The Auburn University Center for Architecture and Urban Studies (The Urban Studio) is pleased to announce an exhibit of photographs entitled “Images of Bethlehem Steel” by Anthony Viscardi. Professor Viscardi is the current chair of The Department of Art and Architecture at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Where: Auburn Urban Studio, Franklin Setzer Gallery
When: November 11 - November 30, 2006
Time: 8 AM - 5 PM

Artist’s Statement:
The Bethlehem Steel Mill, an icon in our nations industrial landscape for many years now stands still, vacant of life yet emanating memory.

I took these photographs almost two years ago, after being granted rare access and permission to guide my students through the mills, including the machine room where the huge dinosaur-like mechanisms, depicted in these photographs, seemed frozen in time. The deteriorating shelter left these obsolete machines exposed to the seasonal cycles of the northeast. Like the leaves in the last days of autumn, these once majestic powerhouses exposed their brilliant colors in layers of still life.

It was not the long view, the panorama of the Bethlehem Steel mills that drew my interest. It was a more intimate glimpse of decay, the fragile skin of the monster and its sad passing that ignited my material imagination, the carrier of memory in my photographs. Like skin, the material of the machines shows age and acquired character lines that intimate a story that words cannot begin to tell.

Only one photograph speaks of the workers who gave their body and soul to the plant; it is of the locker room with the welfare baskets hanging from the ceiling. Each worker had his own basket where he could leave personal items, hoisting his belongings up on a pulley to be locked in mid-air while he worked his shift. The atmosphere of this room was eerie; gloves, wallets, shoes, and other personal items remained as they were on that final day when the last fires of the plant died out. This room has been left relatively untouched since the mills closed in 1998, an unintentional memorial filled with sacred chalices entombed in the cathedral of an industrial era gone by.

For more information on The Auburn University Center for Architecture and Urban Studies, please visit The Urban Studio website.

The Design-Build Masters Program exhibit will be showcased in the Dudley Gallery from Oct. 28 - Nov. 6, 2006. The exhibit includes photographs, models and information about each of the Design-Build Masters Program’s past projects as well as displays by the two current project teams. The current project teams are working on a home and studio for master quilter Mozell Benson, a collaborative project with undergraduate architecture and a new facility for the Auburn Salvation Army Family Store, a collaborative project with undergraduate building science. For more information, contact Ashley Gentry at 844-2412, or visit www.cadc.auburn.edu/dbld/

The Department of Art has opened a new exhibition of ceramics, drawing and prints at Biggin Gallery (101 Biggin Hall) featuring artists Susan O’Brien and Jon Swindler. The exhibition draws together two distinct bodies of work that explore the object from different viewpoints. Both artists investigate the object’s physical nature and investigate their subject through multi-dimensional perspectives including historical, functional, biographical and political. The outcome of these investigations is two unique bodies of work that diverge through media and processes unique to ceramics and printmaking. The exhibition will run through Oct. 6. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment. Biggin Gallery is free of admission, wheelchair accessible and open to the public. For more information contact Barb Bondy, exhibitions and lectures coordinator, Department of Art, at (334) 844-3483 or bondybj@auburn.edu.