Anthony Alofsin

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Anthony Alofsin
Born (1949-06-22) June 22, 1949 (age 75)
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.
Occupation
  • Architect
  • artist
  • art historian
  • writer
  • professor
Education

Anthony Alofsin (born June 22, 1949 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American architect, artist, art historian, writer, and professor. [1] Educated at Memphis Academy of Art and Phillips Academy, Andover, he received from Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, respectively, a Bachelor of Arts (1971) and Master of Architecture (1981). From Columbia University, he obtained a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology (1987).

Contents

Alofsin has written books on modern architecture and published numerous essays on architecture, art, and culture that have appeared in a variety of journals and reviews including The Times Literary Supplement, the Burlington Magazine, the New Criterion, and American Art. He was named Roland Gommel Roessner Centennial Professor Emeritus in Architecture in 2020 in recognition of his scholarship and teaching over thirty-three years at the University of Texas at Austin where he founded and directed the Ph.D. program in architectural history. [2]

In 2017 he began donating material to establish the Anthony Alofsin Archive at the University of Texas in Austin. The vast collection contains research materials, his teaching collection, and professional papers. [3]

Publications

He is the author of Wright and New York: the Making of America's Architect.The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians described it “as an exciting story, a cultural drama about power and intrigue, featuring Wright’s ambiguous love/hate relationship with New York City." [4] He wrote Dream Home, What You Need to Know Before You Buy, a guide for consumers buying a home in the suburbs. His Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector, is the first publication of Wright's unknown collection of German and Austrian art prints. His book When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867-1933 won the Vasari Award from the Dallas Museum of Art .; [5] a German language edition was published by the Verlag Anton Pustet in 2011. He is editor of A Modernist Museum in Perspective: The East Building, National Gallery of Art. He is the author of The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard, the history of the Harvard Graduate School of Design from its beginnings through the 1960s.

Much of his scholarly writing has focused on issues of influence, how ideas are transmitted and transformed, on the concept of artistic transition as well as reception as an index of cultural and social meaning. He conducts a broad range of research activities including American modernism, Central European modern architecture, the history of ornament, the history of design education in architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning as well as ongoing research on Frank Lloyd Wright. He has written on the role of narrative in architecture and on the origins of regionalism in modern architecture. [2]

International recognition

Alofsin is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and as an expert on modern architecture. [6] In 2006, he received the Wright Spirit Award from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The award honors an individual who, through artistic, architectural, scholarly, professional or other endeavors embodies the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright. ' His pioneering study, Frank Lloyd Wright: the Lost Years, 1910-1922, is acknowledged to be one of the most important books on Wright in the last forty years; [6] the book was a winner in the monograph category in the American Institute of Architects International Book Awards. [7] Alofsin's other publications include the five-volume reference work, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence, which won the Vasari Award of the Dallas Museum of Art. [8]

Alofsin was ranked “Best of the Best” and in the 90th percentile of research professors, academics, and dons among an international evaluation of schools of architecture by the Key Centre for Architectural Sociology. [9]

Alofsin has been named a Fellow, Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center; Fellow, Bogliasco Foundation, Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Fellow, MacDowell Colony; Fellow, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna; Visiting Scholar, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; Visiting Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design; and Fulbright Professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. [1] In 2017 Alofsin was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, one of the highest honors given by the profession. [10]

Advice and practice

He has been active as a curator and adviser to several architectural exhibitions. He was consulting curator for the major retrospective Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He curated Prairie Skyscraper on Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and the exhibition Wright's Wasmuth Folios: Representing the Ideal, at the Ross Gallery, Columbia University. [2]

Alofsin maintains an architectural practice and his projects, which range in scale and style, have been frequently published. The sites of his projects include New Mexico, New York, and Texas. He also lectures internationally. [2]

Books

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References

  1. 1 2 "Who's Who in America 2012". Marquis Biographies on Line (66th ed.). 2011.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Anthony Alofsin". soa.utexas.edu. Retrieved November 14, 2020.
  3. ↑ "Architect Anthony Alofsin Donates His Archives to University of Texas Libraries". Architect Magazine. April 11, 2017. Retrieved September 4, 2017.
  4. ↑ “Review: Frank Lloyd Wright and New York and Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco” web |url=https://online.ucpress.edu/jsah/article/81/2/243/185502/Review-Wright-and-New-York-The-Making-of-America-s_c June-2022 | website=https://www.sah.org//publications-and-research/jsah-online. Retrieved July 13, 2022
  5. ↑ "Two Receive Vasari Awards in 2007: Anthony Alofsin and Randall C. Griffin". Archived from the original on December 11, 2012. Retrieved September 9, 2012.
  6. 1 2 ""Frank Lloyd Wright scholar wins Wright Spirit Award" Oct. 3, 2006 News release, University of Texas". Utexas.edu. July 24, 2012. Archived from the original on November 10, 2012. Retrieved September 9, 2012.
  7. ↑ "The American Institute of Architects - Awards Program, Awards". Aia.org. December 13, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Previous Winners of the Vasari Award - Dallas Museum of Art". Dm-art.org. Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved September 9, 2012.
  9. ↑ Gary Stevens, "Rating the Architecture Academics, Professors, and Dons in Research: 2010-13 Final Report." Key Centre for Architectural Sociology,2012. http://www.archsoc.com. See also http://www.archsoc.com/kcas/researchschool.html Retrieved 2012-11-19
  10. ↑ "2017 Texas Fellows, Texas Society of Architects/AIA". texasarchitects.org. Archived from the original on February 26, 2017.
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