Lecture Summary
Wright’s new book, USA, reframes the history of American modern architecture in terms of responses to commercial culture, new media, and diverse concepts of freedom. Each chapter explains how modernity—changes in work life, home life, public life, and infrastructure—affected architecture and vice versa. Unending conventional arguments that Americans brought European modernism to the US in 1932, she shows a distinctive, exhilarating hybrid with much earlier roots. The Architects Newspaper calls the book ‘a classic’ and Ada Louise Huxtable declares “Gwendolyn Wright’s splendid book updates, revises and enriches everything we know about the development and influence of American architecture with new material, brilliant insights, and the perspective of a new century.”


Bio
Gwendolyn Wright is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, with joint appointments in history and art history. The author or editor of six books, her most recent is USA (February 2008) in Reaktion Books’ worldwide series, Modern Architectures in History. Wright received her M.Arch. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her awards include Guggenheim and Getty Center fellowships. Since 2003 she has hosted the PBS television series, “History Detectives”, which explains the dynamic processes of historical investigation. A full biography is available in Who’s Who.

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