Architecture, famously a discipline of space, is also an articulation of time. Haunted by the ruins of its past and its possible future alike, it stands in the present as a profoundly contingent undertaking. In this lecture, Glenn Adamson will draw from his latest full-length publication Craft: An American History, as well as his forthcoming book, A Century of Tomorrows, to construct a narrative of architecture’s impermanence. The talk will reach beyond buildings, incorporating examples from fine art as well as crafts such as pottery and basketmaking, ultimately arguing for a temporal basis to the understanding of “material intelligence.”
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A. Dr. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007); The Craft Reader (2010); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, with Jane Pavitt); The Invention of Craft (2013); Art in the Making (2016, with Julia Bryan-Wilson); Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); Objects: USA 2020; and Craft: An American History (2021). His next book, A Century of Tomorrows, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024.
Dr. Adamson is Artistic Director for Design Doha, a new biennial festival for Qatar (forthcoming in 2024), and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation. He will serve as curatorial director for Design Miami/ in December 2024. His current curatorial projects include Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth (2023) and Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu at the Isamu Noguchi Museum (forthcoming in 2024, and touring thereafter).
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