While it is necessary for buildings to house and shelter the programs that define them, architecture is significant when it ennobles those institutions through intellectual and emotional engagement with the people who occupy it. Buildings can give measure to one's place in the world; they provide insight and perspective. The Poetry Foundation is such a building. Accordingly, Centerline 9: The Poetry Foundation seeks to give the reader a palpable sense of the feeling of the place. With an emphasis on the physical and the phenomenal, the myriad images, drawings, sketches, and texts presented here are an attempt to give the reader access to those qualities there that are so compelling and worthwhile, and to set out a thesis that architecture is fundamentally about the built, physical artifact in relation to the broad conditions of its setting, program, and inhabitation.
ISBN: 978-0-934951-22-7
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Modern Legacy, by Kevin Alter
The Building of the Poetry Foundation—How The Building Came To Be, by John Barr
The Poetry Foundation
No Strings Attached, by John Ronan
Screen
Garden
The Poetry Foundation, Chicago: The Right Angle, by Wilfried Wang
Envelope
Interior
Elucidation and the City, by Raymund Ryan
EDITORS
Kevin Alter
Wilfried Wang
MANAGING EDITOR
Leora Visotzky
