cA+P Fall 2007 Lecture Series

[rmoore]

The University of Utah
College of Architecture + Planning
Fall 2007 Lecture Series

Vertical City: The Life and Design of Pruitt Igoe

Exhibition

September 10 - October 5

Bailey Exhibition Gallery

Pruitt-Igoe was an early and important post-World War Two public housing project. Built on the near North side of St. Louis as part of a massive urban reconstruction program, it was one of the largest housing projects in the United States. With 33 buildings rising through eleven stories and towering over 57 acres of the city, it was hailed as an innovative application of Modernist design principles to the problem of chronic urban housing shortages. At its peak, it housed some 12,000 people in 2,870 apartments.



Vertical City: The Life and Design of Pruitt Igoe surveys the origins of public housing in the city's slum clearance program, the design of the project in the context of post-World War II Modernism, and the subsequent habitation of the project by working-class African-American families. In addition, the exhibit surveys the history of efforts by a range of groups to make homes out of housing units--from architects and planners to social workers, housing officials, civic and religious organizations, and the tenants themselves. Finally, the exhibit explores several competing narratives of decline that attempt to account for the dereliction and eventual destruction this massive housing project.



Henry Whiting

September 17

Architectural writer and preservationist Henry Whiting II is author of two books: At Nature's Edge: Frank Lloyd Wright's Artist Studio, and Teater's Knoll: Frank Lloyd Wright's Idaho Legacy. For twenty five years he has owned the Archie B. Teater studio, the only artist studio designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wright's only Idaho structure. To preserve the diminutive artist studio perched on a cliff above the Snake River, he has painstakingly restored the studio on two separate occasions. Whiting has lectured and written extensively about Frank Lloyd Wright and organic architecture, and holds a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives with his wife, sculptor Lynn Fawcett Whiting, in the Teater studio in Bliss, Idaho.



GraftLab

October 15

GraftLab examines the implications of “transplantingâ€