Meredith Clausen

A productive scholar and teacher of architectural history, Meredith Clausen Hon. AIA Seattle (BA Scripps College; MA & PhD, University of California Berkeley) draws public and professional attention to the work of architects, with a focus on Northwest Modernism.

In 1984, her study of Seattle’s Northgate shopping center -- when it opened in 1960, America’s first regional mall, designed by John Graham Sr. -- acquainted professional and public audiences with an important moment in the history of American architecture and urbanism.

Since 1979, she has taught at the University of Washington in architecture and art history, where her teaching and mentorship have informed and helped launch the careers of hundreds of architects, architecture historians, and design professionals. Meredith engages students and colleagues in architectural appreciation through her studies of the work of Pietro Belluschi FAIA, Frank Gehry FAIA, Michael Graves FAIA, and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, among others -- documented in books and numerous articles published beginning in the 1980s and continuing with works currently in progress and in press, including

* The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream (MIT Press, 2004)
* "Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle," Bauwelt November 2000
* Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect (MIT Press 1994; 1999 paperback edition)
* Spiritual Space: The Religious Architecture of Pietro Belluschi (1992)

She sees her work geared more to architectural practice than to academia. Focusing less on theory and more on the challenges architects face and how they fare, her work began with her PhD at UC-Berkeley, addressing the design of the first major steel-frame building in Paris, the turn-of-the-century Samaritaine department store. More recently she has published articles assessing the work of Michael Graves, with a critical analysis of the Portland Building.

References:
*Clausen c.v.
*Click here for her books