art and nature

Today I'm wearing the Tom Thomson t-shirt that I bought at the Art Gallery of Ontario many years ago. The text reads "Was his work more influenced by art movements or the movements of the wind and water?"

Today I'm reading about the Pritzker Architecture Prize 2020 being awarded to Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects. The article in the N.Y. Times about the prize includes this quotation from Farrell in response to a question about fame, recognition, and starchitects: "There are people whose work should be more recognized sometimes. The media goes for the easy thing -- eye candy. Architecture is much more. It infiltrates our lives in a much deeper way. It's important to remember that the earth is beautiful and sunlight is liquid gold. A lot of architecture excludes natural phenomena -- the rising and setting sun, the power of springtime moving up through the soul."

Daniel and I were talking about the glory of the winter sun as you go about looking at buildings.

the villa of Denise Scott Brown's family

The Architect's Newspaper posted a link on Facebook to a 2013 video interview with Denise Scott Brown. It is fascinating and she is captivating. The interview is entitled "Denise Scott-Brown: An African Perspective." I had not ever read significant biographical information about her and had not realized she grew up in South Africa. Her family lived for a time in a modernist villa-style house designed by Norman Hanson, along the lines of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. You may have read a couple earlier posts -- Villa Savoye and northern Italy and The villa as building type -- that I wrote on villa-style modernist houses, inspired by traveling in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria, that is, Milan, Turin, and Genoa. As I fetched the links for those posts, I was amused to note that Blogger, in its wisdom (artificial intelligence), had chosen "villa-savoye-in-savoy-country" as the title for the post I had called "Villa Savoye and northern Italy." Meanwhile, here's a still of the childhood home of DSB, from the video interview:

I am sorry to see that architect Norman Leonard Hanson (1909-1990) doesn't yet have a LC/NAF authority record but he does have a ULAN record from Avery. Scott Brown says "people are writing about him nowadays" so there may be a book one of these days that will lead to a NAF record.

case in point: Read Weber

As we artnacoisti get accustomed to the new fields in NACO records for attributes of the entity being established, the question of coding gender of persons has come up several times. I have told folks that they need to justify gender either by an explicit statement of gender or by use of a gendered pronoun. We should not assume that a Robert is male or a Susan is female. In most cases you'll be right but ...

I spent this afternoon, into the evening, at the "Building Talent: Women, Patronage, and Mentoring" symposium, coordinated by the University at Buffalo Gender Institute and held at the Greatbatch Pavilion at the Darwin Martin House. One of the features of the symposium, which was fantastic and inspirational, was a showing of the short documentary from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation entitled A Girl is a Fellow Here--100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of the six architects featured in the film was Read Weber (1908-1990). She was listed as male in the registry of American architects of the American Institute of Architecture until 2008. The profile of Weber on the Willis Foundation page mentions this and below is an illustration of the Coney Island Hospital, designed in 1957 by Weber. (Photo credit: Stoller/Esto Photography)

In the film, several of the women are interviewed and express their appreciation of Wright's attitude toward women. That is, he was unwilling to give them any more credit than he gave his male associates.

The speaker that had me in the palm of her hand was Marika Schioiri-Clark, now principal of SOSHL Studio. I had seen some of her work with MASS Design Group as part of my Avery indexing. MASS did a hospital project in Butaro, Rwanda. Schioiri is now living in Cleveland and working on an artist housing and residency project among other things. Her key words are "empathic design" and her mission is founded in her studies at Harvard where aesthetics trumped social engagement.

They said they were filming the symposium. Perhaps it will be available one of these days.