2010 L'Enfant Lecture on City Planning and Design

Barry Bergdoll

Thursday, July 15, 2010
Preston Bradley Hall
Chicago Cultural Center

"Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront"

Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art will discuss MOMA's current exhibition "Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront." This innovative project addresses one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation's largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Five inter-disciplinary teams have worked together to re-envision New York City's harbor and coastline.

Barry Bergdoll is also professor of modern architectural history at Columbia University. Holding a B.A. from Columbia, an M.A. from King's College, Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia, his broad interests center on modern architectural history with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1800.   

Bergdoll has organized, curated, and consulted on many landmark exhibitions of 19th- and 20th-century architecture including "Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront" at MoMA (2010; "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity" at MoMA (2009-10); "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling" at MoMA (2008); "Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32" at MoMA (2007); "Mies in Berlin" at MoMA (2001), with Terence Riley; "Breuer in Minnesota" at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2002); "Les Vaudoyer: Une Dynastie d'Architectes at the Musée D'Orsay, Paris (1991); and "Ste. Geneviève/Pantheon; Symbol of Revolutions," in Paris and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (1989).  

He is author or editor of numerous publications including, Mies in Berlin (winner of the 2002 Philip Johnson Award of the Society of Architectural Historians and AICA Best Exhibition Award, 2002); Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (1994), winner of the AIA Book Award in 1995; and Lẻon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (1994); and European Architecture 1750-1890, in the Oxford History of Art series. An edited volume, Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, was published by Thames and Hudson in 2006. He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2006 to 2008.

Read an interview with Barry Bergdoll

Continuing Education

AICP Certification Maintenance: CM |1.5

AIA CEU: 1.5

Photo credit: Robin Holland