Yo! Modernism Kickoff!

Meyerson Hall

210 S 34th St
Philadelphia, PA
Image details

Yo! Modernism Kickoff!

Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, Louis Kahn, 1965.

Credit

Hugh Loomis

Yo! Modernism Kickoff


On Wednesday June 1, Symposium guests will be welcomed to Philadelphia with a keynote address on the University of Pennsylvania campus followed by a reception at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art. Galleries will be opened specially for the event. 

Throughout the day there will be a special pop-up exhibition focused on Anne Tyng at Penn's Architectural Archives. 

Earlier in the day the Docomomo US National Board will meet and the annual chapter forum will be held at the Richards Medical building.

Registration and badge pickup will start at 4:30 at Meyerson Hall. 

Keynote Address: The Past Informs the Future / the Present Challenges the Past.

6:00-7:15 pm
University of Pennsylvania
Meyerson Hall Room B1

Docomomo US is pleased to present Inga Saffron and Michael J. Lewis as the keynote speakers for the 2022 National Symposium in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s modern heritage is as varied as sunrises. Philadelphia is the city of Howe & Lescaze’s groundbreaking PSFS Building (1929-32), but it is also home to the strongest legacy of the École des Beaux Arts in America. The first modern public housing project is built here (Kastner & Stonorov’s Carl Mackey Houses, 1932-35) and city planning’s role is redefined in and through Philadelphia’s redevelopment. All of this heritage is built on an extraordinary burst of arts and crafts activity at the turn of the century. It can be said that Philadelphia is an important location where modernism was welcomed into American culture while also being a place where its limitations were recognized and challenged. Out of all that you get Louis Kahn, the Philadelphia School, and the post modernism of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In other words, Philadelphia is a quintessentially “big tent” modernism place. And yet, for all the recognized significance of Philadelphia’s modern heritage – or, frankly, its built heritage more broadly – the mechanisms driving development and change are increasingly tipping in favor of the wrecking ball. To unpack the tensions between Philadelphia’s past and present – and in a sense all large American cities – we turn to Inga Saffron, architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Michael J. Lewis, architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal. We’ll explore what is good about the good, and perhaps what’s really good, and consider why things are so bad now.

Keynote Speakers

Inga Saffron

Architecture critic Inga Saffron has been writing about the design of buildings and cities for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1999.  Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum and a 2012 Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In June 2020, Rutgers University Press published a selection of her Inquirer columns about Philadelphia’s urban recovery, Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again. Before becoming the Inquirer’s architecture critic, Inga spent the 1990s as a foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia and the former Yugoslavia, covering the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, and witnessing the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. In addition to her writing about architecture and urbanism, she is an expert on the cultural history of sturgeon. Her book, Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, appeared in 2003 to rave reviews. She is currently working on a history of the American newspaper building.

 

Michael J. Lewis

Michael J. Lewis teaches modern architecture and American art at Williams College, and he is the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal. After receiving his B.A. from Haverford College in 1980, and two years at the University of Hannover Germany, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College; McGill University, Montreal; and the University of Natal, South Africa. His books include Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (2001), American Art and Architecture (2006), and the prize-winning August Reichensperger: The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (1993). He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (2000-2001) and in 2008 received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the completion of City of Refuge (2016), his study of millennial utopias. Lewis has been at Williams College since 1993 and in 2008 he was named Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art.

Opening Reception at the Institute of Contemporary Art

7:30-9:00 pm
118 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA

Following the keynote address, join us for a reception at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, which is just a short walk from Meyerson Hall. Light food and drinks provided and the galleries will be opened specially for the event.  

Credit:

courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art

Na Kim, FFC on 6, 7, 8, 2021. Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 

Credit:

Constance Mensh

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