Always on the second Friday of the month
June 14, 2013
By Temple Ligon
June 14, 2013
This Friday afternoon, June 14 at six inside the Capital City Club, the Wren Institute for Urban Research will discuss the architecture of Thomas Jefferson. We’ll spend the most time on the capitol in Richmond and the UVA campus in Charlottesville. Jefferson died a debtor with a full wine cellar replete with the best red Bordeaux. Holding Jefferson in high regard, particularly his later priorities, bring a bottle of red Bordeaux to the lecture. The capitol in Richmond was the first part of the recent PBS series, 10 Buildings That Changed America. But I didn’t need PBS to show me the way. I have been giving monthly lectures on art history, architecture and urban design for 13 years.
Starting in early 2000, as the founder of the Wren Institute for Urban Research, I put together a lecture series on urban design, that is, the design of cities. And I allowed for the occasional coverage of the work of an individual architect or artist. My personal library on art history and urban design is pretty strong, but my main academic resource has always been Ed Bacon’s The Design of Cities, a book I first studied in the fall of 1975.
In 2000, with many other resources besides the Ligon Home Library, not only in the Richland Library but through its interlibrary loan component, I organized a sequence of monthly talks for the next year, well into 2001. The outline of the series was based on the American Megalopolis, all of the cities from Hampton Roads in Virginia north to Portland in Maine. The order of the talks was to begin with the history and failure of Jamestown and its replacements as the Virginia capital, both Williamsburg and Richmond. Then I took my audiences north.
Since the beginning the Wren lectures have always been on the second Friday of the month. More recently they have been given three times on the second Friday: 1:30 p.m. at Still Hopes ; 3:30 p.m. at the Presbyterian Community; and at 6:00 p.m. in the Capital City Club, where we share the night’s theme libation we bring ourselves. While talking about Paris, for instance, it’s always Champagne; New York City, rye Manhattans; Michelangelo, Tuscan red, because that’s what he drank. And so it goes.
The next lecture in the PBS-inspired series will be on August 9 and will discuss architect H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church (1877) in Boston.
Using the PBS sequence, following Trinity Church are:
September 13 – Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis
November 8 – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (1910) in Chicago
December 13 – Albert Kahn’s Highland Park Ford Plant (1910) in Detroit
2014
January 10 – Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center (1956) in Minneapolis
February 14 – Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) on in Manhattan
March 14 – Eero Saarinen’s Dulles Airport Terminal (1962) near Washington
April 11 – Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House (1964) in Philadelphia
May 9 – Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles
On July 12 the lecture series will be put on hold to allow for our annual Bastille Day observance and lecture on the history of the streets of Paris, including singing the French national anthem and drinking Champagne. Note the capital C.
And on October 11, we again get off the schedule for another annual repeat, the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren, our hero and namesake who best demonstrated the Number One Rule in Marketing Architectural Services: Get in good with the king. After the London Fire of 1666, Wren designed and built 51 churches, including St. Paul’s.
And from then until the lecture on May 9 the PBS building sequence will be followed.
By May 2014, the Wren lecture series will no doubt be posted for the next several months, maybe even for another year. What’s likely to come back to the fore is a survey of the winners of the Pritzker Prize, the architecture equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Since my columns for MidlandsLife come out every Friday, I’ll announce the Wren lecture topic on the second Friday of the month for that afternoon, as is the case right now.
If you would like to be included when lecture invitations go out, just leave me your email address: [email protected]
Also, thanks to Sonny Brunson at Southeastern Help Desk, we keep something of a record of what happens at Wren on the website WIFUR.org.
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