Sponsored by EBSCO
Gather with ARLIS/NA members for lunch with Alan Hess, local historian and architect.
If you plan to attend, you must select this event and your meal choice when completing your conference registration. This will serve as your RSVP.
Fee: $25
"The New History of Old Modernism"
Hess' talk will cover recent scholarship, including the Getty's architecture exhibition Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990, that is broadening the way we see 20th century Modern architecture.
Hess is an architect, author, critic, lecturer and advocate for twentieth century architectural preservation. He researches and documents the emerging suburban metropolises of the West.
He is the author numerous books that document and interpret mid-century, popular, suburban, and Modern architecture on roadside architecture, fifties coffee shop architecture, Las Vegas, Ranch Houses, organic architecture in addition to monographs on Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Niemeyer, John Lautner and Julius Shulman.
As an architecture critic, he has written a column for the San Jose Mercury News since 1986.
His writing has also appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architecture, Architectural Digest, Architectural Record and other journals.
Hess has been active in the preservation of roadside and post war architecture, working to ensure that the nation’s oldest McDonald’s drive-in (Downey, CA), Bullock’s department store (Pasadena) and Edward Durell Stone’s Stuart Pharmaceutical Factory (Pasadena, 1958) qualified for the National Register of Historic Places.
He received numerous honors, awards, and grants: a National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award for his efforts to preserve the McDonald's; a California Preservation Foundation President’s Award, and a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts grant to research the work of Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.
Hess was a National Arts Journalism Program Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism in New York and has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SciArc) and The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
He has given lectures at the Getty Research Institute, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, the Walker Art Museum, and UCLA, among others.
He has also appeared on the CBS Sunday Morning News, CNN, Good Morning America, BBC-TV’s Late Show, NPR’s Morning Edition, California Public Radio’s California Reports, and other programs.
