Morgan Lecture: Dianne Harris

This lecture examines Julius Shulman's famous 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig's "Case Study House #22."  Although most often described as a work of photographic virtuosity that embodies the utopian visions of Southern California architects and developers, Harris's lecture will instead ask what this image--and others like it--might tell us about urban historical processes, and the delineation of race and class in the postwar housing market and in mid-century cities in the United States.

Dianne Harris is Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she teaches courses in landscape history, urban/suburban history, and in architectural history.  In addition to her numerous scholarly articles, her publications include the co-edited volumes Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge University Press, 2001).  She is the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa, Culture, landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), and of Maybeck's Landscapes: Drawing in Nature (William Stout Publisher, 2005).  Her forthcoming book focuses on ordinary postwar houses and gardens in the United States between 1945-60.  She is editor of a multidisciplinary volume on the Pennsylvania Levittown titled Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania that was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2010.  Professor Harris is President for the Society of Architectural Historians.  She is also the recipient of a 2006 Iris Foundation Award from the Bard Graduate of art, decorative arts, and cultural history.