lecture: PROOF POSITIVE episode 2:5 / Caroline Constant
PROOF POSITIVE episode 2:5 / Caroline Constant
February 14, 2013 01:00 PM
Saarinen Conference Room (Rm. 2224)
University of Michigan Art + Architecture Building
Caroline Constant is Professor of Architecture and Emil Lorch Collegiate Professor of Architecture and Planning (2011-2014) at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Interests in the social, cultural, and political ramifications of architectural form underlie Constant’s teaching as well as her research in architectural history and theory. Constant teaches design studios at all levels in the curriculum as well as graduate seminars investigating the theoretical, historical and ideological underpinnings of the revolution in western architectural thought that took place during the early decades of the twentieth century and the repercussions for subsequent architectural practice.
Constant’s research, engaging the traditional disciplinary boundaries of architecture by exploring relationships among architecture, landscape architecture and the decorative arts, has been widely published in books and periodicals. In The Modern Architectural Landscape (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), she explores the reintegration of architecture and landscape in twentieth-century architectural practice, a current within modernism that falls outside its polemical boundaries, yet evolves out of its utopian aspirations. Her earlier books, The Palladio Guide (Princeton Architectural Press, 1985) and The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape (Byggförlaget, 1994), comprise earlier efforts to engage related disciplinary issues. In Eileen Gray (Phaidon, 2002), Constant examines the work of this twentieth-century practitioner and theorist whose designs challenged certain theoretical assumptions of modern architecture to reinstate the bodily experience of space as a primary value. In recognition of her work on Eileen Gray, Constant was made an honorary member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, a recognition that Gray received late in her life.