Symposium at Yale Looks at Everyday Things Through Architectural Prism

Published: October 29, 2009

Michael Graves, The Big Dripper Coffee Pot and Filter, ca. 1985. Porcelain, red-brown and blue-green enamel, gilding, 8 3/4 x 11 1/4 in. (coffee maker), 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. (filter holder). Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Lindsay S. Suter, m.arch. 1991

New Haven, Conn. — “Constructed Objects: Design by Architects in the 20th Century,” a symposium taking place November 12–13 at Yale School of Architecture, will explore ways in which architecture and design infuse and inform the everyday objects we use.

All scheduled events take place in the auditorium of Hastings Hall in Paul Rudolph Hall, 180 York Street.

Drawing its inspiration from the Swid Powell Collection and Records at the Yale University Art Gallery, the conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss how architectural theory is translated into objects, dating from the Arts and Crafts movement to the present. Presentations, note the symposium’s organizers, will address, the role of the architect in outfitting building interiors and the interconnection between buildings and the objects they house, among other topics. Featured guests at the symposium will be Nan Swid and Addie Powell, founders of the pioneering firm, Swid Powell, which put high-end architecture on the dinner table by inventively marketing housewares by such celebrity designers as Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Robert Venturi and Stanley Tigerman.

The symposium will kick off with a keynote address by Glenn Adamson of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on Thursday at 6:30 p.m. Adamson’s talk, which is also the Brendan Gill Lecture, is titled “Substance Abuse: Making the Postmodern Object.” Adamson heads research and graduate studies at the Victorian and Albert Museum, and is the author, most recently, of “Thinking Through Craft” and “Craft Reader.”

The presentations and panel discussions will take place on Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The first session will lead off with remarks by the organizer of the symposium, John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Assistant Curator of the Yale University Art Gallery, and by Swid and Powell. Following their introductory comments, there will be a panel discussion by three prominent architects who contributed to the Swid Powell line—Meier, Tigerman and Robert A.M. Stern.

The second session on Friday, beginning at 1:30 p.m., is titled “Collaboration in 20th Century Architecture and Design,” and features presentations by scholars and curators. Among those presenting are Jennifer Komar Olivarez, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, who will talk about the architecture and design of the Prairie School; Julie Emerson, Seattle Art Museum, who will discuss the Wiener Werkstaette, the early 20th-century “Vienna workshops,” which influenced the Bauhaus style in Germany and Art Deco in the U.S; Brian Lutz, who will talk about furniture architects designed for Artek and Knoll; and Katherine B. Hiesinger, Philadelphia Museum, who will address the topic of “Architects and the Fine Arts Consumer.”

Admission to all events is free, but registration is required. You can register online.

PRESS CONTACT: Dorie Baker 203-432-8553