Museum Events

Event Speakers

Architecture of Writing: Wright, Women, and Narrative
Colloquium at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 10, 2009
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Speaker
Carol Gilligan Carol Gilligan is a psychologist, novelist, and currently University Professor at New York University. As a member of the Harvard faculty, she held the university's first chair in gender studies. Harvard University Press describes her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, as "the little book that started a revolution." Her first novel Kyra, published in January 2008, introduces into a fictional narrative—perhaps for the first time—a female architect as the protagonist. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer called it "a rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person's love story." Her 1992 co-authored book, Meeting at the Crossroads, was a New York Times Notable book of the year. In 2002, The Birth of Pleasure was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as a "thrilling new paradigm" and characterized by National Public Radio as the work of a psychologist who writes like a novelist. Time Magazine named her as one of the 25 most influential Americans.

Speaker
Gwendolyn Wright Gwendolyn Wright is professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she has taught since 1983, with joint appointments in history and art history. Her recent book, USA (2008), is part of a series on Modern Architectures in History published by Reaktion Press and the University of Chicago Press. Her previous books include The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991); Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981); and, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (1980). Wright received her M.Arch and PH.D from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 2003, she has hosted the PBS television series, "History Detectives."

Moderator
Suzannah Lessard Suzannah Lessard is a writer of literary non-fiction, currently working on a book about the American landscape, working title Mapping the New World: Place in the Twenty-first Century. This work has been supported by the Brookings Institution and by the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars where she was a fellow in 2001, and also by the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship for creative non-fiction at George Washington University (2002), and the 2003 Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. From 1975 to 1995 she was a staff writer for The New Yorker. Prior to 1975, she was a writer/editor of The Washington Monthly. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family for which she won the 1996 Whiting Award. She has taught creative nonfiction at Columbia School of the Arts, George Mason University, and George Washington University among others.

Honoree
Lois Gottlieb Lois Davidson Gottlieb, FAIA, was at the Taliesin Fellowship under Frank Lloyd Wright from 1947, right after receiving a B.A. from Stanford, to 1948, when she entered architecture school at Harvard, from which she received a Master’s of Architecture in 1950. After graduation she worked for architect Warren Callister in San Francisco, then freelanced as a residential designer, landscape designer, and contractor. In 1954 she formed a design firm with her Taliesin classmate, Jane Duncombe. The team practiced as Duncombe & Davidson in the San Francisco Bay Area for two years. Later, in a life that took her to India and Europe, Gottlieb designed houses and provided design or construction services for a total of 100 projects. A recipient of Fulbright scholarships, Gottlieb has written two books, including A Way of Life: An Apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright (2001) based on her own photographs from Taliesin that were shown in a traveling exhibition.

Film Director
Beverly Willis Beverly Willis, FAIA, is president of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, which she founded in 2002, following a 50-year in career in architectural and design practice, beginning as a multi-media artist. Among the award-winning projects in her extensive portfolio are the Union Street Stores (1965), the Margaret Hayward Park Building (1978), and the San Francisco Ballet Building (1983). She holds a fine arts degree from the University of Hawaii and an honorary doctorate from Mt. Holyoke College. Her art has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt Museum and Honolulu Academy of Art. She authored Invisible Images—The Silent Language of Architecture, published in 1997 by the National Building Museum.