Yale School of Architecture Announces Schedule of Exhibitions

In the coming academic year, Yale School of Architecture (YSA) will present exhibitions on the radical art collective Ant Farm, the U.S. pavilion at the 2004 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower and the work of YSA students.

From August 29 to November 4, the gallery of Paul Rudolph’s landmark Art & Architecture building will be filled with a multi-media tribute to Ant Farm, the iconoclastic arts group that exemplified the revolutionary decade between 1968 and 1978.

Founded in 1968 by architects Chip Lord and Doug Michels (a 1967 YSA graduate), Ant Farm was a loosely defined collaborative of architects, performance and installation artists, designers, sculptors and video-makers who turned many of the most recognizable symbols of American culture on their head; literally so, in their installation “Cadillac Ranch,” featuring ten Cadillacs buried nose-down in a Texas wheat field with their tail fins jutting skyward.

The group was equally known for the massive inflatable structures they created and introduced, on at least one occasion, as the core of a traveling art show. Ant Farm also made a major contribution to the burgeoning genre of video art with “The Eternal Frame,” a spoof reenactment of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. Their signature work as performance artists was the spectacular “Media Burn,” in which Michels and fellow Ant Farm member Curtis Schreier drove a Cadillac—which they named “The Phantom Dream Car”—through a wall of flaming televisions.

The Phantom Dream Car and one of Ant Farm’s inimitable inflatables will be among the artifacts, photographs, drawings, videotapes and other memorabilia displayed in the exhibition. A catalogue with essays by notable critics and a discussion among Ant Farm members will accompany the show.

Ant Farm 1968–1978 was organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and cosponsored by UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and Department of Architecture. First mounted in Berkeley in 2004, the exhibition has traveled to Santa Monica, Philadelphia and Germany. Yale will be the last stop on its tour.

The catalogue for Ant Farm 1968–1978 was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The catalogue and exhibition were also made possible by the Judith Rothschild Foundation, in recognition of Doug Michels; the National Endowment for the Arts; Rena Bransten; Marilyn Oshman; the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley; the Windfall Foundation; and Joan Roebuck. Special thanks are owed to Robert and Caroline Michels.

The second exhibition at YSA this year, titled “Transcending Type,” focuses on the U.S. Pavilion of the ninth International Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004, which was curated by the editors of Architectural Record. To fit the Beinnale’s title, “Metamorph,” referring to momentous changes in architecture largely fueled by the digital revolution, the curators of the U.S. pavilion invited six inventive young architects to share their unique visions of characteristically American building types. “Transcending Type” will present their designs, which range from the “humanized” highway interchange by the firm Reiser + Umemoto to the installation by Predock_Frane for a contemplative space, made up of 5,000 barely visible suspended filaments evoking the sea. The other ideas represented in the U.S. pavilion are for a parking garage of the future envisioned by Lewis. Tsurumaki. Lewis; an urban sports stadium, which is integrated into the built environment when in use and folded up when not, by Studio/Gang; a high rise apartment building composed of transformable, customized “pods” by Kolatan/MacDonald Studio; and a multilevel shopping center combining retail units with terraced residential apartments and public parks by George Yu Architects. “Transcending Type” will be at YSA from November 14, 2005, to February 3, 2006.

An exhibition titled “Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower,” showcasing the architect’s only skyscraper, will be at YSA from February 13 to May 5, 2006. Originally conceived as an apartment tower for lower Manhattan, the 19-story building was constructed for the H.C. Price Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. With Price Tower, completed in 1956, Wright realized his ideal of incorporating office, commercial and residential space within one structure. Designed to resemble a tree in form and function, it also fulfilled Wright’s architectural precept that buildings have a close affinity to nature. In 1974, Price Tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1985, soon after Phillips Petroleum Company acquired the landmark building, it took on a new role as an arts center.

Now officially the Price Tower Arts Center, the building has become a museum of modern art, design and architecture, retaining in its extensive collection of Wright’s work many of the appointments and furnishings he designed expressly for the skyscraper. In keeping with Wright’s “mixed use” principles, the building now offers luxury hotel accommodations, shops and a restaurant in addition to gallery space for permanent and special exhibitions.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the completion of the celebrated landmark, the Price Tower Arts Center has mounted this exhibition of documents, drawings, furniture, building components and other artifacts that bear witness to the singular genius of its architect.

“Prairie Skyscraper” was organized by Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in cooperation with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Scottsdale, Arizona. The exhibition, its tour and publication are made possible in part by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Buell Family of Bartlesville, the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department and the Oklahoma Arts Council.

The exhibition installation was designed by Zaha Hadid and Office of Zaha Hadid, London, and is co-produced by Price Tower Arts Center and Yale University School of Architecture Gallery.

The final exhibition, May 19 to July 28, will feature projects completed in the academic year by Yale School of Architecture students.

The Art & Architecture building is located at 180 York Street. The hours for the gallery are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. For more information, contact the Yale School of Architecture, 203-432-2288, or visit their web site at www.architecture.yale.edu.