José Lira, University of São Paulo
"Avant-garde, the City and Real Estate: Gregori Warchavchik, Odessa-São Paulo"
Monday, October 24, 5.30 p.m.
Judith Lee Stronach Center

José Lira is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planing in the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), where he presented both his PhD and PD Dissertations (1997 and 2008). He has served as a visiting scholar at GSAPP, Columbia University (2009), and as a Research Affiliate at the National Council of Research, Brazil (CNPq-BR). He is the author of Warchavchik: Fraturas da Vanguarda (Cosac & Naify, 2011), and edited Caminhos da Arquitetura, de Vilanova Artigas (Cosac & Naify, 2004), Tempo, Cidade e Arquitetura (FAU-USP/ Annablume, 2007) and Cidade: impasses e perspectivas (FAU-USP/ Annablume, 2007). He has also published chapters in books such as L'Aventure dês Mots de La Ville, Arquitetura + Arte + Cidade, Les Mots de la Stigmatisation Urbaine, and Rediscutindo o Modernismo, as well as articles in several journals in Brazil and elsewhere. He is currently the director of the University of São Paulo Center for Cultural Preservation (CPC-USP).

Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan
"Activist History: Architectural Surfaces, ca. 1914"
Wednesday, November 2, 6 p.m.
Judith Lee Stronach Center

Claire Zimmerman is Assistant Professor of art history and architecture at the University of Michigan. She teaches courses on 19th and 20th century European and America architecture with emphases in Weimar Germany and the United Kingdom. Research interests include architecture culture as it interacts with commerce and industry, and the infrastructures of globalization that underpinned the spread of modern architecture throughout the 20th century. Her co-edited essay collection, Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (with Mark Crinson) appeared as Volume 21 in the Yale Studies in British Art (Yale University Press) in fall 2010; an earlier monograph, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was published by Taschen in 2006. Zimmerman's recent work has appeared in OASE, AA Files, Perspecta, the Journal of Architecture, and Harvard Design Magazine. She is completing a manuscript on photography in modern architecture in 2011. She was the 2009-2010 Helmut F. Stern Professor at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.

John Harwood, PhD Columbia '06, Oberlin College
"Danger Zones: Aerial Bombardment and the Politics of Risk Analysis in 1930s-40s Britain"
Wednesday, November 16, 6 p.m.
Judith Lee Stronach Center

John Harwood is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at Oberlin. His research centers on the architectural articulation of science, technology, and corporate organization. His articles have appeared in Grey Room, AA Files, and do.co.mo.mo. He is co-author, with Janet Parks, of The Troubled Search: The Work of Max Abramovitz (2004), and co-author with Jesse LeCavalier and Guillaume Mojon of This - Will This (2009). His essays have also appeared in catalogues for the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2008, the V&A's exhibition Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 (2008), and several forthcoming edited volumes. His book, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976, will be published in November 2011 by The University of Minnesota Press. He has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the National Gallery of Art, the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Studies, and the University of Queensland, and received Oberlin's B. Wade and Jane B. White Fellowship and the Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor Award.

Kurt W. Foster
"Architecture in Print: How Karl Friedrich Schinkel Invented the Oeuvre Complète"
Thursday, March 24, 6.30 p.m.
Schermerhorn Hall, room 612

Among Schinkel's numerous professional credentials, an architectural treatise is missing. But he must be recognized as the inventor of a new and singularly successful format of promotion, the oeuvre complète. A gifted designer of public displays, panoramas, and stage sets, Schinkel fed the visual avidity of his contemporaries (and continues to do so today) with ingenious images of his projects and buildings. A biographical thread replaces the categorical order among architectural projects and suggests a conspectus of works across time and place.

Kurt W. Forster is director of doctoral studies at the Yale School of Architecture. He has held professorships at Stanford, M.I.T., the Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich, and the Gropius Chair at the Bauhaus University, Weimar. He has organized major exhibitions, including the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, and is now collaborating on exhibitions of Carlo Mollino (Munich) and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin). He also writes on historiography and contemporary photography.

Alice Friedman
"American Glamour: Mid-century Modern Installation"
Thursday, April 28, 6.30 p.m.
Schermerhorn Hall, room 612

Professor Friedman will discuss collaborations between architects, sculptors and lighting designers in mid-20th century American design. Specifically, she will elaborate projects between Richard Kelly, Richard Lippold and Harry Bertoia on the one side and Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) on the other. This talk represents a work-in-progress, drawing on her recent book American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale 2010).

Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art and Director of the McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College. She is the author of numerous books and articles including House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (U. Chicago, 1989), Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (Abrams, 1998), and most recently, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (Yale, 2010).

The Frankfurt Kitchen
Wednesday, December 1, 6:30 p.m.
MoMA
Join MoMA's Design Curator Juliet Kinchin for a private tour of the new show "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen," and its centerpiece, an unusually complete example of the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926), designed by Austrian Architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. Columbia GSAPP Professor Mary McLeod, who has written on Lihotzky for MoMA's recent publication Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, will comment.

Colin Rowe's "Space Talk"
Tuesday, December 7, 6:30 p.m.
832 Schermerhorn Hall
Columbia Professor Christoph Schnoor will discuss seminal architectural historian Colin Rowe's notion of "space talk," or his unique interpretation of urban and architectural space, and its vital legacy for architectural history. Schnoor is lecturer in architectural history, theory and design at Unitec New Zealand, and has written extensively on 20th architectural history, German colonial architecture, and Le Corbusier (most recently "La Construction des villes," gta, Zürich 2010).