Live Study and Play Sessions

Image details

Day Three Late Afternoon Sessions
Live Study and Play

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

Session 2
Session 3


Session 4

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.


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.

 


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.


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.