Architecture Faculty Lecture: Eric Mumford

Eric Paul Mumford, PhD, is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also holds appointments in the departments of History and Art History & Archaeology. He is a licensed architect and has published numerous books and articles on the history and theory of modern architecture and urbanism, including The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (MIT Press, 2000); Modern Architecture in St. Louis (Washington University, 2004); Defining Urban Design: CIAM architects and the formation of a discipline, 1937-69 (Yale University Press, 2009), The Missouri Botanical Garden Climatron: A Celebration of 50 Years (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 2009), and a textbook, Designing the modern city: urbanism since 1850 (Yale University Press, 2018), and other works. He also has given many invited lectures nationally and internationally, most recently at the Itau Cultural Foundation, São Paulo, Brazil in March 2020, and at the St Louis Public Library in spring 2019.

Mumford’s academic work is focused on the history of architectural design within its many metropolitan environmental contexts since the 1920s. In addition to his teaching and service activities, which included being a member of the Washington University Provost Search Committee in 2019, he is currently the curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum exhibition Utopian Visions: modern art, architecture, and social change in St. Louis, 1940-74, scheduled for fall 2024. He also received a 2020 Sam Fox School Creative Activity Research Grant, with assistant professor of architecture Shantel Blakely, for the book, The Charles E. Fleming House, forthcoming from MIT Press. He is he editor of the forthcoming Wrightwood 659 museum catalogue Ando and Le Corbusier, supported by the Alphawood Foundation, Chicago

Josep Lluís Sert (1902–1983) was a Barcelona architect and leader of the Spanish CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture) group, where he strongly supported the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. After fleeing Fascist Spain in 1939, he moved to New York, Sert designed many urban plans for various Latin American cities from 1944-58, most of them unbuilt. He was also appointed Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1953 to 1969, where he introduced the discipline of urban design to the curriculum, which then had global impact. Beginning in the late 1950s, his firm Sert, Jackson designed major campus buildings in the Boston metro area and near Toronto, Canada, as well as many other works, such as the Eastgate housing on Roosevelt Island in New York City (1970).