Daily-ist: Wednesday

::Houston Mod + RDA Present Gwendolyn Wright::
Houston's Impact on Modern Architecture Lecture + Book Signing

Professor of architecture at Columbia University, Gwendolyn Wright, will be in town tonight to discuss her new book and explain how Houston has played a part in the development of modern architecture. The lecture will take place tonight, Wednesday, April 9th @ 7pm at the Museum of Fine Arts, Brown Auditorium. A book signing and refreshments will follow the lecture and is free and open to the public. The lecture is being co-presented by Houston Mod and the Rice Design Alliance.

Modern Architectures in History: USA is the third in Reaktion Books’ new series which examines the particular characteristics of some 25 different countries from Austria to Turkey. USA reframes the history of American modern architecture in terms of responses to commercial culture, new media, and diverse concepts of freedom. Each chapter explains how modernity – changes in work life, home life, public life, and infrastructure – affected architecture and vice versa. Unending conventional arguments that Americans brought European modernism to the US in 1932, she shows a distinctive, exhilarating hybrid with much earlier roots.

About Gwendolyn Wright
Wright is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, with joint appointments in history and art history. The author or editor of six books, her most recent is USA (February 2008) in Reaktion Books’ worldwide series, Modern Architectures in History. Wright received her M.Arch. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her awards include Guggenheim and Getty Center fellowships. Since 2003 she has hosted the PBS television series, “History Detectives”, which explains the dynamic processes of historical investigation.

The listed event was chosen by the editors of Houstonist and
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