Sunday Afternoons
April 11, 18, and 25, 2021 | 3:00 to 4:30pm Eastern Daylight Savings Time
A Series of Three Live Virtual Lectures and Conversations

Join Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research as we examine the histories of three of Cranbrook’s iconic cultural landscapes through the lens of racial and social justice. The 2021 installment of the annual Bauder Lecture Series, Unsettling Landscapes at Cranbrook, brings six historians and experts to the Center’s virtual auditorium where they will help us explore, expand, and enrich our understanding of the histories associated with Cranbrook’s original 1904 Booth Estate, the 1915 Japanese Garden, and the 1950 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Smith House.

Sunday, March 14th, 2021
3:00pm - 4:15pm Eastern Time
Virtual Lecture

From the desert vistas of Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico ranch to Winslow Homer’s studio on the rocky, windswept cost of southern Maine, the homes and studios of illustrious American artists are sites of extraordinary creativity. Forty-four of the nation’s most celebrated homes and studios have been part of a national coalition of independent museums, the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. On February 10, 2021, the National Trust added four more sites to this prestigious network—one of them is Saarinen House. Join your friends at Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research as we both celebrate this milestone in the history of Saarinen House as a public museum and learn about some of the other forty-seven sites in this nationwide network.

11:00am-12:15pm EST | 7:00pm-8:15pm EST
Virtual Lecture Series

In the fourth annual installment of the Center’s popular series, Kevin Adkisson will examine the past ninety years of architecture history through the framework of distinguished architects who have lectured at Cranbrook and visited the Academy of Art.

Tuesday, October 27, 2020 |  10am & 7pm
Virtual Lecture

This lecture will present Eero Saarinen’s time studying and building at Yale within the context of his teenage years working with his parents in the development of Cranbrook, and the impact his time among the students at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1930s had on his trajectory as an architect.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020 |  10am & 7pm
Virtual Lecture

This lecture will trace Wright’s career as a collector of Japanese art, as an architect working in Tokyo, and the lifelong impact of Japanese architecture and gardens on Wright’s designs for American homes.

Virtual Lecture

This lecture will introduce the pedagogy and designs of the Bauhaus, and compare the German institution with our own Academy of Art. How were they similar? How were they different? How are the legacies of each intertwined, and where do they diverge? Join us for this special Uncovering Cranbrook lecture where we will attempt to answer: Is Cranbrook an American Bauhaus?

Virtual Lecture

Join Kevin Adkisson in this 50-minute survey of the weaving enterprise led by Loja Saarinen—Studio Loja Saarinen. Staffed by a team of Swedish immigrant weavers, the Studio produced rugs, curtains, and fabrics for use at Cranbrook and around the country. The lecture will review the Studio’s inception and operation, study the textile designs for Kingswood School for Girls, completed in the early 1930s, and focus on how Loja’s textiles were central to the vision of her husband, architect Eliel Saarinen.

Brendan Cormier, Senior Design Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, discussed the exhibition he co-curated, “Cars,” with Center Director Greg Wittkopp in this virtual lecture. Cormier presents the car as a force for change and symbol of social, political, personal, and economic transformation. 

Join curator Kevin Adkisson for this five-part lecture series surveying the history of American architecture through the lens of Cranbrook’s distinct and impressive architectural history. Each seventy-five minute talk moves between the story of Cranbrook’s creation and the history of modern architecture.