HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS AND HARVARD DESIGN SCHOOL LAUNCH DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Million-Dollar Gift by Graham Gund Will Establish Architecture Exhibition Fund

Harvard University Art Museums Name Adjunct Curator of Architecture and Design

Cambridge, MA, June 11, 1999 - The Harvard University Art Museums announced that they are establishing a Department of Architecture and Design in collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Noted architect and contemporary art collector Graham Gund has provided a $1 million gift to support architecture exhibitions at Harvard which will enable the creation of the new curatorial department at the Art Museums. Brooke Hodge, Director of Lectures, Exhibitions, and Academic Publications at the Harvard Design School, has been named to lead the new department. As Adjunct Curator of Architecture and Design, a newly created position at the Art Museums, Hodge will oversee programming and exhibition collaborations between the Art Museums and the Design School.

The Department of Architecture and Design builds upon previous collaborations between the Harvard University Art Museums and the Harvard Design School, such as a 1998 exhibition highlighting the Villa Planchart by Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Future collaborations include an exhibition on European architecture in 1000 AD, which will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum in fall 2000; an exhibition on "Windshield," a 1937 international style house by Richard Neutra built on Fischers Island, NY, the only Neutra house on the east coast of the U.S.; and an exhibition on the influence of Le Corbusier on Japanese architecture of the pre-war and immediate post-war years, which was co-organized with the Kamakura Museum in Japan, designed by Junzo Sakakura, an important follower of Le Corbusier.

The new department will draw upon the scholarship, collections, and archives of the Harvard University Art Museums and the Harvard Design School to develop collaborative programs and exhibitions. Together, the extensive holdings of the Art Museums and the Design School include original drawings and plans, architectural models, design objects, faculty and student projects, and archives of distinguished faculty and practitioners including Josep Lluis Sert; Marcel Breuer; Walter Gropius, who in 1969 donated to the Busch-Reisinger Museum more than three thousand prints, drawings, and photographs documenting his architectural work from 1906 to 1946; and Le Corbusier, whose only two buildings in this hemisphere, the Curutchet House in Buenos Aires and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, are uniquely documented in the Design School's special collections.

"As a teaching and research institution, this collaboration gives the Harvard Art Museums an unprecedented resource in architecture and design - an area that is growing rapidly in the art museum community," says James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. "The new venture allows us to draw upon the collections and scholarly strengths of the Art Museums and the Design School to support our exhibitions as well as our teaching, research, conservation and professional practices programs."

Adds Peter Rowe, Dean of the Harvard Design School: "Our exhibition program has been an important dimension of the Harvard Design School for students, faculty, design professionals, and the public. By joining forces with the Art Museums, that program is being raised to a new level at a time when more and more art museums are recognizing architecture and design as essential components of their mission."

In her position at the Harvard Design School, Brooke Hodge has implemented a rich array of exhibitions, publications, and lectures exploring art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Recent exhibitions at the Design School's Gund Hall exhibition gallery include Two Projects by Sir Norman Foster and The Theater of Drawing: Early Artworks of Robert Wilson, which was also shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Lectures by celebrated architects and designers have included Philippe Starck, Peter Zumthor, Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, and Christian de Portzamparc. Before coming to Harvard in 1991, Hodge served as exhibitions coordinator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) for six years and was also the commissioner of the Canadian Pavilion at the 5th International Exhibition of Architecture at the Venice Biennale. As Adjunct Curator of Architecture and Design, she will bring this broad experience to the Harvard University Art Museums, serving as curator of exhibitions and advising on acquisitions related to architecture and design.

The $1 million gift from Graham Gund will be used by The Harvard University Art Museums and the Harvard Design School to establish the Graham Gund Exhibition Fund, which will support a wide range of architecture and design exhibitions to be presented at both institutions. The gift comes from one of the country's foremost collectors of contemporary art and president of Graham Gund Architects, an architecture firm of national renown. Deeply committed to the arts, Mr. Gund holds many leadership roles including trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has served as a member of the visiting committees of both the Harvard Design School and the Harvard University Art Museums. The Gund family have been longtime supporters of the Harvard Design School; major gifts toward the creation of George Gund Hall - which opened in 1972 and houses the Harvard Design School - came from the George Gund Foundation and the Gund family.

The Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums comprises the Fogg Art Museum (founded in 1891, opened in 1895); the Busch-Reisinger Museum (founded in 1902, now housed in Werner Otto Hall); the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (opened in 1985); and the Straus Center for Conservation, located at the Fogg. Through their collections, the Art Museums serve Harvard University as a catalyst for instruction and scholarship, as a training ground for future academic art historians and museum professionals, and as a resource for the greater-Boston area and all parts of the world.

The collections of the Art Museums consist of more than 150,000 objects in all media, with works ranging from antiquity to the present and from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, the collections comprise a unique resource in terms of breadth and quality, and are one of the finest university art collections in the world.

The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and to all on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For tour information, call (617) 496-8576; web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

The Harvard Design School
The Harvard Design School is the nation's leading center for education, information, research, and technical expertise on architecture and the built environment. Its flagship graduate programs provide masters and doctoral degrees in three integrated departments: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design. In addition, the School educates a broad range of design professionals, policy-makers, government officials, business leaders, and the public about design and its impact on our lives and communities through a rich array of conferences, exhibitions, professional development and executive education programs, and research activities. For more information, see www.gsd.harvard.edu.