A Graduate Student Symposium
Hosted by
The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture 38 West 86th Street, New York, New York

19 April 2002
9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

What is the significance of the term modern when it seems to have so many meanings? How does modern bridge the present with the future, or the present with the past? How do societies image modern in the things they design, build, market, and consume? Is modern rational, whimsical, pragmatic or dogmatic, traditional, or avant-garde?

The inaugural Graduate Symposium at The Bard Graduate Center will address the various meanings of the concept of modern in an interdisciplinary atmosphere encouraging critical discussion and open dialogue. An international panel of student presenters has been assembled with topics representing a diversity of approaches.

Anthony Vidler, Acting Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, New York City, and author of such influential publications as The Architecture of the Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (M.I.T., 1992) and Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (M.I.T., 2000) will deliver the keynote address.

Presenters include:

John Stuart Gordon, The Bard Graduate Center
The Martini and Manhattan: Cocktail Shakers and American Modernism

Sarah Hoadley, University of Illinois
Constant’s “New Babylon” and Mumford’s “Good City”: Formularies for a Utopian Urbanism

Helena Kåberg, University of Uppsala, Sweden
Swedish Modern as a Sales Argument

Kimberly Jean Phillips, University of British Columbia, Canada
Looking for Berlin: Imaging the Modern in a Post-Unification Landscape

Robin S. Schuldenfrei, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Bauhütten in Weimar: Walter Gropius, Utopian Visions for Postwar Germany, and a Retreat from Modernism

To attend this special event with complimentary admission, please email Margaret Maile at gradsymp@bgc.bard.edu. Seating is limited.