Halverson Lecture

The Art Department invites all to the 2017 Harry Halverson Lecture on American Architecture. This year's speaker is Penny Sparke, Professor of Design History at Kingston University in London. Her talk is titled Nature Inside: Plants and Flowers in American Public Interiors, 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many American public interiors-- restaurants, corporate office blocks, retail stores, hotels, and shopping malls-- began to embrace nature. Trees and exotic plants suddenly began to fill spaces where people ate, worked, and shopped, transforming those experiences into less exclusively urban ones. Sparke suggests that the roots of this phenomenon lay in 19th-century modernity, while glasshouses, winter gardens, hotel palm courts, and department stores began to blur the boundaries between private and public spaces by bringing an enduring symbol of Victorian domesticity-- the potted palm-- into their midst. During the WW-II era, the scale changed significantly as professional interior landscapers worked to shape these new spaces.

The talk will be on Thursday, October 26, at 5:00 pm in JAC 450. It is free and open to the public.