LITERATURE + LECTURES

Architecture Center Houston and the Houston Public Library are pleased to announce the beginning of the second season of Authors in Architecture. Author Michelangelo Sabatino, Ph.D.s will present Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, Thursday, March 18. Join us for the 6pm presentation and discussion at the Downtown Houston Public Library (500 McKinney) and then a book signing and reception at Architecture Center Houston (315 Capitol) at 7pm.

Bringing to light the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, this book considers architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1980s. The essays here situate Mediterranean modernism in relation to concepts such as regionalism, nationalism, internationalism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism - an alternative history of the modern architecture and urbanism of a critical period in the twentieth century.

Michelangelo Sabatino, Ph.D., is co editor of Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean. He serves as Assistant Professor and Architectural History & Theory Coordinator at the University of Houston Gerald D Hines College of Architecture. Sabatino’s research and teaching are focused on critical and historical problems in late 19thand 20th-century European and North American architecture, urbanism, and design, with special attention to the competing and often contradictory ways in which the appropriation of rural and commercial vernaculars has shaped the pursuit of national, regional, international identity during this period.

Debuting in January 2009, Authors in Architecture is a collaboration between the Houston Public Library Downtown and the ArCH. Our aim is to create a dialogue between these two downtown cultural centers and their patrons. This monthly series is free and open to the public.