholars.

The "Trivium" studies in ancient Rome were grammar, rhetoric and dialectics. Bucher finds their modern counterparts in history, visual arts and communication through literature, drama and film. The Nautilus Trivium houses a library, seminar, study rooms, museum, auditorium, archive, trustees' room, guest room and director's quarters.

The "Quadrivium" studies were mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy. For Bucher, these find modern expression in architecture, urban design, theory and use of proportions, spatial organization and global ecology. This structure, being built from a design by Russian architect Georgi Stoilov, will house design studios, seminar rooms, a library and dormitory.

Also planned is a three-mile "Art Walk" flanked by large sculptures and pavilions for contemplative thought, which will underscore the symbiosis of nature, technology and the arts.

The Foundation's past projects reflect Bucher's vision of a world made better through creative thinking. For example, the 1990-91 exhibition "Nature, Humanity and Technology" featured his friend, the late Buckminster Fuller, a pioneer of urban ecology. Swiss architect Justus Dahinden led a 1992 symposium titled "Ecopolis City of the Future." The International Academy of Architecture cooperated on an international design workshop.

Bucher's gift also includes art, rare manuscripts and books, some dating back 400 years.

The gift, Draper said, "is included in François' estate plan" and will be deeded to FSU outright "as soon as the structure is in place to receive and manage the assets." Bucher's gift is one of the largest ever received by FSU's" capital campaign.

For the Swiss-born scholar from Lausanne, it's a way to ensure that "the ideals and the work of the Nautilus Foundation will continue long after I am gone."

Bucher accepted the university's invitation to watch the Clemson game from one of the plush new skyboxes, and to be honored onfield at halftime, but not without comment on the relative importance of football games and the intellectual life.

"I'd rather people give the Nautilus Foundation a million dollars than pay for sky boxes," he said.

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