Please join us for a talk on May 5 by Beatriz Colomina, Graham grantee and curator of the exhibition, Playboy Architecture, 1953–1979, opening at the Elmhurst Art Museum on May 7.

Sex, architecture and design were inextricably intertwined in the pages of Playboy magazine from the very beginning. Architecture was not simply featured in the magazine but was its very mechanism. The sexual fantasies and the architectural fantasies were inseparable. Architecture turned out to be more seductive than the playmates. It became the ultimate playmate.

With its massive global circulation and sexualization of architecture, Playboy arguably had more influence on the dissemination of modern design than professional magazines, interiors magazines, and even institutions like the Museum of Modern Art.

Playboy architecture is all about the interior. The Playboy is an indoors man. The magazine was relentlessly obsessed with the interior and this interior turns out to be infinite. From the furniture to the clothes, the lighting, the music, the food, the drinks, the conversation, the jokes, the ideas, the art, the architecture, the smells, and even the way to move, to act… everything is provided. The magazine created a total work of art. When you open the pages of the magazine you are invited to dive in into this world without gaps, without cracks, without decay… an infinite perfected interior, a total work of art.

Beatriz Colomina is professor of architecture and founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, sexuality and media. Her books include Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg, 2014); Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (Actar, 2010); Domesticity at War (MIT Press, 2007); Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994); and Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). Colomina has curated a series of exhibitions in Venice, Kassel, London, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Santiago de Chile, Bogota, Vancouver, Oslo, Lisbon, New York, Murcia, Montreal, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Maastricht and Vienna. She will co-curate, with Mark Wigley, the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial. She was born in Madrid, studied architecture and completed her Ph.D. in Barcelona and lives in New York City.


This lecture is presented in partnership with the Elmhurst Art Museum.

Image:"The Playboy's Town House," Playboy, May 1962. Architect: R. Donald Jayce. Rendering by Humen Tan.

Angelo Plessas is an artist based in Athens. The focus of his work is to network the offline with the online in ways that make us understand aspects of both conditions, and to generate new ways of relating to both. His activities range widely—from performances to artist residencies; from self-publishing to interactive websites; from sculptures, to live-stream events and different educational projects. For the last four years, he has organized annual, weeklong gatherings of The Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood.

The Graham Foundation is pleased to present this talk in partnership with the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

This lecture is made possible by support from the Myers Foundations and the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the arts.

Image: Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood 1-3, Angelo Plessas, 2015, Courtesy the Breeder, Athens.

Welshman Rhodri Davies confronts traditional concepts of the harp through his use of preparations, de-tuned, bowed and e-bowed strings.

On April 9, in his Chicago solo debut and first local appearance since 2002, Davies will present recent works for both lap harp and concert pedal harp.

In 1965, Joseph Kosuth first exhibited One and Three Chairs, an artwork comprised of a manufactured chair, a photograph of the chair, and a typed definition of a chair all placed in proximity within a gallery. Soon, other triads followed, including One and Three Shovels, One and Three Plants, and One and Three Photographs. As the interchangeability of the readymade objects he selected attests to, Kosuth was less concerned with the aesthetic value of the art he displayed than with the questions it raised. What, for example, is the relationship between the three items presented- an object, a depiction, and a description? Or, alternatively, between an idea, an instance, and an image?

Sarah Blankenbaker, the 2015–16 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the UIC School of Architecture, will discuss her culminating fellowship exhibition, One and Three. Like Kosuth’s series, from which the exhibition borrows its name, One and Three presents sets of three versions of the same thing—a photograph, a façade, and a window—as an exploration of the translation of images into architecture and vice versa.

Sarah Blankenbaker is a clinical assistant professor at the UIC School of Architecture and the 2015-16 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow. She first moved to Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a BA in mathematics and visual art from the University of Chicago. While photographing buildings and spaces across the city, she was drawn to the architecture she encountered and subsequently departed for Los Angeles to study at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).  Blankenbaker has worked for Terreform in New York and Zago Architecture in Los Angeles. While at Zago Architecture, she was part of a team that participated in Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at MoMA in New York. In 2011, she returned to Chicago to join the faculty at the UIC School of Architecture, where she has been teaching design studios, technology seminars, and YArch, a summer program for people who, like herself, discover architecture while pursuing other interests. Her work has been shown as drawings in Chicago and Los Angeles and appeared as writing in Log, Future Anterior, and Time + Architecture.


About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship, supported with a grant from the Graham Foundation, provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the UIC School of Architecture in the spring. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Image: Sarah Blankenbaker, A photograph, a façade, a window, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

The creation of an African education curriculum and improved access to education have been central to the continent’s development goals from the dying days of colonization to the present. During Africa’s early independence era of the 1950’s and ‘60s, a significant number of school building projects were commissioned to respond to this need. This period of architectural production in Anglophone West Africa coincided with the constellation of a final tranche of colonial funds, international aid, and the presence of a cadre of young modernist architects, many of whom were affiliated with the Architectural Association’s Tropical School. Ola Uduku will explore the architecture, historic symbolism, and legacy of some of the most significant schools built during period and the architects and other actors who contributed to their design.

Ola Uduku is reader in architecture and Dean International for Africa at Edinburgh University’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, was Smutts Fellow in African Studies, and has lectured at Liverpool and Strathclyde Universities. Her research interests include: the history of educational architecture in Africa, gated communities, and issues surrounding social infrastructure provisions for minority communities in cities. In 2014 she completed the British Academy-funded Alan Vaughan Richards Archive Project. Currently she is involved in the Conserving West African Modernism Project (with KNUST, Kumasi) and is founding member of ArchiAfrika, a non-profit dedicated to improving architectural education and knowledge of architectural history in Africa. She is also a member of Docomomo International and is supporting Ghana’s membership application. Her publications include chapters and articles in Architecture Beyond Europe (2015); Radical Pedagogies Project (2015); and Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy in the Twentieth Century (Taylor and Francis, forthcoming), among others.


Image: Fry and Drew, CMS Primary School Lagos, c.1950s. From the exhibition AA in Africa, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, 2002.

For more information on the exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, click here.

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