The American Renaissance expressed the confidence and ambitions of governmental, commercial, institutional, and residential patrons during America's First Gilded Age. Rooted before Chicago's 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the style took advantage of that fair's extraordinary influence to argue that Roman art and architecture, as classified and refined by Italian-speaking practitioners and theorists during the 15th and 16th centuries, was uniquely suited to express the current stature and glowing future of a nationalizing United States, a ready peer to other world powers.
Cleveland was an early adopter of it, commissioning Daniel Burnham, its Chicago champion, to co-design the Group Plan around which the Forest City's civic structures would be arranged. Newly-enriched Northeast Ohio patrons hired architects and artists of national and international reputation, some with local practices, cultivated Buckeye State artisans, and sought out the most-skilled craftspersons among lately-arrived Europeans to imagine and build a grand capital city. The American Renaissance unites the some of the very best work by American creators, both in design and fabrication, and remains for many the style through which Cleveland, at its most dominant, spoke to the world.
Professor Wilson is an expert chronicler of the American Renaissance and of the architecture firm of McKim, Mead, and White, one of its most important advocates. He will address its beginnings, the joining together of many distinct arts, and how it came to dominate Cleveland’s public realm.
WILSON BIOGRAPHY:
Richard Guy Wilson is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus in Architectural History at the University of Virginia. A frequent lecturer, television commentator and author of many articles and books on different aspects of American and modern architecture and design including The American Renaissance (1979), McKim, Mead & White, Architects (1982), The AIA Gold Medal (1983), The Machine Age in America (1986), Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village (1993, 2009) The Colonial Revival House (2004), Harbor Hill: Portrait of a House (2008) and Edith Wharton at Home (2012).
EVENT TIME:
5:00-6:30
COST:
Free
CEU: 1LU Credit
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Attendees will learn about the origins of the American Renaissance as a social and academic movement generating an artistic expression, especially as employed by American architects.
Attendees will learn how to identify American Renaissance works universally, but with special emphasis on Cleveland examples.
Attendees will develop an understanding of how architecture developed as an American profession, as an ethical and artistic undertaking, one allied with the arts of sculpture and painting, and how architects availed themselves of the new capacity of American industry and infrastructure to reliably deliver and assemble high-quality building compenents.
Attendees will be invited to consider the legacy of Cleveland's American Renaissance work, the value of its remaining building stock and the prospect of making this style work for a far more diverse America.