Ashley Hahn
Preservation and the Life between Buildings

Preserving a place is about more than conserving the physical fabric of buildings or monuments—it requires deliberate care for the life between buildings as well. But what does it mean to make public life a preservation concern, and what is at stake? Why are some places “sticky” and others are not? What lessons does Rome have to share? This talk will touch on past work and explore a project in progress, weaving together ideas about civic virtue and the public good, social science studies of public space, preservation approaches to cultural heritage, and the urgency of this work in our era of hyper fragmentation and fragile civic infrastructures.

Ashley Hahn is the Adele Chatfield-Taylor Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and a conservation and writer based in Philadelphia.

Christine Gorby
Writing, Inherited Tradition, and Design: Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”

How does the study of manuscripts lead to a deeper understanding of a written work? Examining the twenty-six drafts that the Philadelphia-based architect Robert Venturi wrote during a ten-year period for his influential 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture yields new ideas and interpretations about its provenance and progression not evident in the final form. Their study helps to answer why Venturi wrote the text and unearths the broad cultural sources from which it arose. Tensions are embodied in the drafts as it author shaped them (with others) through hefty alterations to texts, bibliographies, and images. Perhaps the most palpable and poignant of these revisions come from the iterative writing-design process Venturi employed to develop the book. Ultimately, this is a painful struggle to understand and relay the meanings of his buildings for himself and to a broader public.

Christine Gorby is the Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture and associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University.

The shoptalks will be held in English.