Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian revolutionary and political activist who contributed to the unification and creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He lived from 1807 to 1882. He lived in this house in the Rosebank section of Staten Island between 1851 and 1853. Also friend, associate and inventor Antonio Meucci who also lived at this location, is attributed the invention of the telephone system in 1849, prior to Graham Bell’s patent. He had connected his bedroom with his work studio through a wired communication device.

This project I completed while third year undergraduate student at Pratt Institute around 1981. The design was to minimize the impact of the historic home and garden, therefore it was my intention to take the museum underground and filter light down into the museum through a series of skylights. The drawings presented here are all pen and ink on Mylar. My inspiration ran somewhere between a Michael Graves’ Michael C. Carlos museum at Emory University in Atlanta I chanced to visit, and all my readings and European trips visiting modern architecture in the Winter of 1980. I added some classical landscape elements, thinking at the time it would not be so far removed from historic reference. Chalk it up to a young architect’s thought process.