The first John Pratt Memorial Lecture is going to be held on March 05, 2007 by Dianne Harris, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign.

Date: March 05, 2007
Time: 4 pm
Location: Ray Parker Auditorium (Dudley Hall B-6)

Professor Harris whose lecture is entitled “Clean and Bright and Everyone White: Seeing the Postwar Domestic Landscape in the United States” is currently writing a book that examines postwar houses and gardens in the United States as frameworks for assimilation and the reinforcement of racial constructs and class assignment. She is the coeditor (with Mirka Benes) of Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape and Representation in Eighteenth Century Lombardy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) and Maybeck’s Landscapes: Drawing in Nature (William Stout, 2005). Her edited volume titled Sites Unseen: Essays on Landscape and Vision is due to be in the bookstores this spring. Professor Harris holds affiliate appointments in the departments of history and art history at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign.

The John Pratt Memorial Lecture honors the memory of John MacDougall Pratt, a professor of architectural history in the School of Architecture. John was a cherished member of the School of Architecture faculty from 1989 until his untimely death in 2001. A native of Canada, Pratt did his graduate work under the direction of Christian Otto at Cornell University, where his research focused on Eero Saarinen and the influence of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Former students and colleagues alike fondly recall his unbridled enthusiasm for architecture and its history, his insatiable curiosity for the wide spectrum of humanistic endeavors, and his wry sense of humor. The College continues to benefit from Pratt’s love of books and the ideas they contain as a result of the donation of his extensive personal library to the Library of Architecture, Design, and Construction.

The John Pratt Memorial Lecture is funded through the generosity of alumni and friends of the College.