Donald Albrecht has curated exhibitions that have ranged from overviews of cultural trends, including World War II and the American Dream and Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design for the National Building Museum, the National Design Triennial for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Paris/NewYork: Design Fashion Culture, 1925–1940 for the Museum of the City of New York, to profiles of individual design firms and artists—The Work of Charles and Ray Eames for the Library of Congress and Vitra Design Museum, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Futurefor the Finnish Cultural Institute, the Museum of Finnish Architecture, and the National Building Museum, and The High Style of Dorothy Draper for the Museum of the City of New York.
For most exhibitions, Mr. Albrecht also develops and edits the catalogs, contributing major essays and working with other writers to provide fresh critical perspectives. His catalogs have garnered numerous awards, including the Society of Architectural Historians’ Best Exhibition Catalogue for the Eero Saarinen and the Eames catalogs. Mr. Albrecht has also contributed essays to a number of books about architecture and design, including The Glass House: Pairings and California Design: The Legacy of West Coast Craft and Style to monographs on Andree Putman, Michael Gabellini, and 1100 Architect, and has written extensively about the relationship between architecture and film, starting with his seminal book, Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies.
Mr. Albrecht lectures frequently about architecture and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Thomas Mellins is an independent curator and author, and has curated exhibitions for the National Building Museum, the Yale School of Architecture, and many others. His most recent exhibitions, “The American Style: New York and the Modern Metropolis,” at the Museum of the City of New York, and “Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art,“ was co-curated with Donald Albrecht. Mr. Mellins has also published several books on the architectural history of New York, beginning with New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, and has contributed essays to a number of publications focusing on architecture and design.
