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R.M. Schindler’s Kings Road House: Pre-Everybody

Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 6:00pm

Lawrence Hall, 177
1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR

A lecture by Judith Sheine, UO Department of Architecture Professor and Department Head

Schindler published an article in 1944 on the role of the architect in the building industry: “Architect—Postwar—Post Everybody.” In it Schindler lamented that the architect had little control over the building process and, in fact, got paid after all the other participants in the design process, i.e., post-everybody. 

For the Kings Road house, Schindler was the architect, landscape architect, engineer, interior designer, and contractor. Here, payment would not have been much of an issue.

The house served as a precedent for so much of the Modern architecture that followed that, at least in this case, the architect could be said to be pre-everybody.

This talk will be based on Sheine’s new book, co-authored with Robert Sweeney, “Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California Modernism”(University of California Press, 2012).

R.M. Schindler lived and worked in his house and studio on Kings Road from its completion in 1922 until shortly before his death in 1953. It was central to his life and career and to the development of modern architecture in southern California and, arguably, internationally. It was Schindler’s first independent realized work in southern California and the first to demonstrate the principles of his 1912 manifesto “Modern Architecture: A Program.”

Judith Sheine’s essay places the house in the context of Schindler’s career, in which it established the basis of the spatial development of his work and examines the influence of the house on the work of numerous architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry.

The book includes forty-five new photographs of the house and gardens taken by Timothy Sakamoto.

Professor Judith Sheine is Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon. She has been recognized as the leading authority on the work of architect R. M. Schindler and is a practicing, award-winning architect.

Sheine has lectured extensively on the architect’s work in North America and Europe and is currently co-curating an exhibit with Professor Lauren Bricker, of the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, entitled “Technology and Environment: the Postwar House in Southern California,” funded by the Getty Foundation as part of their project “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.” The exhibit opened April 11, 2013, at the Kellogg University Art Gallery at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Event Type

Lecture, Lectures & Presentations

Departments

Department of Architecture, College of Design

Website

http://architecture.uoregon.edu/lectu...

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