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How Frank Lloyd Wright Became America’s Greatest Architect Lecturer: Kathryn Smith
April 20, 2018 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Approved for 1 AIA LU Co-sponsored by Monterey Area Architectural Resources Archive (MAARA) and the Alliance of Monterey Area Preservationists (AMAP)
Friday, April 20, 7 pm Canterbury Woods Auditorium, 651 Sinex Avenue near the corner of Forest Avenue, Pacific Grove
About the Talk:
Frank Lloyd Wright, the creator of New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater, a house over a waterfall, is universally regarded as the greatest American architect who ever lived. His career spanned over seventy years from the 1890s to 1959. While he went from local recognition in Chicago in the 1910s to national notoriety for his love life in the 1920s, he rose to international fame in the 1930s when he appeared on the cover of TIME magazine to finally becoming an icon of American culture in the 1940s and 1950s. He was then and still remains the only architect most people can remember by name.
In her new book, Wright on Exhibit, Kathryn Smith charts Wright’s rise and fall and rise again in a revealing exposition of how Wright refused to be forgotten and what he did step by step to attract the admiration of millions of Americans, not to mention the Europeans and Japanese.
Her illustrated lecture covers favorites such as the Prairie Houses, the Usonian Houses, and major public buildings including the Guggenheim Museum and Marin County Civic Center. She will devote special attention to one of Wright’s most dramatic houses by the water, the Mrs. Della Walker House, Carmel-by-the-Sea, the only other Wright building that can be compared to Fallingwater in its profound connection between man and nature.
Martin Filler for New York Review of Books describes Smith’s latest book Wright on Exhibit as “an intriguing treatise on career development … so illuminatingly detailed that it gives a richer portrait of Wright than many full-length biographies. The care, audacity, and originality with which Wright orchestrated the public presentation of his revolutionary architecture from start to finish…is laid out by Kathryn Smith with exceptional thoroughness.”
About the Speaker:
Kathryn Smith is an architectural historian, who is an historic preservation consultant, author, and lecturer. Her books include Wright on Exhibit: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Exhibitions (2017), Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master (2009), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Taliesin West (1997), and Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill (1992).
Smith has been a consultant to Graycliff Conservancy, Florida Southern College, and Barnsdall Park. She has held NEH, NEA, and Graham Foundation fellowships. In 2003, she was Scholar-in-Residence at the Robie House, Chicago. In 2001, Smith was awarded the Wright Spirit Award in the Professional Category from the Building Conservancy.
FREE for current AMAP members and residents of Canterbury Woods.
All others, $20 at the door; ticket includes an AMAP membership for the rest of 2018!