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Gwendolyn Wright

Portrait of Gwendolyn   Wright

Gwendolyn Wright (b. 1946, Chicago, USA) is an architectural historian and author, a professor of architecture and art history at Columbia University since 1983, and one of the hosts of the PBS television series History Detectives. Although she specializes in US architectural history and urban history from after the Civil War to the present, she also studies the exchange across national boundaries of architectural styles, influences, and techniques, in particular in colonial and neo-colonial contexts, and has written about the status of art preservation in French Indochina.

After studying at New York University, with a BA in history and art history in 1969, Gwendolyn Wright received her PhD in Architecture in 1978 from University of California at Berkeley. Her first published book in 1980 dealt with domestic architecture and cultural conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913. In 1985, she was the first woman to enter the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Gwendolyn Wright and her husband, anthropologist Paul Rabinow, spent several years in France under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the emergence of modern urbanism. In 1996, she presented the symposium "Studies in the The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology" in the review History of Art (Vol. 47, Symposium Papers XXVII), contributing the study "National Culture Under Colonial Auspices: The École Francaise d'Extreme Orient".

Publications

  • Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913. 1980 (1985 paperback) University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-90835-9.
  • Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. 1981 (1983 paperback). New York: Pantheon (MIT Press paperback). ISBN 978-0-394-50371-4 (9780262730648 paperback).
  • The History of History in American Schools of Architecture, 1865-1975. (edited with Janet Parks) 1990 (1996 paperback). New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-878271-02-0.
  • The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. 1991. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-90848-9.
  • The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology. 1995. CASVA/National Gallery of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-07718-6.
  • "National Culture Under Colonial Auspices: The École Francaise d'Extreme Orient". 1996. Symposium "Studies in the The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology", History of Art, Vol. 47, Symposium Papers XXVII.
  • "The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology", ibid., 1996.
  • USA: Modern Architectures in History. 2008. Reaktion Press/University of Chicago. ISBN 978-1-86189-344-4.