Gwendolyn Wright, professor of architecture at Columbia University and host of the PBS television series, “History Detectives,” will deliver the next Geske Lecture.

Wright’s lecture, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Progressive Suburbia” will be 7 p.m. Nov. 2 in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will immediately follow the lecture in Sheldon’s Great Hall.

Frank Lloyd Wright has been praised and blamed for endorsing the American suburban ideal of distinctive single-family houses in bucolic landscapes. In fact, he advocated compact residential settlements throughout his career, although only a few were even partially realized. The most innovative design was a Model Suburb on the outskirts of Chicago for a 1913 competition. He went beyond the program to propose mixed incomes (including apartments near mass transit for single men and women) and a mixed-use greensward woven through the center (including a women’s club, a kindergarten, a library and a cinema) to bring people together. This little known proposal situates him within Chicago’s progressive reform movement of the time, even as it offers precedents for contemporary architecture’s interest in landscape urbanism, community facilities, density and transit-based suburbs.

Wright

Gwendolyn Wright in 1985 became the first woman to receive tenure in Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She also holds appointments in Columbia’s departments of history and art history. She earned her master of architecture and doctoral degrees at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Norman and Jane Geske Lectureship in the History of the Arts was established in 1995 through the generosity of Norman and Jane Geske and features noted scholars in the history of the visual arts, music, theater, dance, film or architecture.

The lectures are intended to advance the understanding and appreciation of the arts with creative writing and thinking that reflect the importance of historical perspective of the arts. The invited scholar presents a public lecture open to the campus and the community, focused ideally on a single work, art form or artist that will subsequently be published and distributed to major research libraries throughout the United States.