Yale School of Architecture Exhibition Salutes Architect Stanley Tigerman

NEW HAVEN — A retrospective exhibition celebrating the creative life, work and spirit of the eminent architect and educator Stanley Tigerman will usher in a new term at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, 180 York Street, on August 22.
 
Titled, " 'Ceci n'est pas une reverie' [This isn't a dream]: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman"  the exhibition, curated by Yale School of Architecture Associate Professor Emmanuel Petit, will be at the Gallery in the historic Paul Rudolph Hall until November 4.
 
Tigerman will formally open the show with a public lecture, titled "Displacement," on August 25. Petit will share his insights as the exhibition curator in a lecture titled "Scaffolds of Heaven: On Tigerman," on September 1. Both lectures are free and open to the public and take place in the auditorium of Paul Rudolph Hall at 6:30 p.m.

The exhibition takes a thematic approach, grouping Tigerman's projects according to motifs that resonate throughout his body of work—including "utopia," "allegory," "death," "humor," and "division." "Ceci n'est pas une reverie" draws on original artwork—including paintings, sketches and cartoons—Tigerman-designed household objects and models of projects exemplifying his evolving eclectic style, as well as videotaped interviews and lectures and archived material dating to his student days at Yale to provide a deeper look at a celebrated professional life that has spanned more than 50 years.
 
A Chicago native and Yale alumnus, Tigerman ('60 B.Arch, '61 M.Arch) is a principal of the Chicago-based firm Tigerman McCurry Architects. He has designed numerous buildings and installations throughout North America, Western Europe and Asia, and has delivered many hundreds of lectures around the world.  He has been a visiting professor and served on advisory committees at several prestigious schools of architecture, including Yale and Harvard, and he was Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago for eight years.  In 1994 he co-founded with Eva Maddox  ARCHEWORKS, a school and  "socially oriented design laboratory," in Chicago.
 
Tigerman's work has earned him critical acclaim and countless awards, especially in Chicago, where he was born and where his practice has flourished for more than a half-century.  The work of his firm has been exhibited more than 300 times in major galleries and art museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the  Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007, Tigerman and his partner Margaret McCurry were named by Architectural Digest to its list of the top 100 architects and designers in the world.
 
Among the diverse objects, documents and projects to be featured in the exhibition are Tigerman's Bachelor's and Master's theses under Paul Rudolph at Yale and models and sketches of early and mid-career projects, such as the Five Polytechnic Institutes in Bangladesh (1966–75); the Urban Matrix proposal on Lake Michigan (1967-68), the Daisy House (1975–78) and Dante's Bathroom Addition (1980). More recent projects represented in the show include the Commonwealth Edison Energy Museum in Zion, IL (1987–90), the Park Lane Hotel in Kyoto (1990); the Berlin Wall project (1988) and the recently inaugurated Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois (2000–2009). Also on display will be such diverse objects as tableware Tigerman designed for Swid Powell and his designs for Cannon Fieldcrest and Alessi.  It will include oil paintings from the "I Pledge Allegiance" series in the mid-1960s, "Architoons," and travel sketches from the 1970s onwards. The exhibition will be accompanied by both historical video material of Tigerman's lectures and interviews and a new video interview with Tigerman and others, produced by Karen Carter Lynch.  

In January 2012, the exhibition will be displayed at the Graham Foundation 's Madlener House in Chicago.  

The exhibition will mark the transfer of Tigerman's complete drawing archive to Yale University's Manuscripts & Archives depository in 2012.

The opening of "Ceci n'est pas une reverie" in New Haven will coincide with the book launch of Tigerman's collected writings 1964-2011, "Schlepping Through Ambivalence: Essays on an American Architectural Condition" published by Yale University Press. It will also coincide with the release of Tigerman's autobiography, titled "Designing Bridges to Burn: Architectural Memoirs by Stanley Tigerman" published by ORO Editions.

"Gwathmey Siegel: Inspiration and Transformation" the second exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery this term, will open on November 14, 2011 and be on display through January 28, 2012. More information about this exhibition will be sent in a separate press release.

Exhibitions at the Yale School of Architecture are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday–Friday 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Sunday.

Editor's note: All information in this post was contributed. It is unedited here.