Events & Lecture Series Events & Lecture Series

Fall 2009
College of Design events

Lectures

Maryann Thompson
Principal, Maryann Thompson Architects, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Maryann Thompson: Recent work
Monday, October 19, 6 p.m., 100 Rapson Hall
Cass Gilbert Fund Lecture

Maryann Thompson will present a selection of recent award-winning projects from her practice. Maryann Thompson Architects is a Cambridge-based firm that specializes in architecture that is sustainable, regionally driven, and attempts to heighten the phenomenological qualities of the sites within which they work.

Maryann Thompson is the principal and founder of Maryann Thompson Architects. She received the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Young Architects Award in 1998. Her work has also received three AIA National Honor Awards, numerous AIA New England Design Honor Awards, and BSA Honor Awards for Design Excellence. Her work has been published in numerous national and international architecture and design magazines and in various books on architecture, including Norton's A Guide to 250 Key Twentieth-Century American Buildings, 40 Under 40, and Contemporary American Architects. Thompson has taught design as a visiting faculty member at MIT, RISD, UVA, Michigan, and Rice and is currently a faculty member at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Deborah Karasov
Executive director, Great River Greening, St. Paul

Thoughts of a sometime geographer
Monday, November 2, 6 p.m., 100 Rapson Hall
H.W.S. Cleveland Fund Lecture

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that sometimes we can be immersed in beauty and yet our eyes have no clear vision. For a landscape architect or environmental artist, it is not such a great matter to have the technical skills to create beautiful things. Many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary. Karasov has always been inspired by those who recommend enlarging our sympathies by the patient and loving observation of landscape. Some say it is in this practice, rather than in formulas or theories, that we can find the promise of perfection for the art of landscape. Our greatest challenge is to mature our imagination among the things of this earth.

Deborah Karasov is executive director of the nonprofit Great River Greening. She has a Ph.D. in geography (University of Minnesota) and a MLA (Harvard Graduate School of Design). With both these backgrounds, and as a past collaborator with environmental artists, Karasov writes about major themes of geography and landscape in light of her own experiences. In the art field, she served as director of adult programs at the Walker Art Center; codirector, with Kinji Akagawa, of the Institute for Public Art and Design, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and consultant to the director, Design Arts Program, National Endowment for the Arts. Author of The Once and Future Park, she also coedited the visual arts attachment of the literary review Rain Taxi, was editor of Public Art Review, and has written reviews for Sculpture Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Architecture Minnesota.

Her community service has included: board member of the Franconia Sculpture Park, New Opportunities Committee of Public Art Saint Paul, jury chair for the Minnesota Women's Suffrage Memorial Garden, and task force member of the Ford Site Redevelopment, Saint Paul Green Development Policy, and Critical Areas Zoning.

Grace La and James Dallman
Principal architects, LA DALLMAN, Milwaukee

LA DALLMAN: Fabricated landscapes
Monday, November 9, 6 p.m., 100 Rapson Hall
Cass Gilbert Fund Lecture

The work of LA DALLMAN explores architecture as transformed site, reshaping the raw materials of found and abstracted landscape in projects of diverse scale and type. The practice deploys material and detailing investigations as cultural artifacts, which grow from the context. Among recent projects, the lecture will discuss LA DALLMAN's permanent exhibits at Discovery World, the new University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Hillel Student Center, and the Levy House.

Led by James Dallman and Grace La, both graduates of Harvard University, the LA DALLMAN design studio has been awarded over 30 professional honors since its inception in 1999. Most recently, the Marsupial Bridge and Urban Spaces has received the Silver Medal of the national Bruner Award for Urban Excellence. LA DALLMAN was featured as Architectural Record's emerging architectural firm (April 2001), and was recognized as one of four small firms nationally working on large scale projects (Dec. 2002).

Recently, the practice won six design awards for excellence from the American Institute of Architects Wisconsin, second prize among 109 submissions in Pittsburgh's 2006 International West End Pedestrian Bridge Competition, and was a finalist in Atlanta's 2005 International Andrew Young Design Competition, Madison's Chazen Art Museum, and Pittsburgh's Allegheny Square Competition. The practice was awarded first place in the 2000 design competition for Kilbourn Tower.

LA DALLMAN is published in Detail in Process (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), The Green Braid (Routledge, 2007), The Public Chance (a + t, 2008), 1000x Architecture of the Americas (Verlaghaus Braun, 2008), Architectural Record, Praxis, Spain's a + t In Common Series, Canada's Azure, and Germany's Topos. They have lectured broadly and have exhibited their design work in various cities including at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Gail Dubrow
Professor of architecture, landscape architecture, public affairs and planning, and history; director of the Consortium on Interdisciplinary Inquiry, University of Minnesota

Shanties fit for swine in God-forsaken places: How picture-brides made homes in the Pacific Northwest landscape
Monday, November 16, 6 p.m., 100 Rapson Hall
H.W.S. Cleveland Fund Lecture

Ordinary women rarely have been imagined as significant agents of change in shaping the landscape of the American West, but a new exhibit at the Autry Museum of the American West starts from that premise. Commissioned for one segment of the exhibit, this research draws on the material culture, personal narratives, and poems of Japanese picture brides to reveal their key role in transforming the rough architecture and raw landscape associated with Japanese men, who immigrated before them to work in lumber camps and on farmsteads, into places women considered suitable for human habitation. This lecture will be illustrated from Dubrow's extensive collection of images of the built environment and cultural landscape associated with Japanese American communities.

Gail Dubrow is professor of architecture, landscape architecture, public affairs and planning, and history at the University of Minnesota. She served from 2005-2009 as Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School. Prior to 2005, she served for 16 years on the faculty of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Washington, where she was founding director of the Preservation Planning and Design Program. Her work documents and protects places in the history of women, minorities, and other underrepresented communities. She is currently working on a report of findings from the Consortium on Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Following a leave, she looks forward to rejoining the faculty in fall 2010.