AIA Credit: 1.5 LU
Curator and scholar Barry Bergdoll discusses Chicago architecture at midcentury, in particular the politics and ideals of modernism. His talk will explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s project for a mile-high skyscraper for the city that proudly claims to have given birth to the high-rise tower.
To attend, RSVP Here.
This lecture is presented in partnership with the Chicago Public Library’s One Book, One Chicago program.
Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Bergdoll’s broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany between 1750 and 1900. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of 19th-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in 19th-century European society. Bergdoll’s interests also include the intersections of architecture and new technologies—and eventually cultures—of representations in the modern period, especially photography and film. He has worked on several film productions about architecture, in addition to curating a number of architectural exhibitions concerned with the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture.
