Lecture: "The Architecture of Harry Weese" November 5, 2010

"The Architecture of Harry Weese"
A public lecture given by Dr. Richard Bruegmann
5:30pm, Friday, November 5, 2010
Rm. L150, Chazen Museum of Art

During a career that spanned half a century from the 1930s to the 1980s, Harry Weese (1915-1998) produced a large number of significant designs ranging from small but highly inventive houses, larger institutional structures like the George L. Mosse Humanities building and the Chazen Museum of Art, to massive urban scale commissions like the Washington, D.C. Metro system. Bruegmann’s book on the architecture of Harry Weese takes its place within a fast-growing revival of interest in the work of Weese and a number of his friends and contemporaries with shared assumptions and sensibilities. As important as Weese’s buildings were, though, they were only one part of what almost all his contemporaries recognized as his seemingly inexhaustible creativity. His work was characterized by a deep respect for older buildings and existing urban patterns and a fondness for unexpected, often idiosyncratic design decisions.

ROBERT BRUEGMANN, a historian of architecture, landscape, and the built environment, is University Distinguished Professor of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is The Architecture of Harry Weese (WW Norton).