Category: Directors’ Night

Jacob Albert

Virginia Raguin

Elizabeth A. Kassler-Taub

This talk will draw on new evidence for the design of Palermo’s port in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries culled from the Archivo Generale de Simancas in Valladolid, Spain. On the basis of these previously-unpublished sources, I will propose that the design was modeled in part on the dual port system at Ostia, in ancient Rome. I argue that this engagement with antiquity – which operated in tandem with an active desire to launch the city onto a contemporary global stage – speaks to Palermo’s active participation in the theory and practice of early modern ”maritime urbanism.”

Bryan Norwood

 Bryan will start by talking generally about his dissertation project, in which he is arguing that the co-development of professionalization and formalized education in nineteenth-century American architecture was grounded in a particular type of knowledge: architects professing to know the history of architecture. He will then turn in the second half to talk more specifically about how the work he did with the NESAH John Coolidge Research Fellowship fits into this study, focusing specifically on the formalization of education at University of Illinois and University of Michigan.