Architectural Lecture and Film To Be Presented at UH Architecture School

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Architectural Lecture and Film To Be Presented at UH Architecture
School

The importance of design history in our fast-forward world will be the
subject of an interactive evening that will include a conversation
with Susan S. Szenasy, editor in chief of Metropolis Magazine, and the
Hawai'i premier of Site Specific: A Legacy of Regional Modernism, a
short film about the climate and place-sensitive architectural
experiments of the Sarasota School.

The free event will be held on Wednesday, December 12, at 5:30 p.m. at
the School of Architecture's Auditorium Room 205. The event is co-
sponsored by Leo A Daly, the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's School
of Architecture, and Historic Hawai'i Foundation. It is open to the
public.

Szenasy will deliver a compelling presentation on design history and
how it can shape current practice, if we pay attention to it. The talk
will be accompanied by a short film produced by Metropolis about the
Sarasota School of Architecture, characterized by its climate-
sensitive Modernism--offering essential information for today's green
designers.

According to Metropolis, the documentary is a 20-minute film meant as
a design history lesson and somewhat of a cautionary tale (what
happens when great architecture is subverted by well-intentioned but
uninformed renovators and the architecture community is left out of
the dialogue). The film offers an affirmation of design trends that
were interrupted beginning about 40 years ago by the advent of the new
technologies that promised to free designers from some of the "basics"
of design, most notably environmental concerns that are now becoming
more important. The idea is to familiarize architects and designers
with some of the breakthrough work and urge them to stand on the
shoulders of previous giants.

Clearly, at a time when designers and architects are thinking more and
more about sustainability issues in their practices, they often ignore
past examples, such as the important work done by the Sarasota School
in the days before air conditioning, when architects naturally built
to climate.

The film advocates a thoughtful evaluation of the building and the
ideas designed into the school such as day-lighting, natural
ventilation, sun-screens, and shade-giving plantings. The building has
a great deal to teach current practitioners.

"We looked at what it means to build to climate, because architects
are looking to that more and more because of energy costs, building
costs and the need for people to be more connected to the sunlight and
the air," said Szenasy.

"Riverview High School and the rest of the Sarasota School of
Architecture is a historical marker for the topic," she added. "The
working title for the film is 'Pave Paradise and Put up a Parking
Lot'," Szenasy said, only half-jokingly.

The Metropolis Site Specific national tour in its entirety is
supported by sponsors Haworth, Lutron, Shaw Contract and Wilsonart
Contract.



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