Interior Design As Environmental Design: Parsons In The 1960s
October 25, 12-1pm
25 E 13th St
New York, NY 10003
Room 206
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.
Out Of The Trenches And Into Vogue: ‘Unbelting’ The Trench Coat
November 15, 12-1pm
25 E 13th St
New York, NY 10003
Room 206
MARILYN COHEN, Lecturer, MA Program in the Decorative Arts, School of Art and Design History and Theory/Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
Marilyn Cohen’s talk will examine the fashionable trench in relation to texts taken from literature, film, and television, contrasting cinematic trench-coat wearers such as the crime-fighter Eliot Ness, the iconic Holly Golightly, the comic Inspector Clouseau, and television detective Columbo. It views the coat as an irony of the “spectacular” and the obfuscating, and seeks to lure the trench out of the shadows. She has published widely on the subject of material culture in relation to film and television including: ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Filmic Case of Interior vs. Exterior Identity’, ‘A Design for Greed: Set Decoration in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street’, ‘Furnishing I Love Lucy’, ‘The Material Culture of Toy Story’, and ‘The Best Years of Our Lives: Design, Disability & Displacement in Postwar America’.
Miraculous Mexico and the Hyperbolic Paraboloid
December 6, 12-1pm
25 E 13th St
New York, NY 10003
Room 206
LUIS CASTAÑEDA, PhD Candidate, Institute for Fine Arts, New York University
Luis Castañeda’s talk will be based on his dissertation, entitled “The Serpent and the Torch: The Politics of Design, Mexico ’68,” which analyzes the relationship between the design of exhibitions, artistic and design practices, and urban renewal in the context of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics. His essays on twentieth-century art and design culture in Latin America have appeared in Grey Room, Pidgin, and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. He teaches art and architectural history in NYU’s Department of Art History.
