Anthony Alofsin Archive

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Anthony Alofsin attended the Memphis Academy of Art in his early teens. After studying painting and ceramics, he became a weaver under the tutelage of Henry Easterwood and exhibited his tapestries in Memphis and New York. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, where he was drawn to English literature, creative writing, Latin, and ancient Greek. He worked on the weekly newspaper, The Phillipian, and became its managing editor in his senior year. While at Andover he created his first collection of books, which received the school’s Redpath Award, and graduated Cum Laude. During his years at Harvard College (1968-1971), in the midst of the turbulent counter-culture of the late 1960s, he majored in Visual and Environmental Studies. The program emulated the rational and functionalist philosophy of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius was still alive and cast a long shadow at Harvard. While working at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts—Le Corbusier’s only built work in America—Alofsin studied under Eduardo Chillida, the Basque Constructivist sculptor who encouraged his interest in art. Alofsin’s honors thesis was an exploration of the technology of photostress analysis applied to light sculptures. While at Harvard, he also studied under architectural historian, Eduard Sekler, director of the Carpenter Center, and James Ackerman, the historian of Renaissance architecture in the Department of Fine Arts.

After graduating from Harvard College (1971), Magna cum Laude with High Honors, Alofsin spent the following six years sculpting in Santa Fe and San Francisco, where he opened an atelier, Innerforms Ltd., dedicated to the restoration of 18th and 19th century furniture and objects. By the late 1970s Alofsin had grown increasingly interested in architectural restoration. He worked for the firm Conron and Lent in Santa Fe, where he conducted fieldwork and archival research, and wrote building histories that documented Socorro, New Mexico, a 19th century boom town. He returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978 to enter the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Architectural postmodernism was at its zenith. The values and resources of history were seen as inspirations and source material for transformation into contemporary design, and as the antidote to the sterility of the International Style. At the Graduate School of Design, Alofsin began his research focusing on the history of architectural history and the history of design pedagogy at Harvard. His work unraveled a history of the Harvard GSD and its precursors that had not yet been explored, and he established the first chronicle of Gropius’s arrival in America. This research also launched his first publications and lectures in the US and abroad. Though interested in architectural history, he was equally focused on design and upon graduation from the GSD, received the AIA Henry Adams Medal for excellence in academic studies.

Alofsin moved to New York in 1981 to enter the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University where he pursued M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees as a Presidential Fellow. His principal teachers were the former students or colleagues of art historian, Rudolf Wittkower, and Wittkower’s interest in the transformation of motifs and symbol systems influenced Alofsin’s intellectual orientation. He studied the historiography of art history with Richard Brilliant and later developed a course on architectural historiography as a professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Initially at Columbia, however, he focused on Baroque art and architecture under Howard Hibbard and developed an interest in reception theory and the problematics of influence as articulated by Harold Bloom. After Hibbard’s premature death, Alofsin broadened his research agenda to test reception theory against the standard historical account of Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on Europe in the early 1910s. Using archival documents and unconventional research techniques, he discovered a wholly unknown history about Wright’s connections to Europe and his famous Wasmuth publications. His doctoral dissertation on Frank Lloyd Wright, the first in several decades, “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lessons of Europe, 1910-1922,” launched themes that he would pursue for the rest of his career. While living at Taliesin West for his dissertation research, he had the first complete access to the Wright Archive and created a five-volume index to the 100,000 documents, comprising 300,000 pages of Wright’s correspondence. The index radically changed the field of research on Wright.

In 1987, Alofsin left New York to take a teaching position in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. During three decades of teaching, he created numerous new courses on a broad range of topics, taught generations of students, and established the school’s first comprehensive global survey of modern architecture. For Alofsin’s students—who ranged from architects to planners, preservationists to historians—the study of history was integrated with the rigors of making. His students went on to work as both practitioners and teachers, shaping the spaces and the minds of successive generations. In 2012, the Key Centre for Architectural Sociology ranked Alofsin internationally as the “Best of the Best” among research professors, academics, and dons. He was also Director of the Center for American Architecture and Design from 1990-1993 and founded the school’s Ph.D. program in Architecture. During his role as director of the school’s program in Architectural History, he increased enrollment and transformed its MS in Architectural Studies degree into an MA in Architectural History.

From the late 1980s, Dr. Alofsin’s research expanded into Central Europe where he conceived the concept of the “Many Moderns” to encompass the variants of modern architecture that had been neglected in conventional histories. As Fulbright Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the early 1990s, he began documenting these developments and formed the Tense Alliance, an international research consortium of scholars in Central Europe commissioned to conduct original research throughout the region of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. His Vasari Award-winning book, When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867-1933, was one outcome of this research engagement.

During his time in Texas, Alofsin also launched his architectural practice. Deliberately limited in scope to select residential projects, his practice emphasized the use of proportional systems, site integration, development of details, and close interactions with clients. In addition to designing his own residences, he built homes for clients in Austin, Santa Fe, and Rhinebeck, New York. In 2017 he was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor that the profession provides.

Alofsin’s production of books, articles, and essays has been prolific. As author or editor, he has written fifteen books and eighty articles, essays, and reviews. He has lectured around the country and the globe, and though he has spoken at dozens of academic, professional, and scholarly events, his preferred venue has become lectures for the general public. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he was named a three-time Fellow of the MacDowell Colony; a two-time winner of the Vasari Award from the Dallas Museum of Art; Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and a Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation. His books and projects have been funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Getty Research Institute and Getty Museum, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (International Research Center for Cultural Sciences), Vienna. Among several professional societies, he is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.

-- compiled by Hannah Simonson, February 2017