Morgan Lectures Spring 2009

Morgan Lectures are presented by
the Allen R. Hite Art Institute
@ the Speed Museum auditorium
All are Free and open to the public

Thursday, April 2, 2009, 6 p.m.
"Public Space, Healing Space, A Place for Inner Action: How I Fit a Round Piece in a Square Hole"
Ed Hamilton, sculptor



It is not always easy when an architect and a sculptor come together. There are those magic moments, however, when both are in concert with each other, and that's when the site and the work come together. This is the story of how a commission, a long time in coming, came together as one.

Thursday, April 9, 2009, 6 p.m.
"Dining halls, lunch counters & grazing: Integrating social history into the architecture and design of a more sustainable environment."
Jamie Horwitz
Associate Professor of Architecture, Iowa State University



Observing what, where, and how people eat on campus opens a vantage point to the culture of higher education and the history of campus design. As more students, faculty and administrators seek ways to practice a sustainable relationship to resources, their efforts generate incubators of design innovation and cultural exchange. This lecture traces an evolution in eating spaces and habits––on and off campus. By focusing on examples of contemporary campus architecture, including those with a commitment to eating fresh and local, as well as examples of sustainable design here in Louisville, we can see how relationships between healthy communities, economies, and environments are under consideration and construction today.

Morgan Lectures Fall 2008

Thursday, August 28, 2008, 6 p.m.
"Structures of Belief"
Steven Skaggs, Professor of Design
University of Louisville



The lecture will briefly survey historical archetypal forms engendered in central areas of belief such as church, state, and corporation. I will develop the idea that it is possible, through semiotics, to find strong symbolic elements in the architecture - and also in the graphic design - which function as visual tropes (recurring thematic devices). After briefly isolating some of these forms and discussing how they come to act as symbols of an often- unstated referent, I will turn to the analysis of a particular institution - the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

The Creation Museum opened in spring of 2007 with fanfare that was welcomed in fundamentalist Christian denominations, while ridiculed in much of the general press. The premise of the museum is that the creation story in Genesis is completely and literally factual. The universe was created in six days, dinosaurs and humans were contemporaries, Noah built an ark, etc. Yet, the organization behind the museum, Answers In Genesis, believes science is not contradicted by the biblical record. As a result, the Creation Museum provides an unusual opportunity to see two of the primary belief centers - science and religion - fused. How does the building, the exhibits, and the graphic design deliver their message? How does a message that is clearly marginalized in the society attempt to overcome the marginality to become the dominant reading? What can the Creation Museum teach us about the workings of propaganda, information, belief, and power? Can we come away from a visit to the Creation Museum and see subtle ways we are influenced to believe in mainstream belief structures?

Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 6 p.m.
"The Lincoln Memorial"
Christopher Thomas
Associate Professor of Art & Architectural History
University of Victoria



The coming birth bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and his ever-green reputation -- note his appearances in the campaign rhetoric and imagery of Illinois’s Senator Barack Obama -- underline Lincoln's continuing resonance for Americans and others. His posthumous presence is felt most intensely, perhaps, in the national memorial to Lincoln on the Mall in Washington, built in 1913-22 to the design of architect Henry Bacon and sculptor Daniel Chester French. More a celebration of Republican Party ideals than is generally realized and more of a hymn to the Union Lincoln was credited with saving than to his personality and leadership -- though the statue, especially, alludes to these -- the Lincoln Memorial captures the unique blend of personal appeal and patriotic admiration the Sixteenth President excites even today. While some other memorials seem to lose their fascination, his does not; indeed, its appropriation for the cause of equal rights from the 1930s onward, especially in the March on Washington of 1963, involved a virtual re-imagining of the Lincoln Memorial. The building's perennial appeal owes much to the effect of timeless Classicism architect Bacon gave it, thanks to his skill and sensitivity in deploying Graeco-Roman design. Yet, the memorial is actually newer than many skyscrapers and was built using daring, revolutionary technology for its time. The costliest commemorative project in the history of the capital to that date, Bacon's memorial echoed the one sketched in the Macmillan Plan for Washington of 1901-2, and its design and construction-history steered a delicate line between celebrating the memory of a man some still found controversial and the idea of the nation as it was being re-imagined under Republican hegemony after the Spanish-American War. The lecture will combine reflections on a few significant aspects of the Lincoln Memorial’s design and construction with some topical thoughts on Abraham Lincoln’s relevance for today.