No. 264 - 1/5/13
What a lovely way to start May… My morning class was cancelled so I got up early and got a donut at Firecakes and went to the Art Institute and studied for my midterm for like, five minutes in the park.
No. 118 - 18/9/12
At the Art Institute for my American Art class, but only got to the 18th-century portraits I was supposed to be looking at after two hours.
Oh, look! More female architects!
Marion Mahony (Griffin) was Frank Lloyd Wright’s right-hand woman and supremely talented drafstman. When Wright disappeared to Europe, galavanting with his mistress, the prominent feminist Mamah Borthwick (Cheney), Mahony stuck with the firm. She was the second woman to graduate from MIT’s architecture program and the first in the world to become a licensed architect. She married another Wright draftsman (Griffin) and continued her work independent of Wright. Her style is, naturally, very similar to his, and she was also highly influenced by Japanese art, which you can see in her prints. But Mahony is fundamentally independent from Wright, and immensely creative and innovative in her own right.
She did a series called Forest Portraits that totally destroyed me when I saw them at AIC today, but I can’t find pictures of them anywhere.
(All images from Northwestern University’s Block Museum)
This is the architecture firm whose exhibition I was talking about earlier. Studio Gang Architects’ first exhibition is going on right now at the Art Institute of Chicago, open to the public as of tomorrow. The firm is founded and headed by Jeanne Gang, a Chicago native and Harvard graduate, who has returned to Chicago to help turn the city into the avant-garde architecture haven it once was.
Her style is very similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s in that the designs are all extensions of nature. Going through the exhibit, you see models and architectural plans, but also honeycomb and pine cones. In Hyderabad’s case, Gang used a geode (pictured above) as a model. Something else that’s really fucking cool about this building is that Gang took into account the Hindu emphasis on spacial harmony to create four towers that were physically separate but visually woven together.
(Photos from SGA’s site)
