The symposium, “The Campus of the Future: Modernism at the University of Kentucky, 1963-1970,” will be held Feb. 22, 2019 at the UK Athletics Association Auditorium in the W. T. Young Library from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

During the 1960s, modern architecture transformed the University of Kentucky. As enrollment skyrocketed, university officials scrambled to provide new housing, classrooms, laboratories, and faculty offices. Construction of the Chemistry-Physics Building, the Anderson Engineering Tower, the Kirwan-Blanding Dormitory Complex, the Patterson Office Tower, and the White Hall Classroom Building introduced radically new architecture to a fast-growing campus, transforming a bucolic environment dominated by Victorian and Georgian Revival academic buildings.

This symposium will examine the campus architecture of the 1960s and the social and cultural ideals it expressed. With the university in the midst of another major building boom, what are the most important legacies of that decade? How should buildings slated for demolition be remembered – and others made part of the campus now taking shape? Join distinguished historians, archivists, and architectural photographers as we explore these questions and the developments that reshaped the university campus half a century ago.

 

Featured Presenters

Mary Anne Hunting
Architectural historian, New York, NY. Author of Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect (W. W. Norton and Co., 2012)
“From New Delhi to Kentucky: Modern Architecture by Edward Durell Stone”

John Thelin
University Research Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation, College of Education, University of Kentucky
“Building the Knowledge Factory: American Campus Construction in the 1960s”

Sandy Isenstadt
Professor, Department of Art History, University of Delaware
“Matriculated Modern: The Future Was Then”

Ruth Bryan
University Archivist, Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries
“Strategies for Investigating the Modern Era at UK Archives”

Frank Döring
Architectural Photographer, Lexington, KY
“Conveying Spatial Experience: A Touchstone for Architectural Photography?”

 

Sponsored by the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Design. Questions? Call (859) 323-2747 or email jessica.frazier@uky.edu. This event is free and open to the public.