Works selected for the exhibition include three architects, a composer and a musician/violist who is also a music scholar.
Burnham Brothers
Burnham Brothers is the firm established by Daniel H. Burnham, Jr. and Hubert Burnham, sons of the renowned Chicago Architect and planner Daniel Burnham and is one of two successor firms to D.H. Burnham and Company. One of the their most recognizable structures is the Carbide and Carbon building at 230 N. Michigan Avenue.
Douglas Garofalo
As the Principal of Garofalo Architects, Douglas Garafolo was internationally renowned for his innovation and experimentation with material and technology. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1981 and acquired a Master’s degree from Yale University in 1987 before opening an architectural firm in Chicago. The firm's clients included the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hyde Park Art Center; and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Garafolo also assisted in the co-founding of ARCHEWORKS, an alternative design school focused on social causes, was a tenured professor at University of Illinois, and played a significant role in Chicago’s urban design and public planning.
In 2006 Garafolo was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was named a United States Artist Fellow and his practice received numerous awards including the Distinguished Building Award from AIA Chicago for the Hyde Park Art Center and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. After his passing, UIC founded the Douglas Garafolo Fellowship supporting teaching and research in his honor.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Piranesi was a prolific 18th century Italian etcher, engraver, designer, architect, archeologist and theorist. He is best known for his drawings of ancient buildings of Rome, both real and imagined. While he only built a few structures and mostly theatre sets, his greatest contribution to architecture is through the lasting impact his drawings and theoretical writings had on European Neoclassicists.
Andrew Norman
Andrew Norman is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music. He is known for innovation and expanding the standard lexicon of musical notation. Because his works include new sound innovations, it was necessary to invent symbols or brief word descriptions to demonstrate how musicians should execute a note or passage.
Prior to pursuing a career in music, Norman was interested in pursuing a career as an architect. After realizing he could use architecture as a metaphor for what he wanted to try in composition, he began writing music about buildings. "Companion Guide to Rome" is a nine movement string trio, in which each movement is inspired by churches Norman visited during a year long stay in Rome. The final and longest movement is based on a visit to Santa Sabina at sunrise where he observed morphing golden patterns of translucent crystalline gypsum windows. Norman sought to articulate the transitions of color and light using string instruments whose sound grows in resonance from small to surprisingly large as the movement unfolds. The first performance of the final movement, now titled Sabina, was publicly presented in 2007 as a string trio ‘in situ’ at Santa Sabina, Rome, which Julia Fish attended.
Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
Lanzilotti is a "leading composer-performer" (The New York Times) dedicated to the music of our time. She was recently appointed Curator of Music at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Lanzilotti's PhD dissertation is an analysis of Andrew Norman’s The Companion Guide to Rome showing the influence of architecture and visual art on the work. As an extension of the research, she created Shaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings. Lanzilotti's dissertation is the source for the printed analytical/visual graphic analyses in the exhibition.