Douglas Darden: Lithographs
March 10-21, 2014
Macdonald Harrington Building Room 114
815 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal
The “Douglas Darden: Lithographs” exhibition and the “Going down to build up: Revisiting the Work of Douglas Darden” symposium held at McGill University’s School of Architecture (March 10-21, 2014) presented lithographs by the renowned architectural storyteller Douglas Darden. These lithographs formed the source material for his book Condemned Building: An Architect’s Pre-Text (1993).
Douglas Darden was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1951. He studied dance and ballet before earning a bachelor degree in English and psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1974. Following his early academic formation, Darden studied industrial design at Parsons School of Design and received his Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD in 1983. He began work on the projects that would later be featured in Condemned Building: An Architect’s Pre-Text (1993) while also teaching at Harvard, then at the Catholic University of America, and Columbia University, and later at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Condemned Building brought together the plans, sections, elevations, details, models, ideograms, scriptexts, and letters for ten allegorical works of architecture by Darden that critically challenged fundamental suppositions of architectural praxis. McGill’s “Douglas Darden: Lithographs” symposium and exhibition reflected on Darden’s oeuvre, impact, and place in both modern architectural practice and academia.
