Since 2004, Professor Lisa Schrenk has served as a consultant for Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s. The long-awaited exhibition finally opened on October 2nd to great fanfare (and fair food) at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. As part of the opening celebration, Professor Schrenk was invited by the Art Deco Society of Washington, D.C. to give a lecture at the NBM on Chicago's 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition.

As stated on the Building Museum's website, the exhibit explores the modernist spectacles of architecture and design used to present visions of a brighter future at the six major expositions held in the United States during the worst economic crisis the United States (1933 to 1940). The fairs popularized modern design for the American public and promoted the idea of science and consumerism as salvation from the Great Depression (sound familiar?).

A first-of-its-kind exhibition, Designing Tomorrow features nearly 200 never-before-assembled artifacts including building models, architectural remnants, drawings, paintings, prints, furniture, an original RCA TRK-12 television, Elektro the Moto-Man robot, and period film footage.

Professor Schrenk is also a contributing author of the related exhibition catalog pictured above.

For more information on the exhibit: http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/worlds-fairs.html

 

Reviewed January 2008 in CHOICE:

In an engaging and wide-ranging study, Schrenk (architecture and art history, Norwich University) situates the architecture of the "Century of Progress" World's Fair in Chicago in many broader contexts.

This well-written book argues for the continuing impact of this fair long after its temporary structures came down. Built during the Depression, it introduced new materials and technologies (such as various pressed wood boards, some including asbestos, and other innovative forms of prefabrication) that would shape building practices for subsequent decades.

Schrenk's story is surprisingly interesting, enlivened by postcards and ephemera as illustrations. Major and minor architectural firms receive equal treatment (Frank Lloyd Wright and Norman Bel Geddes are mostly considered in their absence from the built environment of the 1933-34 fair site).

A marvelous gallery of color images supports an important assessment of the role of color in architectural theory of the era. Those unfamiliar with the growing literature on world's fairs as cultural phenomena will find this a useful starting point. This book has much to interest audiences from art history, architecture, modern cultural history, and American studies.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

All levels. -- J. E. Housefield, Texas State University--San Marcos

Every year in the January issue, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year. Choice editors base their selections on the reviewer's evaluation of the work, the editor's knowledge of the field, and the reviewer's record.

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