news & events
FALL 2008 NEWSLETTER
Past Issues
Faculty News
During her Dean's Leave in 2007-2008, Mirka Beneš completed a major portion of her book on seventeenth-century Roman villa gardens and a article titled ”Generational Change, Mediating Structures: Social History, Geographical Space, and Culture in the Recent Study of Italian Villa Gardens,” to be published in the edited volume, Recent Issues in Italian Garden Studies. Sources, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Washington, D.C.-Cambridge, Mass.: Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2009). In 2007-08, she published three short articles: “The Villa Doria Pamphilj,” in The Janus View from the American Academy in Rome: Essays on the Janciulum, eds. Katherine A. Geffcken and Norma W. Goldman (New York, 2007); “Zilker Park,” in Emergent Urbanism: Evolution in Urban Form, Texas, eds. Sinclair Black and Frderick R. Steiner (Austin: UT Austin, 2008); and “The Roles of History in Teaching Landscape Architecture: Synthetic Rehearsal and Cultural Translation,” in Platform (2008). Her article “Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain: Myths and Realities of the Roman Campagna,” originally published in 2001, was republished in the anthology Italian Baroque Art, ed. Susan M. Dixon (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008). In 2007-08, Mirka also gave several lectures, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C (October 2007) on historiography; at Emory University, Dept. of Art History (November 2007) on “Gardens, Landscape Painting, and the Larger Landscape in Baroque Rome: Leaping the Fence before the Picturesque”; and a Center Forum talk at the School of Architecture, UT, on “The Larger Landscape and the Notion of Territory” (April 2008). She co-chaired a session at the Society of Architectural Historians' Annual Meeting, Cincinnati (April 2008) on “East, West, North, South: A Broader Geography for the Culture of Gardens, 800-1700 AD.” During 2007-08 and continuing in the coming year, she is trying to expand her academic interests in an inter-disciplinary way across campus at UT, serving as a member of the Advisory Council for Landmarks, the Public Art Program of the University of Texas at Austin, as a member of the Graduate Studies Committee for Italian Studies, and as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Center for European Studies. She is at work on a book chapter, “Gardens and the Relation to Larger Landscapes,” for volume 3 (Renaissance, 1400-1700) of: A Cultural History of Gardens, eds. John Dixon Hunt and Michael Leslile (London: Berg Publishers).
In December 2008, Professor Richard Cleary conducted a three-day seminar on architectural theory for the architecture faculty of Tecnológico de Monterrey in Querétaro, Mexico. His ongoing research on Frank Lloyd Wright led to lecture invitations from two organizations conserving houses by the architect: the Graycliff Conservancy in Darby, New York, and the Westcott House Foundation in Springfield, Ohio. He is a member of the board of directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and the Guggenheim Museum’s advisory committee for its exhibition on Wright scheduled to open in Spring 2009. Closer to home, he and Professor Larry Speck are writing a book on the architecture of the University of Texas at Austin that will be published next year by the Princeton Architectural Press.M.A. student Sam Dodd has served as research assistant for the project. In addition to advising dissertations and master’s theses in the School of Architecture, Professor Cleary in a member of dissertation committees for the departments of Music, Art History, and French & Italian. He continues to serve as Graduate Advisor for Architecture.
Michael Holleran, who is also director of the Historic Preservation program, completed a book chapter, “America's Early Historic Preservation Movement (1850-1930) in a Transatlantic Context.” He spent the summer working on the Getty Foundation-funded preservation plan for the UT campus.
Christopher Long spent much of his time the past year working on two new books, a study of Adolf Loos’s famed Goldman & Salatsch Building on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna (1909-1911) and a monograph on the German-American architect and designer Kem Weber. He received a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to support his research for the Kem Weber book. He also received several awards this year: the Texas Exes Teaching Award, the School of Architecture Scholarship Award, and the Robert Award Smith Award for the Best Article in the Decorative Arts in 2007 from the Decorative Arts Society for his article “The Viennese Secessionsstil and Modern American Design,” which was published in Studies in the Decorative Arts. He completed several articles and reviews, including “Architecture: The Built Object,” forthcoming in Sarah Barber and Corrina Peniston-Bird, eds., History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge); “Paul T. Frankl’s Skyscraper Furniture,” in which appeared in The Magazine Antiques; a review of SvM: Die Festschrift für Stanislaus von Moos, edited by Karin Gimmi, Christof Kübler, Bruno Maurer, Robin Rehm, Klaus Spechtenhauser, Martino Stierli, and Stefanie Wenzler, which appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; a review of Oskar Strnad—1879-1935, edited by Iris Meder and Evi Fuks, and Moderat Modern: Erich Boltenstern und die Baukultur nach 1945, edited by Judith Eiblmayr and Iris Meder, forthcoming in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; and “Josef Frank: Making Swedish Modern,” which appeared in Modernism.
Francesco Passanti, who is a Research Fellow with the Architectural History program, continued working at his book on Le Corbusier. The work covers the years 1907-1925, from the time Le Corbusier left school to the time when he had emerged as a leading modernist architect in Paris, and it focuses on the process by which he constructed his own concept of architecture during those two decades. Francesco's essay “The Aesthetic Dimension in Le Corbusier's Urban Planning” was just published in Josep Llouís Sert: the Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969, edited by Eric Mumford and Hashim Sarkis with Neyran Turan (Yale University Press and Harvard GSD, 2008). He also lectured on “Spirituality in the Architecture of Le Corbusier” at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.; on “Le Corbusier in Tuscany, 1907: A Step on the Road to Becoming an Architect” at a conference in Rome; and on “Le Corbusier, Type, and Mallarmé” for the Modern Studies Group at UT.
Professor Danilo Udovički-Selb is currently working on a book manuscript about the evolution of modern architecture in the USSR under Stalin’s perestroika. He was invited to present his scholarly research on the subject to the faculty of history of the Norwegian University of Arts and Sciencies. As architectural critic for the United States of the Giornale dell' Architettura, he published critical essays about Zaha Hadid’s Art Museum in Cincinnati; the Rural Studio in Alabama; wHY’s Kulapat Yantrasast Grand Rapids Art Museum; Sanaa’s Kazujo Seijima’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; Pentagram’s James Biber’s Harley-Davidson Museum in Seattle; the addition to the Yale School of Architecture by Charles Gwathmey of Allied Woks’; and Brad Cleopfil’s Museum of Art and Design in New York. He continued his research with Professor Wilfried Wang on the significance of Eileen Gray’s Villa E.1027 in Roquebrune, in collaboration with Eric De Backer, President of the Conseil Général des Alpes-Maritimes for the preservation of the Patrimoine, in preparation for the reopening of the villa and the international symposium to be held in 2010 on the occasion. Professor Udovički-Selb is member of the Center for European Studies of the University of Texas at Austin, and faculty at the Center for Russian, East-European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES). In the last five years, his research was funded with numerous grants from the School of Architecture, the Center for European Studies (CES), the (CREEES), the University, a Senior Fellowship at CASVA, and from the Graham Foundation.
This past summer, Wilfried Wang, took a group of UT architecture students, including M.A. candidate Katie Pierce, to Sweden to study Sigurd Lewerentz’s St. Petri Church in Klippan (1963-66). Located in the rural south of Sweden, the church was one of Lewerentz’s most important commissions, absorbing his earlier typological concerns (e.g., for Johanneberg) as well as formal interests from the early 1930s. Similar to his other early buildings, whether the Edstrand Villa in Falsterbo (1933-36) or the Theater in Malmö (1928-33), the design drew from continental functionalism, but like Peter Celsing, Klas Anshelm, Bernt Nyberg and Bengt Edman, Lewerentz saw beyond the abstraction of the orthodox modernists to seek a credible materiality. The result of the class’s research will appear in the second of the O’Neil Ford Monograph, published by the Center for American Architecture and Design and the O’Neil Ford Chair in Architecture. It will include the reproduction of an extensive collection of hitherto unpublished archival materials, as well as the results of a measured survey, made by the students, of the church.
Graduate Student News
During the past academic year, Mayassah Alsader focused in her research on the gardens of Madinat al-Zahra in Islamic Spain and on its iconographic and ornamental program. In May 2008, she presented a paper titled “The Cross in Muslim Gardens: A New Understanding of Al-Zahra and Other Islamic Gardens as the Earthly Paradise” at the Papers-In-Progress Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium at UT. The paper was accepted for the University of North Carolina Global Encounters conference that will be held at Chapel Hill in November 2008. Mayassah started her M.A. thesis in the summer 2008 studying the early Islamic hunting park. She is also working on organizing and translating a chronological list of textual and visual evidence of Islamic landscapes from the medieval Arabic books as part of her M.A. thesis. Her future plans include pursuing her research on the Islamic hunting parks and as animals in Muslim garden traditions, which she hopes to publish in some form. She is also looking forward to continuing this line of inquiry for her Ph.D.
Ashley Chadwick entered the M. A. program this fall. In 2005, she received her Bachelor's degree in History from Texas A&M University, where she focused her studies on medieval religious history. Specifically interested in regime patronage of public buildings, Ashley researched sacred spaces, exploring their changing socio-political meanings. She coupled this interest with a brief study of the Holocaust in Poland, where she examined the architectural manipulation of meaning and its relationship to cultural memory. For the past few years, Ashley has been working for TBG Partners, an Austin-based landscape architecture and planning firm, serving as the firm's writer and editor. Ashley is interested in researching the architecture of totalitarian governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sam Dodd is entering his second year in the architectural history program. This summer, he worked as a research assistant for professors Richard Cleary and Lawrence Speck for their upcoming architectural guidebook on the UT campus. Sam was able to familiarize himself with Austin’s local archival repositories and the history, or biography, of UT’s expanding campus. He will focus the next two semesters on researching and writing his Master’s thesis, which will explore the role of the National Association of Home Builders and their Parade of Homes events in the post-war American housing environment of the 1950s. More than a collection of specialized, futuristic case study houses or World’s Fair showrooms, the Parade of Homes served as the largest national display of modernized middle-class houses: newly constructed, decorated, and presented to millions of American consumers with ready-to-move-in availability. By looking at the Parade of Homes for the first time from a scholarly perspective, he hopes to examine the development of a modern American domesticity at the level of mass production. Over the next year, he also plans to revise two of his previous papers for publication. One contextualizes the early writings of the American architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock and argues for the idea of architectural criticism as a first-draft form of history. The other piece focuses on the work and theory of the Chicago-based architect Frederick Baumann, specifically discussing his 1873 pamphlet on early foundation construction.
Tara Dudley is in the process of conducting archival research for her dissertation, “Entrepreneurship, Ownership, and Identity: The gens de couleur libres and the Architecture of Antebellum New Orleans.” Tara’s academic interests include African-American architects and design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architectural education in the United States, and historic interiors. This fall, she will be collaborating with Jodi Skipper, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, to research the possible involvement of black architect William Sidney Pittman in the construction of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church (1911) in Dallas, Texas. The project will culminate in a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Tara is the recipient of the Hogg Fellowship from The University of Texas for the 2008-2009 academic year. Outside of academia, Tara has put her master’s degree in historic preservation (May 2003) to use working as a private-sector architectural historian, participating in various cultural resource management and historic preservation projects as a writer, research assistant, production assistant, and field surveyor. Her most fulfilling project yet—academic, professional or personal—has been a joint work with her husband: Tara gave birth to a baby girl, Zoya Marie-Elsie, last December.
This summer, Richard Gachot taught a study abroad program entitled Paris: The Birth of Modernism with eleven students from Lamar University at the Paris American Academy. He subsequently spent a month and a half in St. Petersburg and Moscow, with generous support from a Mebane grant, doing research for his Ph.D. dissertation on pre-revolutionary Russian émigré architects in the United States. After meetings with Semyon Mikhailovsky the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, and Boris Kirikov, the St. Petersburg government director of architecture, his thesis, “Nicolas Vassilieve: Modernism in Flight,” is undergoing review for a monograph on Vassilieve with Dom Kolo editions, as well as an exhibition at the Museum of the City of St. Petersburg in the Peter and Paul Fortress. In September, he was invited by David Sarkisyan, the director of the Moscow State Museum of Architecture to attend the Venice Biennale for Architecture in order to promote both the book and the exhibition.
Vladimir Kulić is finishing his dissertation on architecture and politics in Socialist Yugoslavia, which he expects to defend in the spring of 2009. He has had an exciting year of new projects and recognition for old ones. His dissertation proposal was awarded the Graham Foundation's Trustees Merit Citation for 2007. His essay ”Architecture and the Politics of Reading: The Case of the Generalštab Building in Belgrade” (scheduled for publication later this year in: Visible Culture: Design Artifacts and Participated Meaning, edited by Leslie Atzmon), won the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Graduate Essay Competition, organized by UT's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His book project on the architecture of Socialist Yugoslavia, a collaborative effort with Austrian architectural photographer Wolfgang Thaler, won a 9,000 Euro grant from the Erstestiftung in Vienna. This summer, Vladimir co-curated an exhibition on the architecture in the Balkans, which will open this fall at the Swiss Museum of Architecture in Basel and travel next summer to the Architekturzentrum in Vienna. A selection ofexhibited material will be published in a special issue of the Swiss journal S AM. Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, which Vladimir is co-editing with Monica Penick and Timothy Parker, is also making progress and should go to press next year. He is now teaching architectural history at Florida Atlantic University.
This summer, Laura McGuire continued her doctoral research on the Viennese émigré architect Frederick Kiesler at the Juilliard School of Music and at Harvard’s Houghton Theatre Collection. Her research was funded with a generous travel grant from the School of Architecture. This year, she was awarded the Professor Goldwin Goldsmith Memorial Scholarship in Architecture from the Texas Architectural Foundation and the Texas Society of Architects. She will sit for her qualifying examinations this spring. Laura is currently preparing a paper entitled “From the Louvre to You: Frederick Kiesler’s Televised Architecture” for the Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina, in November 2008. In conjunction with her research on Kiesler, Laura continues her study of the Americanization and commercialization of Central and Eastern European design during the 1920s and 1930s. She is particularly interested in the role that émigré designers and architects played in the conceptualization and creation of American shopping environments. She is preparing an article entitled “Modernism, Divided: The Bullocks Wilshire Department Store and Los Angeles” on the American work of German émigré architect Jock Detlef Peters for the Journal of Design History. In January of 2008, Laura published a review of the recent international exhibition of Erich Mendelsohn’s work, titled Erich Mendelsohn, Dynamics and Function: Realized Visions of a Cosmopolitan Architect, in CITE: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. Last spring, she was a historical consultant and guest lecturer for the Digital Fabrication Studio, at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston. She presented a lecture, “Frederick Kiesler’s Grotto for Meditation.” Laura continues to work as a research assistant and tour guide at the Charles Moore Foundation in Austin and is currently supervising the digitization of Charles Moore’s slide collection for ARTstor.
Natsumi Nonaka, who enrolled in the Ph.D program in Architectural History in Fall 2007, devoted her first year mainly to coursework. In Spring 2008, she was a Teaching Assistant for Professor Long’s Architecture History Survey I. During the summer months, she wrote an article “Japanese Gardens: The Art of Setting Stones” for the Foundation for Landscape Studies’ journal Site/Lines. She also completed the Japanese translation of Gilles Chaillet’s Dans la Rome des Césars, which is due to be published soon. From Fall 2008, Natsumi will be the Teaching Assistant for Professor Beneš’s Landscape Architecture Survey I. She is also studying for her comprehensive examinations, which she intends to take in the late spring. In April 2009, she will be participating, as a tour guide, in the Foundation for Landscape Studies’ Japan tour “Japan in the Footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright.” Natsumi’s current academic interests include classicism and Roman Renaissance and Baroque gardens, paintings of the gardens and estates in the villas in and around Rome, and gardens and landscapes in the lake district of Northern Italy.
Timothy Parker is currently completing his dissertation, “The Modern Church in Rome: Architecture, Theology, and Community, 1945-80.” He is focusing on a group of four Catholic parish churches in Rome as exemplars of the struggle to articulate modern identity in architectural, theological, and liturgical forms and ideas. The study is set against a background of period discourse and over forty comparable churches in Rome. A William S. Livingston Fellowship from the Graduate School has provided support for this final dissertation year. In January, Timothy presented a paper, “Politically Contested Sacred Spaces: Anti-Fascist Modernism in Postwar Rome,” at the Winter Meeting of the American Society of Church History, in Washington, D.C. A review essay on Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World, by Jeff Malpas, and Heidegger's Hut, by Adam Sharr, will be forthcoming in Centropa. With colleagues Monica Penick and Vladimir Kulić, he is currently co-editing the book, Sanctioning Modernism:Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, under advance contract with University of Texas Press. Timothy is an architect and liturgical consultant and occasionally lectures on religious architectural history at local churches.
Monica Penick completed her doctoral degree in the fall of 2007 and received the school’s Outstanding Dissertation Award for her dissertation, “The Pace Setter Houses: Livable Modernism in Postwar America.” She continued at UT as a Lecturer, and taught the History of Interiors, the History of Architecture, Survey III, and Graphic Documentation for Historic Preservation. This year, Monica holds an Andrew W. Mellon-ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will allow her to complete a book based on her doctoral research. Monica served as co-chair and panelist in the 2007 University of Texas School of Architecture Symposium Sanctioning Modernism. Her paper, “Modern but not too Modern:” Postwar Housing and the New American Style” was featured alongside those of Gwendolyn Wright (Columbia) and Sandy Isenstadt (Yale) in the session "At Home with Modernism." This symposium inspired a book of collected essays published by University of Texas Press, which Monica is co-editing with doctoral candidates Vladimir Kulic and Timothy Parker. Continuing the spirit of collaboration, Monica and Kate Holliday (Ph.D. 2003) co-chaired “Women in the Wings: Addressing the Importance of the Periphery” at the 2008 Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. In September, Monica was invited to the University of Florida at Gainesville to give the opening lecture for the exhibition “Of a Master’s Hand: Alfred Browning Parker.” Monica’s essay “Integrated Design: Alfred Browning Parker and the Pace Setter Textiles” will appear in a special themed issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts. She will present her paper “A Little Paradise: Paul László and the Modern California House” at the College Art Association annual meeting in February. She will also participate in the UT Odyssey Architecture Lecture Series, and gallery talks related to the exhibition “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” at the Blanton Museum of Art. Monica’s work has been generously supported by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) American Dissertation Fellowship, The Beverly Willis Foundation, and the School of Architecture Robert E. Veselka Endowed Fellowship. She is also still putting her Master's degree in Historic Preservation from UT Austin to good use and is working actively as an independent architectural historian and historic preservation consultant.
Katie Pierce will be starting her second year in the Architectural History program this fall. Over the summer, Katie traveled to Sweden to participate in a summer course taught by Wilfried Wang. She worked with a group of students to document St. Petri Church in Klippan. Katie, along with the other students, sketched, photographed, and analyzed the modern church. During her time in southern Sweden, she also visited a number of other buildings built in and around the period and location of St. Petri. After thoroughly analyzing the church, Katie worked for a week in the Lewerentz archive at the Swedish Architecture Museum in Stockholm comparing original drawings and documents to the church as built. Her textual description, analysis, and photographs will appear in the upcoming publication, O’Neil Ford Monograph 2: St. Petri Church, Klippan 1962-66, Sigurd Lewerentz. Katie will spend the year researching and writing her Master’s thesis on Houston architect Karl Kamrath, a Frank Lloyd Wright devotee. By considering commonalities and influences for themes and motifs within and across project types, she hopes to determine how Kamrath developed and asserted his architectural identity through his built work. Her thesis will present a critical view at how he managed to leave a significant legacy that is his own. Katie will also continue to work as a project processor in the Alexander Architectural Archive.
Elise Wasser, who entered the M.A. program this fall, received her Bachelor’s degree in interior design from Baylor University in May 2008. She graduated with honors and was named the Interior Design Department’s Rising Young Professional. While attending Baylor, Elise studied abroad in France and Italy, examining the juxtaposition of the classical and modern architecture in some of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Elise’s internships have included work in residential interior design during which she designed furniture and planned the interiors of many residences. She also worked for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy as an education intern at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Her responsibilities included working with the summer residency programs for visiting students of architecture, interpreting the architecture for tour groups, and writing a curriculum for a children’s tour. The experience solidified Elise’s desire to become an architectural historian and provided excellent practice in communicating architecture to a variety of people. In the fall of 2007, Elise and Dr. Adair Bowen, Baylor’s interior design program coordinator, presented a juried poster entitled The Undergraduate Inte Preparation for the Academy at the Interior Design Educators Council SRegional Conference. Elise’s rinterests are focused on the issue of immortality in twentieth-century architecture. She also plans to pursue research in the history of interiors in the modern era.
Kelso Wyeth entered the M.A. program this fall. She received her B.A. in mathematics and art history from Agnes Scott College in May 2008. Her undergraduate senior thesis, “Modernism at Auschwitz,” explored the relationship between Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Modernist architectural practices, including the impact of CIAM's Existenzminimum and Le Corbusier's Fourierist tendencies on the decisions of the architects at Auschwitz. Kelso's research interests include the natural confluence of architecture and the visual arts, as well as mid-century Central European and Scandinavian design.