A white scale model of RPI architecture students Emma Geer's and Katy Wright's design for a William Kennedy Research Center is placed into a model of the proposed building site on Broadway just north of Quackenbush Square and across from the Leo O'Brien Federal Building in Albany.

Michael Oatman, associate professor and artist-in-residence at RPI's School of Architecture, chats with William Kennedy during a break from the midterm review of the projects by Oatman's architecture majors who were assigned to design a concept for a proposed William Kennedy Research Center in Albany.

Emma Geer, left, a fourth-year RPI architecture student from Waterford, Conn., and Katy Right, a third-year student of Portland, Conn., designed the bricks to look like hardcover books laid on their sides for their concept of a Kennedy Research Center in downtown Albany.

Jack Zhang, a third-year RPI architecture student from Katy, Texas, shares his Tadao Ando-inspired design concept for a Kennedy Research Center as the author, right, looks on.

Fourth-year architecture major Nic Roscioli-Barran, of Stowe, Vt., presents his design concept, which involves a building rising up out of a grassy slope, for a William Kennedy Research Center.

TROY — Associate Professor Michael Oatman gave his RPI architecture students, shall we say, a novel assignment.

He conjured a clever Latinate name: Scriba Albaniae: Designing the William Kennedy Research Center.

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Oatman, artist-in-residence in RPI’s School of Architecture, is a friend of Kennedy’s who secured immersion access for his students. They took a deep dive into the creative imagination of the Pulitzer-winning novelist and author of the Albany cycle as a way of translating his fiction and biography into a design aesthetic.

The students spent hours at the author’s home in Averill Park, read his 1978 novel, “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game,” and watched two films for which Kennedy wrote screenplays: The Cotton Club (1984) and Ironweed (1987).

The aspiring architects are endeavoring to ascertain what makes Kennedy, well, Kennedy. They tried to get inside the head of the 97-year-old writer — who is, even now, working on a new novel — and to make form........

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