Anthony M. Alofsin, AIA, Ph.D.

Anthony Alofsin is a writer, architect, artist, art historian, and professor.  He publishes essays internationally and has written several books. His book reviews and essays appear in the Times Literary Supplement and The New Criterion. His recent book When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867-1933 (2006; paperback, ed, 2008; German edition, 2011) won the Vasari Award from the Dallas Museum of Art;  He has written The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture and City Planning at Harvard. His pioneering study, Frank Lloyd Wright: the Lost Years, 1910-1922, is acknowledged to be one of the most important books on Wright in the last forty years; the book was a winner in the monograph category in the American Institute of Architects International Book Awards. Dr. Alofsin's other publications include the five-volume reference work, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence, which also won the Vasari Award of the Dallas Museum of Art. He is editor of The East Building in Perspective (in press, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower; and  Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond. He has written a new introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, which appeared in English, German, and Italian editions, and the introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fifty Views of Japan: The 1905 Photograph Album.

Dr. Alofsin’s first work of fiction, Halflife, a novella, was published by InnerformsLtd.com in January, 2009.  He has also curated and planned numerous exhibitions. From 1992-1996 he originated and directed the research project "A Tense Alliance: Architecture in the Habsburg Lands, 1893-1928," an international collaboration among scholars in North America and Central Europe who conducted original field research on modernism and nationalism throughout the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.  He was consulting curator for the major retrospective Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He curated Prairie Skyscraper on Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and Wright's Wasmuth Folios: Representing the Ideal at the Ross Gallery, Columbia University.

He lectures nationally and internationally on modern architecture.  He is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and as an expert on modern architecture.  In 2006, Dr. Alofsin received the Wright Spirit Award from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. The award honors an individual who, through artistic, architectural, scholarly, professional or other endeavors embodies the Spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright. The highest honor given by the Conservancy, it comes in recognition Dr. Alofsin’s significant contributions to the study of Frank Lloyd Wright as a scholar, educator, author and curator, and his work Frank Lloyd Wright: An Index to the Taliesin Correspondence, which has created an invaluable reference tool for Wright scholars and researchers the world over.

A registered architect, Dr. Alofsin maintains an architectural practice in Austin, Texas. His buildings have been extensively published, and his Model Condominium was exhibited on the 2008 annual AIA Homes Tour in Austin. The scope of his work includes projects for private clients in Texas, New Mexico, and New York.

Positions, education, and honors

Teaching:

  • Roland Gommel Roessner Centennial Professor in Architecture
  • Professor of Art and Art History
  • University of Texas at Austin

Education:

  • Columbia University, Ph.D., Art History and Archeology, 1987
  • Columbia University, M.Phil.,1983
  • Harvard Graduate School of Design, M.Arch., 1981
  • Harvard College, B.A., Magna cum Laude with Highest Honors, , 1971
  • Phillips Academy, Andover, 1963-1967

Selected honors:

  • Whiteley Center Scholar, Friday Harbor, Washington.
  • Fellow, Bolgiasco Foundation, Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities.
  • Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Galley of Art, Washington, D.C.
  • Fellow, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire.
  • Fellow, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna.
  • Visiting Scholar/Artist at the American Academy at Rome.
  • Visiting Scholar, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
  • Visiting Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
  • Fulbright Scholar, the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Anthony Alofsin, Ph.D., AIA

Award-winning artist and architect, author and art historian, Anthony Alofsin is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and as an expert on modern architecture.

Architecture

Latest Fiction

Halflife is a fictive memoir, hovering between fiction and biography. Recalling the measure of decay that describes how radioactive isotopes die even as they live, a young man who, in his search for love and meaning, discovers loss and hopelessness as atoms in the same physical universe.  From the perspective of age 35, which he assumes is the mid-point in his own life, the narrator reflects on the friends, women, neighbors, places, plants, and animals he has encountered.

His journey has taken him to the mountains of New Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the urban heart of San Francisco, a contemplative family island retreat in Rhode Island, the rotting and mysterious Villa Trice in Austin, with a final look back at a childhood in Memphis.This book gives us the exuberance and creativity of youth and love yet it adds with unusual honesty the sense that experience does not simply exist in the present, but carries at the same time the weight of its past and the foreshadowing of its future, that the fullness of life contains many opposite particles.

"...a pure pleasure... written with such delicacy, such a lightness of touch. I could not have enjoyed it more."

- Anne Engel

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Latest book: Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector

  

            In Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector, Anthony Alofsin presents the first catalogue raisonné of the thirty-two prints and one original drawing that constitute Wright’s Secessionist print collection.  Alofsin explores Wright’s encounters with German and Austrian art before his travels to Europe; the fluid definition of modern art around 1909; and the complex context for Wright’s acquiring his collection while in Europe. This book, with its original research, puts into a new light a range of artists, some famous, others unknown, who sought to express, like Wright, their own rebellion against academic traditions.

 

            A unique contribution to the history of modern art, Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Collector offers stunningly original insights into the master’s artistic taste, as well as to a group of progressive artists whose work has been undeservedly overlooked in conventional histories of modernism.

 

Order your copy at University of Texas Press http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/alofra.html