Yale Architecture: Fall Exhibitions

Yale School of Architecture Announces Fall Exhibitions
New Haven, Conn.—
The Yale School of Architecture (YSA) Gallery in Paul Rudolph Hall, 180 York St., will feature exhibitions in the fall term celebrating the life and work of two legendary master architects with deep ties to the School: lighting designer Richard Kelly (1910–70) and Pritzker Prize laureate James Stirling (1926–92).

The exhibition “The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture,” opens on August 23. Displaying a selection of drawings and photographs, largely from the Kelly Papers held at Yale’s Manuscripts & Archives collection, the exhibition is a celebration of the 100th birthday of one the most successful and influential lighting designers in the history of modern architecture. Kelly, who graduated from the Department of Architecture of Yale University’s School of the Fine Arts in 1944, has more than 300 lighting projects to his credit, among them the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago and the Seagram Building in New York, both designed by Mies van der Rohe; Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons restaurant, the New York State Theater, the Wiley House, in Westport, Conn, and Johnson’s own Glass House, in New Canaan, Conn.

Curated by Brown Professor of History of Modern Architecture Dietrich Neumann, “The Structure of Light” exhibition will be on view until October 2. A two-day international symposium on the illustrious designer, also organized by Neumann, will take place at Yale October 1–2. For more information, see Yale Calendar of Events.

Opening on October 13, the second exhibition of the term, “An Architect’s Legacy: James Stirling’s Students at Yale, 1959–1983,” offers a rare glimpse of a towering figure of 20th century architecture through the prism of his former students’ work.

Displaying hundreds of architectural drawings by some 70 YSA alumni who studied with Stirling when he taught at Yale in 1959 and from 1966 to 1984 as the Davenport Visiting Professor of Design, the exhibition is organized chronologically around five themes: “Articulated Functionalism” (late 1950s to mid-1960s); “The New City” (late 1960s); “Urban Insertions” (early to mid-1970s); “Architectural Places” (mid- to late-1970s); and “Fragmented Monumentality” (early 1980s). Among the students whose work is on display are Robert Finkle ’60, Der Scutt ’61, Craig Hodgetts ’67, Steve Heiken ’71, George Turnbull ’74, Louise Braverman ’77, Philip Babb ’78, Mac Ball ’78, Reese Owens ’80, Robert Kahn ’80, Brian Healy ’81, Frank Lupo ’82, Tim Lenahan ’84, and Marion Weiss ’84. The students’ studio projects include a commercial hotel for New Haven (1959); the Fort Worth Museum (1960); the Mellon Centre for the Arts (1972), later realized as Louis Kahn’s landmark Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; and many projects that Stirling was himself engaged in through his London-based professional office: the North Rhine-Westphalia Museum (1975), Düsseldorf; the Tuscany Government Center in Florence (1977); the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1978); the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain in London (1981); and the Performing Arts Center at Cornell University (1983). A video documentary accompanying the show will constitute an oral history of Stirling’s teaching at Yale. Yale School of Architecture faculty members Emmanuel Petit and Dean Sakamoto are, respectively, curator and designer/organizer of “An Architect’s Legacy.”

In April 2009, in anticipation of this exhibition, the Yale School of Architecture hosted a symposium “James Stirling, Architect and Teacher.”

The exhibit will be on view until February 11, 2011.

Exhibitions at the Yale School of Architecture take place in the Gallery of Paul Rudolph Hall and are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday–Friday 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. For the Stirling exhibition, the Architecture Gallery will be open from 12 noon – 5 p.m. on Sundays and will be open until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays from October 13 –November 10 and will also remain open until 8 p.m. on November 12, December 2 and 8.

The exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture will run concurrently, from October 14, 2010 to January 2, 2011, with another Stirling retrospective, “Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher,” at the Yale Center for British Art (BAC), 1080 Chapel Street. Co-produced with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (CCA), the BAC exhibition will feature more than 300 original architectural drawings, models, and photographs drawn from the James Stirling/Michael Wilford collection at the CCA. For more information about this exhibition, visit the Yale Center for British Art website.

The Yale Center for British Art is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and will be open until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays from October 13 – November 10, and will also remain open until 8 p.m. on November 12, December 2 and 8.

ENDS

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