JOANNA MERWOOD-SALISBURY, Assistant Professor, Architectural History and Theory, Parsons The New School for Design
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s scholarly interests range from the design and reception of the first skyscrapers in late-nineteenth-century Chicago, to the historiography of modern architecture in 1930s New York City, to the transformations of interior design practice and pedagogy in the twentieth-century. Her talk will examine a radical and controversial moment in Parsons’ institutional history when interior design education was reconfigured as part of a larger movement labeled “environmental design,” breaking with the limits of the discipline as it had been traditionally conceived and setting out an ambitious agenda of social engagement. This topic will be the subject of an exhibition in Aronson Gallery in Spring 2011.
