Archtober at the Tibetan Museum: Stone by Stone, in Her Own Words

"You don't have to be a registered architect to build beautiful buildings." So wrote Jacques Marchais (1887–1948). Without ever setting foot in Asia, she designed the first Himalayan-style architecture in the United States, on a hillside in Staten Island. "Express our ideas and don't be afraid to carry them out," she told the women who would come after her.

This expanded Archtober tour covers the same ground as our earlier walk, with Jacques telling more of the story through her letters and diary. It starts with the child performer born in Cincinnati and the 17th-century Bon bronzes she slept beside as a girl: "my companions by day and my bedfellows by night." It continues through her gallery on East 51st Street, which she called "only a stepping stone toward doing something I think will be a help to humanity," and on to her vision of a "miniature copy of the Potala of Lhasa" on Lighthouse Hill.

You'll hear how she and the Italian stonemason Joseph Primiano gathered fieldstone across the island on Sunday drives after mass. In her diary she wrote, "Each stone was lovingly picked by me and hauled." Then step outside to see what they built: trapezoidal windows under cedar posts, the 1945 library, the museum she called "a replica of a Tibetan chanting hall," the monks' meditation cells, the lotus pond, and the terraced Samadhi Garden. From the garden, look up to the copper pagoda roof, which replicates the Jehol Lama Temple shown at Chicago's 1933 World's Fair.

The site has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2009. When the Dalai Lama visited in 1991, he said it felt like home.