Caroline Maniaque: La face cachée de l'Amérique

Presenter: Caroline Maniaque, CCA Visiting Scholar Title: La face cachée de l'Amérique Time: 6 p.m. Coming to the end of a prolonged research project on the reception of North-American architectural culture and counter culture by French architects in the 1960s and 1970s (cf. seminar CCA 28 June 2007), I am trying to draw together some conclusions. I will take the example of 3 or 4 American and French publications and assess the ways in which ideas passed from one to the other. The transfers, metamorphoses and resistances will be analyzed in their use of images, popular culture and underlying theories. Caroline Maniaque is both an architect and a historian, having earned her PhD from l'université de Paris VIII. She is an associate professor at l'école nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage in Lille, where she teaches architectural history and culture. Additionally, she teaches regularly at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York. Between 1994 and 1997, Caroline was the associate curator at the Centre Pompidou for the exhibition L'Art de l'ingénieur taking charge of the portion of the exhibit devoted to light structures showing the works of Graham Bell, R. Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Snelson, Georges David Emmerich, Frei Otto, Robert Le Ricolais, and Emilio Perez Pinero. Her research and publications have, on one hand, focused on scholarly architectural culture of the 1950s and, on the other hand, on alternative North American culture of the 1960s and its impact on Europe. She has most notably published Hard et Soft America : Perspectives françaises, dans Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale et urbaine (2002). She contributed to the catalogues for Ant Farm exhibitions both through the University of California Press in 2004 and at the FRAC Centre in October 2007. During her stay at the CCA, she is putting the finishing touches on a work about European architects and North American counterculture. She has presented her work in progress at the Docomomo international colloquium in New York in 2004, at the Americanization of Post War Architecture colloquium at the University of Toronto in 2005, as well as at the colloquium on the Whole Earth Catalog organized by UC Davis in 2006. Caroline Maniaque has been awarded Fulbright, Rockefeller, Graham, Getty and Samuel H. Kress research fellowships. Her book, Le Corbusier et les maisons Jaoul : Projets et fabrique (Picard, 2005), received the "Prix National du Livre d'Architecture de Briey" and will be published in English by Princeton Architectural Press in the fall of 2008. Website