Award-winning architect lectures October 30 on 'Commonplaces'

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. ? On Thursday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m., Middlebury College’s 2008 Cameron Visiting Architect Brian Healy will give a lecture titled “Commonplaces: Thinking about an American Architecture.” The event is part of the “Architecture &.” series, jointly organized and sponsored by Middlebury College and Bread Loaf Architects, Planners, Builders. Free and open to the public, it will take place in Room 304 of the Johnson Memorial Building, located on Château Road off College Street (Route 125).

The lecture is based on Healy’s 2008 monograph of the same name that includes a collection of essays, observations, drawings, paintings and photographs related to projects spanning the last 20 years in dozens of locations - from the Appalachian hills to the vineyards of Northern California, the Catskills to the west side of Chicago, and downtown Boston to the New Jersey shore. As the Cameron Visiting Architect, Healy is working this fall with architectural studies students enrolled in an intermediate level course with Middlebury College Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture John McLeod.

Healy worked in the offices of Cesar Pelli and Richard Meier before establishing Brian Healy Architects in Boston in 1986. He was selected for the Emerging Voices Series of the New York Architectural League in 1999; the “Forty under 40” compilation of emerging architects and designers in 1996; and, in 1990, received the Young Architect Award from Progressive Architecture. As a student at the Yale School of Architecture, he was editor of “Perspecta 19,” Yale’s Architectural Journal, and received the H. I. Feldman Prize in Design and the William Wirt Winchester Traveling Fellowship.

His firm’s work has been recognized for design excellence and received numerous awards and honors, including first place in Chicago’s Design Competition for Mixed Income Housing in 2000. The work has also been featured in magazines and newspapers such as Abitare, Global Architecture, Architecture, Architectural Record, Time, Dwell, Esquire, Progressive Architecture, the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune and Streetwise.

Healy is the recipient of fellowships for residency at the American Academy in Rome, the MacDowell Art Colony in Peterborough, N.H., and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, Calif. He received the Dinkeloo Fellowship from the New York-based Van Alen Institute, and was a visiting artist in residence at Amherst College in 2007.

Healy was on the Board of Directors of the Boston Society of Architects from 2000-2005, serving as president in 2004, and was a member of the Design Advisory Panel for the Rose Kennedy Greenway. He is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Architectural Research Grant Program of the Boston Society of Architects, and a member of the National Register of Peer Professionals in the General Service Administration’s Design Excellence Program.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Middlebury College History of Art and Architecture Department and the Cameron Family Arts Enrichment Fund, established in 2007 by the Cameron Family to support visiting artists in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Studio Art Program.

For more information, contact Academic Department Coordinator Monica McCabe at 802-443-5234 or mmccabe@middlebury.edu.