Conversations in Context invited leaders from creative fields to reflect on the site’s past, present, and future, and to contribute their perspectives on the Glass House and its significance to contemporary debates.

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Holding a B.A. from Columbia, an M.A. from King’s College, Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia, his broad interests center on modern architectural history with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1800.

Bergdoll has organized, curated, and consulted on many landmark exhibitions of 19th and 20th-century architecture including “Building Collections: Recent Acquisitions of Architecture” opening at MoMA in November 2010; “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront” at MoMA (through October 11, 2010); “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” at MoMA (2009-10); “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” at MoMA (2008); “Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32” at MoMA (2007); “Mies in Berlin” at MoMA (2001), with Terence Riley; “Breuer in Minnesota” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2002); “Les Vaudoyer: Une Dynastie d’Architectes at the Musée D’Orsay, Paris (1991); and “Ste. Geneviève/Pantheon; Symbol of Revolutions,” in Paris and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (1989).

He is author or editor of numerous publications including, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (winner of the 2010 Award for Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue, Association of Art Museum Curators); Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (winner of the 2010 Philip Johnson Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians); Mies in Berlin (winner of the 2002 Philip Johnson Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians and AICA Best Exhibition Award, 2002); Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (winner of the 1995 AIA Book Award); Lẻon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry; and European Architecture 1750-1890, in the Oxford History of Art series. An edited volume, Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, was published by Thames and Hudson in 2006. He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2006 to 2008.

The 2011 season of Conversations in Context was generously sponsored by BMW and Design Within Reach.

Go to Film page.