The Docomomo US/NOCA Symposium Grant provides financial support for students and emerging professionals committed to the documentation and conservation of Modern Movement buildings, landscapes, and sites. The intent of this year’s scholarship is to enable up to three individuals to participate in the Docomomo US 2021 National Symposium.

Docomomo US has is accepting article proposals for the ongoing Regional Spotlight Series and the Summer Special Edition newsletters that will focus on this year's annual theme of Travel & Leisure.

Originally published in 1962 and out of print for almost 50 years, The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn was the first book on influential 20th-century American architect Louis Kahn (1901–74) to feature his own images and words and offers a unique window onto Kahn’s early creative process. Among the books of his own work published during his lifetime, it is the one that the architect most treasured, the one that he felt got his work—and his thinking—right.

Rita Cofield, a lifelong resident of L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, is working to protect a building designed by USC Architecture alumni Robert Kennard and Arthur (Art) Silvers that is right in her own backyard.

Modern Love + The Advocacy Fund. As part of our #ModernLove campaign, Docomomo US is announcing the creation of a new intiative: The Advocacy Fund. Gifts to this new initiative will go directly to critical advocacy efforts and will support local and national work. 

Docomomo US joins The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) plus a growing list of leading landscape architects, architects, and scholars in speaking out on threats to the "finest corporate campus in the world," the Weyerhaeuser Campus in Washington State. 

Director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center of Pittsburgh takes us on a ‘visit’ to the Betty and Irving Abrams home designed in 1979-82 by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and explores the broader trends of Jewish patronage for modern architecture along the neighborhood’s infamous Woodland Road, and throughout the region. Recently a contentious local preservation issue, the property’s new owner wants the dwelling dismantled and removed from their property. The preservation community reacted in disagreement, noting the grave loss of an important postmodern design in a particular context.

In conducting research for the exhibition Imagining the Modern: Architecture and Urbanism of the Pittsburgh Renaissance at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center and the subsequent book, we made it a priority to meet some of the key players active during this critical time in Pittsburgh’s renewal. Among the most surprising discoveries was Troy West. West was a surprise not just for his bold body of work, but for the participatory process by which they were created. His built legacy in Pittsburgh could be considered scant, but his influence on the city, the way architecture is taught, and the definition of a modernist architect is far more profound.

A local leader in education with a keen eye for Brutalism shares a visionary, preservationminded love poem of the open-plan structure that welcomes and inspires his students from lowincome communities - designed with a groundbreaking concept in 1972 by Tasso Katselas, Pittsburgh’s most prolific modern architect.

Through the lens of a contemporary, award-winning landscape architect-designer, we explore and examine a 1974 project by Dan Kiley, painstakingly crafted in tandem with architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, enhancing the site of one of Pittsburgh’s most epic cultural institutions in the Carnegie legacy, and most successful modernist additions in a U.S. art museum.

Recently retired archivist of Carnegie Mellon University’s Architecture Archives offers a glimpse into the professional career and Pittsburgh-rooted portfolio of Walter L. Roberts, a multi-talented, unsung architect of the region who made a diverse, modernist mark including with Westinghouse Electric, community housing and facilities, industrial design firms and more.

Chair of the Pittsburgh Modern Committee of Preservation Pittsburgh introduces ‘Pittsburgh’s Modern Milieu’ with an impression of the city and region’s modern and postmodern resources, initiatives, challenges and curiosities – along with a summary of the spotlight series, which touches on the ongoing Docomomo US themes: the Diversity of Modernism and the 1970s turn 50, amongst other topics. (+ plus announcing the launch of a special collaboration-series of limited edition screen-prints of Pittsburgh modernist gems!).

A midcentury PepsiCo plant in Doral, Florida is slated for redevelopment, which may include demolition of all current buildings, including a unique brutalist theater designed to resemble a bottle cap. 

2021 - new year, new modern homes (and apartments, and ... floating homes?!) on the market for your viewing pleasure. What does this year's real estate market have in store? Keep scrolling to find out!

If there is one industry that defines the mid-century, it’s Travel and Leisure. Whether hitting the road by car or jetting off to exotic locations, modern ideals and aesthetics can be found just about everywhere you look.

In a year in which the United States of America has been ravaged by the worst pandemic in a century and economic devastation that may take generations to repair, Docomomo US is disturbed and appalled by the December 21, 2020 announcement of the Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture

With a new year on the horizon, the repercussions of the past year on modern sites we love are front and center. Here are some of the issues and threatened sites that will be on our radar in 2021.

When one thinks of Kansas, a hotbed of progressive design is likely not the first descriptor that comes to mind. One usually thinks of the Wizard of Oz, figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, and perhaps the origin of fast food pizza (Pizza Hut). That said, a deeper review of architecture and design brings to the forefront the breadth of modernism that can be found throughout the state.

In October of 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Wichita Public Library, likely the first Brutalist building designed in the state of Kansas, became the state’s first Beton Brut building added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Library nomination was rushed through, along with a separate nomination for the adjacent Century II Performing Arts and Convention Center by concerned citizens against the wishes of developers and City officials.

Kansas, the 15th largest state by area, resides at the geographical center of the continental United States. “The Sunflower State” combines mostly family-owned farms and ranches with the robust aviation industry that made the state a strategic military training center during World War II. Paralleling this, between 1941 and 1956 the population of Kansas’s largest city, Wichita, doubled from 115,000 to 240,000 during the peak years of postwar modernism.