“Dr. Irene Sunwoo to Join Art Institute of Chicago as Department Chair”

Irene Sunwoo will Leave Columbia University to Become Chairwoman of The Art Institute of Chicago’s Architectural Department

The Art Institute of Chicago (A.I.C.), which re-opened earlier this month after a second COVID-19-included lockdown, announced on Monday, February 8, A.D. 2021 that Irene Sunwoo, Ph.D., would join the A.I.C. staff as John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of the Architecture and Design Department, effective on Monday, April 26, A.D. 2021. Dr. Sunwoo is coming to the A.I.C. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. There, since 2016, she has been Curator of the Arthur Ross Gallery of Architecture and Director of Exhibitions.

Irene Sunwoo received her B.A. in Art History from New York University. She has two Master of Arts degrees (M.A.s), one from the Bard Graduate Center and another from the Architectural Association. Dr. Sunwoo earned her doctorate from the Princeton University School of Architecture. She has taught at the Parsons School of Design, Bard College, and Oberlin College.

Figure 1 Credit: Benjamin Mistak Caption: This is Irene Sunwoo, Ph.D., who will be joining The Art Institute of Chicago as John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of the Architecture and Design Department in April of 2021.

In a press release, the A.I.C. stated, “At Columbia, Sunwoo established a distinctive vision, overseeing an experimental and interdisciplinary exhibition program that fused a scholarly approach to content with innovative exhibition design. In her ongoing collaborations with architects and artists, Sunwoo has supported and advanced new architectural practices, research, and ideas. She has consistently demonstrated a rigorous commitment to how architecture and design intersects with urban legacies as well as equity and environmental concerns. As curator of the Ross Gallery, Sunwoo organized numerous revelatory exhibitions, including Eternal Gradient: Arakawa and Madeline Gins (2018), Cooking Sections: Offsetted (2019), Torkwase Dyson: 1919: Black Water (2019), and most recently, A Wilderness Distant (2020), a program of films and essays that confront duality of landscape as sites of memory and political imagination.”

“Irene’s experience as a thought leader, scholar, and curator makes her uniquely qualified to lead the Architecture and Design team and bring her curatorial vision to Chicago, a longstanding and world-renowned laboratory of architectural theory, practice, and innovation,” stated James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of The Art Institute of Chicago.

“Already invested in Chicago’s architectural history as well as its contemporary practices, Sunwoo served as Associate Curator of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial titled The State of the Art of Architecture (2015) and was a key team member in the launch of this vital new institution,” the A.I.C. stated.

Dr. Sunwoo edited the book In Progress: IID Summer Sessions, published in 2017. This is a book on the history of the International Institute of Design (I.I.D.), a school of architecture founded by Alvin Bovarsky and directed by him from 1970 to ’72. [Bovarsky is famous for begin Chairman of the Architectural Association from 1971 to 1990.] Further, she has written articles published in journals including Grey Room, AA Files, Harvard Design Magazine, Domus, and the Getty Research Journal. She has two books in the works, one on Bovarsky, and another on Arakawa and Madeline Gins.

$5 Per Month IN THE GARDEN CITY Subscription Plan

$50 Per Year IN THE GARDEN CITY Subscription Plan

Help Keep the Lights On

If you like this content, you can help keep more of it coming with a one-time payment of as little as $1.

$1.00

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.