Advancing Women's Education: Symbols in the Architecture at Vassar College

Join us for a new season of the Charnley Conversations lecture series, hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians and the Charnley-Persky House Museum.

About the event:
Vassar College was founded in 1861 by Poughkeepsie, NY brewer Matthew Vassar, as a pioneering and rigorous higher education institution for women. While the college embraced co-education starting in 1968, its uniquely beautiful and varied campus predates co-education, and remains a microcosm of the architectural history of the US. Two features of the campus distinguish it from other American colleges:

· Vassar offers a very strong sense of its unique place, and thus provides a contrast to many other American campuses

· For its first hundred years or so, Vassar’s administration was very determined to be representative of its time period, and the college usually hired notable architects to design its new buildings, and gave those architects considerable artistic freedom.

This presentation explores the most stylistically innovative buildings and spaces on campus, which tend to be great illustrations of their architects’ work elsewhere.

Dr. Martha Frish (VC '78) is an architectural historian who writes and lectures about how architecture reflects its social and cultural context. She has worked for FEMA on Section 106 architectural history projects and as a Senior Program Officer at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She has also served on the faculty in the Historic Preservation Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at DePaul University, and has published in the Oxford Handbook of Public Heritage Theory and Method and in Planetizen.

This event is co-sponsored by The Charnley-Persky House, The Society of Architectural Historians and The Chicago Vassar Club.

Join us for glass of wine, refreshments, and light bites at 5:30 p.m., followed by the presentation, and more conversation afterwards. Proceeds will support the Charnley-Persky House Museum Foundation.

Since this is a program with limited seating, please cancel your reservation if you are unable to attend.

Venue:
This lecture takes place at the Charnley-Persky House Museum, a National Historic Landmark building located in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. Designed by famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan with assistance from his at-the-time junior draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright, the Charnley-Persky House (1891-1892) is recognized as a pivotal work of modern American architecture. We look forward to welcoming you into this unique space for an enlightening talk about preservation. In the meantime, take a virtual tour of the house.