August 23, 2013

Richmond Renaissance – Day 15

Day 15 in Richmond was another scorching, close-to-100-degree day. While we had managed to be outside for the past few days, today we needed an indoor break. We went in search of a museum we had spied during our Monument Avenue hunting expedition.

The Virginia Center for Architecture is housed in a gorgeous Tudor-style home built in 1919 for banker John Kerr Branch and his wife. The building was designed by architect John Russell Pope who is known for designing several prominent Washington area structures including the Jefferson Memorial. The Branch’s used the home as a private residence. It was a second home for them and they lived there only a few months out of the year. The home was decorated with Renaissance tapestries while they lived there. Today, it is an architecture museum.

The current exhibition was called “Mutations: The DNA of 20th Century Design.” The exhibit was designed in conjunction with students from Virginia Commonwealth University and highlighted 20th century achievements in architecture, fashion design and graphic design. (My little sis would have LOVED to see this.)

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The curators broke the 20th century into 10-year blocks of time and created a large poster and “sketchbook” for each time period, highlighting an architect, graphic designer and fashion designer from that period. There were no original artifacts but there were nicely reproduced photographs of their work.

Introduction to the "Mutations" exhibit. — Introduction to the “Mutations” exhibit.

Some of the designers profiled that piqued my interest included:

Paul Poiret – who was a pioneer in the marketing, conception and execution of modern fashion, connecting it to popular culture
Walter Gropius + The Bauhaus – this hotbed of German designers fled Nazi persecution with about half of them relocating to the United States and influencing design practices here
Le Corbusier – and his belief that people in densely populated cities needed fresh air and daylight, designing rooftop gardens in this aim
Madeleine Vionnet – “Queen of the Bias Cut”
Herbert Bayer – who designed only with lowercase letters for “compositional simplicity and purity”
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – famous for his extreme simplicity and quotes “Less is More” and “God is in the details.”
Saul Bass – an innovative graphic designer who created many famous corporate logos including those for the Girl Scouts and United Way as well as classic movie posters
Louis I. Kahn – an architect who infused “muscular poetics” in his architecture. His looked for where objects and activities needed to be. For example, in a design for the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, he wanted “searching for knowledge” to occur in the most public spaces.
Massimo Vignelli – the graphic designer behind all of the National Park Service maps and brochures we use today.
Stefan Sagmeister – a current graphic designer whose work embodies 2013 life. The main page of his website is a live feed of designers working in his design studio in New York.

This is a wonderful exhibition space with plenty of light and high ceilings.

This was originally the Branch's living room where they displayed their tapestries. — This was originally the Branch’s living room where they displayed their tapestries.

There was a lot of dense reading in this exhibit. My son’s patience was tested but he did quite well. His two favorite parts of the exhibit were the timeline graphic showing events in world history and the art world’s response (or non-response) to those events and the fireplace knobs.

My son was drawn to these fireplace knobs.

Lego model of the museum in a side exhibition about the history of the building.

We roamed the spacious back garden for a bit and then got in the car to head to a spot for lunch and afternoon touring.

The garden of the Virginia Center for Architecture.

I decided to head back to Meadow Farm to see if we could tour the Sheppard farmhouse that was closed on our prior visit. We were in luck and had a personal tour of the farmhouse, which has been painstakingly furnished to recreate the life of the Sheppard family before the Civil War.

Parlor of the Sheppard house. In summertime, the furniture would have been draped like this to keep it clean as the windows were always open to let in as much air as possible.

Bowls of water were placed under the table legs to thwart any insects crawling up the table legs during meals.

I love period bedrooms. This room was for the boys.

"Homeschooling" had a different meaning for the Sheppard family. They hired a teacher to move in! She lived here in this small bedroom off the hall. — “Homeschooling” had a different meaning for the Sheppard family. They hired a teacher to move in! She lived here in this small bedroom off the hall.

Love this detail of the crochet coverlet.

In another building there is a small exhibit space where you can watch a short film about the history of the Sheppard farm, shop in gift shop or view current exhibitions.