Alison Lurie, who visits us on Thursday, September 18, is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who applies her wit and insight to the meaning of ordinary architecture in her new book, The Language of Houses (2014).
The book is reviewed by Kathleen Hirsch in the Boston Globe:
Lurie serves as able guide on an opening overview of basic architectural themes: style, scale, materials. Concepts such as formal and informal, open and shut, darkness and light, as well as the influences of foreign and regional idioms, become the building blocks on which she proceeds into her discussion of dwellings. We learn that the simple, unadorned, home intended to convey “green” values, often uses “old bricks and boards that in fact cost more than new ones,” while a suburban McMansion’s pricey entrance is coupled with cheap siding and exposed ductwork out back. She chronicles the evolution of the Colonial meeting house into Gothic worship sites that are mini-theaters with their raised altars, lavish pipe organs, and stage lighting. Gender differences abound: In homes and offices, men prefer what she calls “prospects”; women, “refuge.”
More in the Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/08/30/book-review-the-language-houses-alison-lurie/yySBJHfY7IjpAFCT60gU0L/story.html
More about Lurie and upcoming events: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lurie
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
The House Tour
Alison Lurie's new book in the Wall St. Journal
The Language of Houses by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and reigning NYS Author Alison Lurie (who visits us on Thurs. 9/18) is reviewed in the Wall St. Journal:
Le Corbusier may have decreed that the house should be "a machine for living," but Alison Lurie knows architecture carries a far greater moral charge than such minimalist efficiency implies. In "The Language of Houses," she takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the social and psychological significance of private and public structures: schools, churches, government buildings, museums, prisons, hospitals, hotels, restaurants and of course homes. She makes a powerful argument that how we choose to order the space we live and work in reveals far more about us, our place in the world and our preoccupations than we know. Architectural design is both a mirror and molder of human experience.... The Language of
Houses is a mine of adroit observation, uncovering apparently humdrum
details to reveal their unexpected, and occasionally poignant, human meaning.
More in the Wall St. Journal: http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-language-of-houses-by-alison-lurie-1409345436
More about Lurie's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison14.html
More on the upcoming Visiting Writers Series: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html
Friday, September 5, 2014
Alison Lurie in National Geographic
Acclaimed novelist Alison Lurie, who opens our Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series, is interviewed in the August 17 issue of National Geographic:
Acclaimed Novelist Alison Lurie Thinks Buildings Say a Whole Lot About Us
A critic once remarked that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie writes so simply that a cat or a dog can understand her. It was meant as a compliment and taken as such. In her new book she turns her lucid gaze on a subject baffling to many of us: architecture.
In this candid interview she talks about what buildings tell us about their owners' aspirations and politics, why she built houses for fairies as a child, how she feels about being compared to Balzac and Jane Austen, and what her own home in upstate New York reveals about her.
More in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140817-alison-lurie-architecture-cornell-spoils-of-poynton-great-expectations-booktalk/
More about Alison Lurie's events in Albany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison14.html
More about the Fall 2014 Visiting Writers Series: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#lurie Read More......