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Faculty members receive coveted international fellowships
By PATRICIA
DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
In an unprecedented decision, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, one of the most distinguished interdisciplinary architectural research centers and museums in the world, will present prestigious annual visiting fellowships to two faculty members at the same school—the UB School of Architecture and Planning.
The recipients are Kent Kleinman, professor and chair of the Department of Architecture, and Hadas Steiner, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture. They will be resident scholars at CCA from January 2005 through May 2005.
CCA fellowships are awarded annually to scholars of diverse academic and professional accomplishments at various stages of their careers, and are coveted by architects all over the world, according to Brian Carter, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. The fellowships are awarded on the basis of recommendations from a distinguished international jury, which this year consisted of Peter Eisenman, Martin Bressani, Jean-Louis Cohen, Kurt W. Forster, Sylvia Lavin (chair) and Mark Wigley.
"The fact that this is the first time the CCA has awarded fellowships to scholars in the same school in the same year highlights the world-class caliber of our architecture faculty," said Carter. "This is a great honor for UB."
The CCA inaugurated its Study Centre Fellowship Program in 1997 as an international institute for advanced research at the postdoctoral level on all aspects of architectural thought. Since it was founded, the program has hosted more than 65 distinguished scholars from 16 countries.
Fellowships are awarded on the basis of proposals submitted by candidates in the fields of architectural history, theory or criticism. The program encourages interdisciplinary research projects in such fields as landscape architecture, photography and film history.
Kleinman is the author and editor, with Leslie Van Duzer, of "Villa Muller: A Work of Adolf Loos" and "Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision" and contributed to two books on the University of Michigan's Raoul Wallenberg Lectures.
During his CCA residency, Kleinman will focus on the American reception and transformation of Eurocentric modernity during the interwar and immediate post-war years. He will look particularly at the practice of architect William Muschenheim (1902-1990), whose work offers an important, but relatively unknown, link between early European modernism and its importation and development in the United States.
"Muschenheim's life and work illuminate many of the most significant impulses and debates that framed the development of architecture in the United States between 1925 and the early post-war years," Kleinman says.
"His oeuvre consists of more than 190 projects, many of which are unparalleled examples of the quest to find an appropriate architecture for America's technological, material and social context."
Kleinman's research will augment substantial archival work he conducted at Columbia University and the University of Michigan and which was completed in 2002-03 when he was a senior fellow of the Mellon Foundation/Public Goods Council Fellowship program at the University of Michigan.
Steiner is an architectural historian, theorist and critic whose CCA project, "City Synthesis: Archigram and the Structure of Circulation," will be the first archival study of the Archigram, an underground journal published in London by six architects at irregular intervals from 1961-70 that went on to spawn a movement.
While the journal is not familiar to most outside the field, it was a brilliant and provocative publication that disseminated an ideological model among the attendant avant-garde practices of the period. Wildly colorful, intense, hilarious and audaciously critical, the polemics of the Archigram group helped define the 1960s futuristic aesthetic that others applied to such things as the villains' headquarters in James Bond films, Monty Python's psychedelic animation and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.
The journal remains among the most significant phenomena to emerge in architectural culture since WWII. In architectural terms, Steiner says, it gave us visual inventions like the "Plug-in City," "Living Pod," "Instant City" and "Ad Hoc" design that now are part of our intellectual and visual vocabulary.
"This study will train a theoretical lens on a hitherto unexamined body of archival sources," she says, "to establish how the assimilation of the Archigram imagery set the course for the visual output of what are now commonplace tools in architectural practice."