Events

As Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, Barry Bergdoll has been responsible for seminal exhibitions which deal with contemporary and critical issues regarding our built environment. Two such exhibitions, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream and Rising Currents: Projects for New York´s Waterfront, have had a significant impact not only on the urgency of their respective topics but also in the approach of the Museum in fostering design research and experimentation by bringing together experts in an array of fields to think, discuss and propose strategies that can offer alternatives to some of the most pressing issues regarding our built environment. Columbia Global Center and Studio-X Rio are pleased to welcome Barry Bergdoll to discuss both of these exhibitions and more at Studio-X Rio.

Prof. Barry Bergdoll is a renowned expert on modern architectural history and recently curated a MoMA exhibit (still ongoing) on “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980.” His scholarly research interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany between 1750 and 1900. Trained in art history rather than architecture, his approach is closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society. Bergdoll’s interests also include the intersections of architecture and new technologies—and eventually cultures—of representations in the modern period, especially photography and film. He has worked on several film productions about architecture, in addition to curating a number of architectural exhibitions concerned with the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture.