Lisa Schrenk

Associate Professor. B.A., Macalester College with degrees in studio art and geography, 1983; Masters in Architectural History, University of Virginia, 1988; Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1998. Dr. Schrenk teaches art and architectural history courses, including seminars on Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago, international expositions, Brazil, and India and Southeast Asia.

Research

My main areas of research are international expositions and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 2007 the University of Minnesota Press published my book Building a Century of Progress, which explores the architecture of the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair. I have been a consultant on the exhibit Designing the World of Tomorrow: America's World Fairs in the 1930s, which opened at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. in October 2010. I also co-authored the paper Trains for a Century of Progress: How Railroads Promoted the 1933-34 World’s Fair for the 2009 annual meeting of the Southwest Popular Culture Association and presented the paper "Synthetic Utopias": National Identities in a Context of Peace and War at the 1939-40 Golden Gate Exposition at The Utopia of Tradition, the 2010 conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments.  I am currently completing a book manuscript that explores the educational environment of Wright's Oak Park studio and how the architect used the physical structure of the building as an experimental laboratory for his innovative design ideas.

Travel

One of my main passions is travel (a wonderful habit that I attempt to pass on to all my students in the belief that it is always better to experience a building firsthand than to just look at images of it in a darkened classroom). To gain the fullest understanding of important landmarks, I have visited sites of architectural significance in all 50 states and travelled throughout Europe, Lebanon, Syria, Peru, India, China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In 2007 I spent six weeks touring Brazil with fifteen other educators on a Fulbright. While on sabbatical the following year I traveled for three weeks in Jordan and Egypt. Two of my favorite stops were Petra and Abu Simbel. (To see pictures from my travels, check out http://adventuresinarchitecture.blogspot.com/.)

Aesthetics

The aesthetics of my working and living environments have always been extremely important to me. Prior to arriving at Norwich in 2002, I had the opportunity to experience a couple of amazing architectural settings on a daily basis. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, I was able to soak in the architectural lessons of Thomas Jefferson while living among the classical colonnades and curving brick walls of his original 1819 campus (just a few doors down from Edgar Allen Poe’s former dorm room). After graduation I moved to the Chicago area and spent four years as Education Director for the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation in Oak Park, Illinois. During much of my tenure there my office was located on the balcony of Wright’s octagonal drafting room where he and his employees developed prairie house designs. Today I feel fortunate to be able to work within the handsome brick and granite walls of the former Carnegie Library that houses the various creative activities of Norwich’s School of Architecture and Art.

lschrenk@norwich.edu