|
 |
| About Our Building |
|
Architecture and History of the Allen Memorial Art Museum
 |
 |
The buildings that house the Allen Memorial Art Museum's collection and the college art department are no less engaging than the works of art within them. The complex of buildings designed by Cass Gilbert in 1917 represents an eclectic dialogue between Tuscan Renaissance and Midwestern vernacular architectural styles. The 1977 addition designed by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates comments, with both respect and irony, on that dialogue, and poses an early critique of the orthodox modernist architecture of its day.
|
|
|
Architectural styles ranging from neoclassical to Gothic served as models for Cass Gilbert's building programs. In his plans for the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Gilbert employed the vocabulary of Tuscan Renaissance architecture to evoke European art of the past in an inspirational and instructive structure for his Oberlin contemporaries.
|
|
|
The addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Associates is one of the earliest and finest examples of postmodern architecture in the United States. In its complex dialogue with the Gilbert building and its innovative use of ornamentation, this building was pivotal in the new appreciation of architectural context and symbol that developed during the 1970s and '80s.
|
|
|
|
