Live Study and Play Sessions

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Live Study and Play Sessions

Hill College House at the University of Pennsylvania, built in 1960 and designed by Eero Saarinen with landscape by Dan Kiley. The building underwent a 15-month, $80 million, LEED Gold certified renovation and was awarded a 2018 Modernism in America Award of Excellence.

Credit

Aislinn Weidele

Day Three Late Afternoon Sessions
Live Study and Play

Session 1
Live, Study, Play: Community in the Work of Eero Saarinen

Session 2
Modernism by the Numbers: Federal Funding for Post-WWII U.S. College Expansion

Session 3
Milwaukee’s Midcentury Schools: 58 New Schools in 15 Years

Session 4
America’s First Modern Enclave: Alfred and Jane West Clauss in Tennessee

Live, Study, Play: Community in the Work of Eero Saarinen

Midcentury dormitories, more than most other campus buildings, are reflective of rapid growth and cultural change – admission of women, lifestyle changes, the post-war increase in student body population and increased need for housing. Many of them have begun to reach a critical point in their lifespan, and preserving, renovating, and adapting them to new cultural trends is imperative for their survival.

This session will discuss the comprehensive renovations recently completed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Hill College House designed by Eero Saarinen in 1960. This historic structure was constructed for freshmen women and its iconography of an urban Italian palazzo created a protective environment.  By contrast the interior is bright, light filled, and organized around an open atrium with overlooking balconies.  The interior was designed with spaces for living, study, and play and one of the goals of the renovation was to enhance those facilities in the context of this larger rehabilitation.

Michael J. Mills, FAIA

Michael J. Mills, FAIA, has devoted his career to the preservation and adaptive use design of some of the nation’s most historic structures such as: The Statue of Liberty, Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bath House, Saarinen’s Hill College House at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Milwaukee Federal Building and Courthouse. He has served as Chair of the Advisory Group of the AIA Historic Resources Committee and is a past president of Preservation New Jersey. Michael is a national peer reviewer for the GSA Design Excellence program, and former member of the NJ Uniform Construction Code Advisory Board. He has lectured at Princeton University’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Association for Preservation Technology’s (APT) international conference, and serves as Associate Graduate Faculty in the Rutgers University Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program.

Modernism by the Numbers: Federal Funding for Post-WWII U.S. College Expansion

This paper examines publicly-funded higher-education facility construction in the decades following World War II. Looking beyond the GI Bill impact, the paper examines other socio-economic factors that contributed to an expansion of college enrollment from 3 million in 1957 to 6 million by 1970. New research recognizes the multi-decade significance of the 1963 Higher Education Facilities Act (HEFA) and its initialization of “Great Society” programs ushered by the LBJ Administration. The legislation additionally included unique collaborations with the AIA. The presentation considers the Midwest region including landmark projects associated with UIC, U of I, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin, and SOM’s Walter Netsch, Harry Weese, and Gene Summers. The increasingly disappearing legacy of these publicly-funded projects deserves greater concern as they struggle with maintenance against diminished state and federal funding.

 

Jon Buono

Jon Buono is an Associate Director with SOM’s New York office and leads the firm’s work for adaptive reuse and higher education. His focus on modern architecture began while with the National Park Service, contributing to preservation of the agency’s “Mission 66” building program. In 2005 he lead the University System of Georgia’s “Guidelines for Campus Historic Preservation,“ which created one of the largest statewide campus preservation programs in the country. Additional preservation work includes projects for the UMass Amherst campus, Massachusetts State House, and the Cartier Mansion in New York. From 2006-13, Jon was a consulting preservation expert for the United Nations Capital Master Plan including restoration of the Conference and General Assembly Building interiors. Jon is a past Board Member of Docomomo US.

Milwaukee’s Midcentury Schools: 58 New Schools in 15 Years

The City of Milwaukee, like cities across the country, faced a population explosion, suburbanization, and racial disparities in the aftermath of World War II. Milwaukee doubled its land area in under fifteen years, and enrollment in its public schools nearly tripled. In response, the public school system undertook an enormous building program, constructing 58 new schools between 1950 and 1965, along with 124 major additions and modernizations at older schools.


To accomplish this building campaign, the school board turned to a talented group of local architects, including Harry Bogner; Lillian Leenhouts (Wisconsin’s first licensed female architect); and Donald Grieb (designer of the iconic Mitchell Park Domes.) The resulting schools showcased postwar materials and technologies and resulted in several distinct building typologies.  Yet even as the school board embraced change in architectural design, it continued to enforce decades-old district policies that ultimately led to a 14-year court battle over school segregation.

Justin Miller

 

Justin Miller is an architectural historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He specializes in historic preservation legal compliance, historic tax credit consulting, and research and documentation for the National Register of Historic Places. He has presented on a variety of topics for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the Victorian Society in America. Justin’s recent articles, talks, and tours have ranged from an exploration of a modernist ski resort in northern Wisconsin to a Chicago tour of the buildings of African American architect John Moutoussamy. Justin is a member of the Docomomo US/Chicago chapter.

America’s First Modern Enclave: Alfred and Jane West Clauss in Tennessee

The history of 20th-century modern architecture, particularly The International Style, has some unlikely origin stories. This is one of them. Between 1939 and 1945, before John Entenza’s Case Study House program; before the Eames’s playful explorations with the materiel of war, on an isolated knoll just beyond the Knoxville city limits, Alfred and Jane West Clauss designed a planned grouping of what seems the first development of exclusively International Style houses in the United States. The ten dwellings were to flank a narrow ridge crowned by a crude road with the unlikely name, Little Switzerland; half were realized and still exist, more or less. While the immediate context of the Clausses work was an idealized Tennessee Valley and the nearby Smokey Mountains (clearly visible from the site), among the larger cultural and political determinants were: the war in Europe; the nearby Secret City of Oak Ridge and its Manhattan Project; and the unprecedented scope of the Tennessee Valley Administration (TVA) for which Alfred Clauss worked and made important contributions. 

George Dodds

George Dodds taught throughout the United States, and practiced in offices in Detroit, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, before earning his Master of Architecture, Master of Science, and a PhD in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, writing on Landscape and Garden in the Work of Carlo Scarpa. Immediately before arriving at the University of Tennessee, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. Dodds has published Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, with Robert Tavernor, and Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion, in addition to over fifty scholarly articles, and over thirty critical commentaries on the built environment. He was the Executive Editor of The Journal of Architectural Education (2006-2010); The Mickel Visiting Professor at Clemson University (2008) and the first Cox Professor from the UT College of Architecture + Design (2006-09). He is a Distinguished Professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and is currently the UT Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor of Architecture where he has served as Chair of the Graduate Architecture Program, Associate Dean of Research and Academic Affairs, and co-founded the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture. Among his current projects is a critical monograph on the Jackson, Mississippi practice of Duvall Decker Architects with Jori Erdman.