Wednesday, January 16 WINOLD REISS: A PIONEER OF MODERN AMERICAN DESIGN Lecture by C. Ford Peatross, Curator of Architecture, Design, and Engineering Collections, Library of Congress The lecture gave a visual overview of the work of Winold Reiss (18861953), a native of Munich, Germany, one of the first artists to introduce the elements of modern European (especially Viennese-influenced) design to the United States. From his arrival in this country in 1913 to the 1950s, Reiss helped define the high-style American commercial vernacular, designing many of New York's greatest restaurants, including the Restaurant Crillon and the Longchamps chain; the Tavern Club in Chicago (with John Root), and restaurants and hotels in Washington, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. Of his public spaces, best known is Cincinnati's Union Terminal, where his monumental mosaic murals define and enliven a magnificent interior. Tuesday, February 12 The lecture looked at a patrician family of Renaissance Florence, the Spinelli, whose ancestral homes neighbored those of the Peruzzi and Alberti in the Santa Croce quarter. A new Spinelli palace went up in the 1450s during a burst of residential building. The family archive, recently brought to light, provides a detailed picture of how the palace was constructed and furnished. As conservative patrons, the Spinelli emulated the taste of the Medici, while avoiding the appearance of competing with Florence's first citizens. The building is distinguished by its fashionable sgraffito decoration on the facade and in the courtyard. In examining the sources of this imagery, the lecture showed how one family gave visibility to its rising status by adapting traditional architectural forms within a specific urban context. Tuesday, March 19
From the 1920s through the 1940s, Chicago-based architect David Adler (1882-1949), in collaboration with interior designer Frances Elkins, created many of the last generation of grand country houses for wealthy clients across the country, from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, to Hillsborough, California. Adler's approach to design, while relying on the past, also displays an eclectic and modernist sensibility. The lecture considered his novel employment of various stylistic idioms. Tuesday, April 30
Saturday, June 1
Tuesday, September 24 "A CITY AS A WORK OF ART": THE EMERGENCE OF THE SENATE PARK COMMISSION PLAN Lecture by Pamela Scott, Architectural Historian Between April 1901 and January 1902, the three active members of the Senate Park Commission-Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Charles Follen McKim-met frequently in Washington, traveled together in the United States and in Europe, and corresponded nearly daily as they conceptualized a comprehensive plan to revitalize Washington. Several of their preliminary drawings, newly discovered, yield surprising information about their design for the city's monumental core. Not only did the treatment of the Mall and the memorials change considerably from the initial concept, but most of the major design decisions were made before the commissions's European tour. In addition, the oft touted visionary nature of the plan can be seen as the culmination of a local Washington political agenda for municipal improvements set by Senator James McMillan as chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. In examining the drawings with other documents produced by major aesthetic and political figures, the lecture will show how Burnham, Olmsted, and McKim satisfied all of McMillan's pragmatic concerns while treating the monumental cityscape as a work of art. Saturday, October 26 HEADQUARTERS OF THE NAVY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT Tour led by Jan K. Herman, Historian of the Navy Medical Department; Curator of the Old Naval Observatory; and Editor of Navy Medicine From 1844 to 1893, the U.S. Naval Observatory occupied a hilltop in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood. During those years, astronomers at the observatory helped the nation gain an international reputation in science. In the years before the Civil War, Superintendent Matthew Fontaine Maury "invented" the modern science of oceanography, and on a hot August night in 1877 astronomer Asaph Hall, using what was then the world's largest telescope, sighted one of the two moons of Mars, one of the most significant astronomical discoveries of the 19th century. In 1894 the site was transferred to the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery to replace the old Naval Hospital in southeast Washington and provide modern clinical facilities for the Naval Medical School. The structures of this phase were designed by Ernest Flagg, architect and planner for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Although the Naval Medical Center was eventually built in Bethesda, the Washington site on the hill has continued to serve the Navy Medical Department and the U.S. Government. The tour visited the observatory and other buildings on the site. Tuesday, November 12 BENJAMIN HENRY LATROBE AND HIS DESIGNS FOR "CAPTIAL" HOUSES Lecture by Michael Fazio, Professor of Architecture, Mississippi State University Benjamin Henry Latrobe had built three still-extent houses in England before emigrating to Virginia in 1795, and in his lifetime in the United States, he completed more than 60 residential commissions, of which three—Adena in Chillicothe, Ohio, the Pope Villa in Lexington, Kentucky, and Decatur House in Washington—remain largely intact. This lecture will consider Latrobe's houses in Washington—the Van Ness House, Decatur House, and the President's House during Jefferson's presidency—as well as the Casanave House, about which much less is known. In each case, Latrobe sought to build according to his theories of residential design. At the Van Ness House, adapted an established English model; at the President's House, he corrected what he considered to have been errors made by James Hoban; and at Decatur House, he worked with a program and site conditions that challenged his considerable ingenuity. |
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2002 |