Saturday, November 19, 2011

Thinking globally

Kanokwan Trakulyingcharoen, an architectural history scholar from Thailand, spent three weeks at the Hagley Museum and Library recently researching the Seagram Building in Manhattan, which was designed by German architect Mies van der Rohe. She is writing her doctoral dissertation (from an Italian university) on several postwar projects by the noted architect and received an H. B. du Pont research fellowship from Hagley to use the library's Seagram corporate archive, which contains "detailed information on how the Seagram Building was imagined, designed and built,"according to a story in the "Hagley Magazine."
"Drawings, letters, corporate minutes, and other documents in the Seagram papers have allowed Trakulyingcharoen to unravel the tangled connections between corporate intentions, design sensibilities, and materials provisioning that made the Seagram Building one of the outstanding examples of the International Style in corporate architecture."
The story says that Ms. Trakulyingcharoen "plans to return to Thailand after completing her dissertation to teach and to write."
The Seagram Building, 375 Park Ave., is 38 stories tall and was completed in 1958. According to Wikipedia it was designed as the headquarters for the Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons.

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