UB Architecture School Plans Lecture Series

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Robert McCarter will speak at 6 p.m. Oct. 20 in the Performing Arts Center auditorium at Buffalo State College as part of the UB School of Architecture and Planning's Fall Lecture Series.

McCarter, chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Florida, will discuss "The Fabric of Experience: Inside Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses." The lecture is co-sponsored by the Burchfield-Penney Art Center at Buffalo State.

The series will continue Nov. 3 with a lecture by Elizabeth Grosz, the Park Professor of Comparative Literature at UB. Grosz, who may be best-known among architects for her theoretical writings on embodiment, identity and spatial organization, will speak at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall on the South (Main Street) Campus. Grosz' essay, "Bodies-Cities," was among those published in "Sexuality and Space," a discussion of feminist architectural theory.

K. Michael Hays, chair of the doctoral program in architecture at Harvard University and the 1999 Clarkson Chair at UB, will present three related lectures Nov. 10, 11 and 18 that look at the development of influential architectural theories.

The series, entitled "The Smoothing of Architecture from 1973-1999," will examine "The Autonomization of Type, or, How to Get from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Aldo Rossi" on Nov. 10; "The Mythification of the Semiotic Surface, or, How to Get from Robert Venturi to Roland Barthes" on Nov. 11, and "The De-differentiation of Practices and the Smoothing of Theory, or, How We Got from 1973 to 1999" on Nov. 18.

All three lectures will begin at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby.