Prof. Emily Pugh is ill and will not be able to deliver the Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture this week. We have rescheduled the event for Thursday, March 23, 5-6:30pm, on Zoom. Please join us then! We apologize for any inconvenience.
Aline Bernstein Saarinen was one of the most influential architectural critics in the postwar US. Her writings on art and architecture appeared in a wide variety of venues from the 1940s into the 1970s. She served as associate art editor and critic for The New Times from 1948 to 1953, wrote for popular magazines such as Vogue and McCall’s, and in 1963 was hired as the first full-time arts critic on US television. Saarinen’s criticism found a wide and enthusiastic audience, helping to create, according to critic Reyner Banham, a “new architectural public” in the US in the 1950s and 60s. In 1970, TV Guide dubbed Saarinen “a cultural institution.”
Saarinen’s career unfolded at a key moment in the evolution of popular architectural criticism in the US, building on the work of Lewis Mumford in his New Yorker column “The Sky Line” and preceding that of Ada Louise Huxtable, who would take over from Saarinen at the New York Times in 1963. In this talk, I will explore Saarinen’s influence, considering how her criticism, in print and on TV, played a decisive role in shaping the public’s perception of architecture in the United States in the postwar period.
Emily Pugh received her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, where her studies focused on postwar architecture in the US and Germany, as well as technologies of architectural representation. She is the author of Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), and her writing on the Cold War urban built environment have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Centropa, and Space & Culture. Pugh’s research has been supported by the Center for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland, the European Architectural History Network, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. She is currently at work on a second book, focused on architectural criticism on US television in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is an online event, register below to receive more details.