H+U+D colloquium members traveled to New York to MoMA to see Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive   The show marked the recent joint acquisition of the archive by Columbia University and MoMA. The exhibition divided materials fromthe Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s Archive into 12 sections showcasing 12 different guest curators and scholars. The show was organized by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University; with Jennifer Gray, Project Research Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. Colloquium members discussed the exhibition with Jennifer Gray.

H+U+D co-director, David Browlee and Jennifer Gray

H+U+D Colloquium Members (l-r) Raffaella Giannetto Fabiani, Domenic Vitiello, Lee Ann Custer (guest) and Naomi Waltham-Smith

In its final year, the H+U+D initiative invested in the creation of four new courses to attract students from across the university at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The courses each pair a faculty member from the Schools of Design and Arts and Sciences to co-create and co-teach a course that explore cities from the dual perspectives of the humanities and design disciplines. The city seminar courses focus on one city in depth for undergraduates and include travel to the city under study. This semester students will be traveling to New York and Berlin. Students in “New York as Incubator for the Twentieth Century” will study four urban visionaries influence by New York City. In “Media Memories and the Future: Sound and Environment in Berlin,” students will use the city as a  a palimpsest—sonically, visually, and spatially—to investigate and interpret historical patterns and their relationship to novel practices and methods in the present. The graduate problematics seminar takes a theme and tackles it using methods of inquiry from both the humanities and design disciplines. Students will be studying coastal cities and how infrastructure needs contend with sea level rise in “Sinking and Floating: Phenomenologies of Coastal Urban Resistance.” A fourth course, “Philadelphia: Urban Experience and Public Memory,” explores how monuments. memory, politics and sensory experience shape understandings of Philadelphia’s past, present and future.  For more information…

The earliest roots of place making have involved a symbiosis of different kinds of natures: a necessary one of production—also called the “other” or “second” nature to distinguish it from the pristine “first”—and a third nature of polite, yet dispensable, aesthetic appreciation, its distinctness articulated in the 16th century. The etymology of the word garden, from the Frankish gardo, in fact, refers to an “enclosed place” that can be cultivated both for pleasure and for consumption. The history of landscape architecture is replete with examples in which the relationship between the beautiful and the productive—with the former often indebted to the latter—is apparent. According to Charles Elliot, speaking in 1891, the design work of a successful landscape architect will elicit beauty “from the happy marriage of the natural and the needful.” Yet today, the needful, or functional, has almost been lost to the discourse, with little attention paid to such problems as soil conservation, the globalization of food production, and the effects that industrial agriculture—the largest landholder and producer of monocultures—has on the environment and its inhabitants.

The objective of this conference is therefore to create a cross-disciplinary forum that will address the relationship between landscape design and the productive or working landscape from a variety of lenses. The latter will include the perspectives of a few emerging and established professionals, whose work has begun to explore the relationship and interaction between design, agriculture and infrastructure; the research of historians who have addressed the relationship between the worlds of second and third nature; the contributions of planners who have studied the challenge of urban food production; and those of scholars who have devoted their attention to the conservation of natural resources, the protection of biodiversity within working landscapes, and the preservation of the latter for their historic, social and cultural values.

Licensed landscape architects may register for CEU credit at the event.

For schedule and registration

The Project in Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D), invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit research proposals for Academic Year 2016-17. Small grants will be awarded to support projects that align with the mission of the H+U+D project. Both undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to apply. The maximum award is $2,000. Allowable research expenses include travel, archival charges, and photography. A list of previous student award recipients is available here.

Application Instructions

The application should include

• Research project proposal (maximum: 500 words)
• Short itemized budget
• Unofficial Penn transcript
• Letter or recommendation from sponsoring faculty member

The Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design (H+U+D) Initiative requests proposals for undergraduate city seminar courses and course development funds. Attached please find the full RFP that details the application process. 

Next year (2017-18) the initiative will sponsor two city seminars: one international and one domestic. Please see our website for descriptions of previous seminars here. The seminar should examine one city in a detailed, multidisciplinary way that incorporates both the humanities and design. Please consult HUD Course Development RFP for full application information. 

The deadline for proposals is April 21 , 2017. Proposals should be submitted to Mary Rocco at mrocc@design.upenn.edu. 

For questions, please contact Genie Birch at elbirch@design.upenn.edu or David Brownlee at dbrownle@sas.upenn.edu.

On Friday, February 3, members of the H+U+D Colloquium ventured to New York City’s Jewish Museum to view the first US exhibition to focus on French designer and architect, Pierre Chareau. The exhibition brought together many rarely-viewed works from both private and public collections. Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design  also addresses the designer’s life and work in the New York area, after he left Paris during the German occupation of the city, including the house he designed for Robert Motherwell in 1947 in East Hampton, Long Island. Together with his wife Dollie, Chareau was an active patron of the arts, and the exhibition reunites several pieces from their collection of paintings, sculptures, and drawings by significant artists such as Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ernst. The exhibition utilizes virtual reality and video technologies to the present the design evolution of Chareau’s extraordinary Maison de Terre, the glass house completed in Paris 1932. The Colloquium met with Professor Esther da Costa Meyer, History of Modern Architecture, Princeton University, one of the show’s organizers to discuss the curatorial and design process of the exhibition.

The exhibition continues through March 26, 2017.

From left to right: Shiben Banerji, Esther da Costa Meyer, Nancy Davenport and Orkan Telhan

The Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design (H+U+D) Initiative requests proposals for undergraduate city seminar courses and course development funds. 

Proposals should include

• a one-page letter from the proposed instructor(s), laying out the general objectives of the course
• a letter of support from the chair of an SAS undergraduate academic program or department
• a short biographical sketch of each instructor
• a sketch syllabus that includes the major topics to be considered, principal readings, the nature of the assigned work, and travel schedule
• a one-page budget

Next year (2017-18) the initiative will sponsor two city seminars: one international and one domestic. Descriptions of f previous seminars can be found here. The seminar should examine one city in a detailed, multidisciplinary way that incorporates both the humanities and design. Click here for HUD Course Development RFP.

The deadline for proposals is January 30, 2017. Proposals should be submitted to Mary Rocco at mrocc@design.upenn.edu. 

For questions, please contact Genie Birch at elbirch@design.upenn.edu or David Brownlee at dbrownle@sas.upenn.edu.

The Mellon Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D) Initiative, invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit research proposals for Academic Year 2016-17. Small grants will be awarded to support projects that align with the mission of the H+U+D project.

Undergraduate Research

Small research grants will be awarded to support interdisciplinary design/humanities projects undertaken by undergraduates in conjunction with a course or faculty-supervised independent study. Eligible research must draw from both humanities and design disciplines. Examples of eligible projects include senior theses in Visual Studies and Urban Studies, ABCS projects, work in the Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium, and other kinds of interdisciplinary research. The maximum award is $2000 per proposal. Allowable research expenses include travel, archival charges, and photography.

Graduate Research

Small research grants will be awarded to support interdisciplinary design/humanities projects undertaken by graduate students in humanities and design disciplines that focus on the built environment. Eligible research must draw from both humanities and design disciplines. Examples of eligible work include master’s thesis projects, independent study projects, and doctoral dissertation research. The maximum award is $2000 per proposal. Allowable research expenses include travel, archival charges, and photography.

For examples of student projects from past cycles click here.

Applications should be submitted on or before April 17, 2017 through the CURF website.

Lazaretto, photo credit: Conor Lucey, H+U+D Colloquium 2014-15

“This place is a treasure. I can’t believe that this place is still here,” said David Barnes, H+U+D Colloquium member, while walking around the perimeter a massive old brick mansion in a recent Newsworks interview. “There’s nothing like it anywhere in the country or in the world. People should be flocking here from all over just to see the site and learn about its history. And nobody knows it’s here!”

Barnes, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science, documented the history- “stories of commerce and politics, suffering and death, medicine and caregiving, immigration and hope” of Philadelphia’s Lazaretto. His extensive research and writing contributed to preservation efforts on behalf of the site. H+U+D colloquium members (pictured here), led by Barnes, toured the Lazaretto in spring 2014.

Tinicum Township, where the Lazaretto is located, is set to begin preservation efforts after arriving an agreement with the Philadelphia airport that will bring dedicated revenue to the project.  If all goes as planned, the Lazaretto will be open to visitors in January of 2018.