We are so pleased to announce BGC professor and alumni (MA ‘04) Freyja Hartzell on being selected for 2022 Grants to Individuals from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts!

Hartzell is among the 56 new grant recipients this year, awarded to individuals exploring ideas across disciplines that expand contemporary understandings of architecture, including established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, and writers.

Hartzell’s book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, reveals the humble, ordinary objects of the influential modernist architect Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) as extraordinarily powerful things that not only shaped the modern built environment, but changed the fate of German modernity. The first book on Riemerschmid in English, this innovative study reveals the social, cultural, and political import of Riemerschmid’s arresting designs for household objects, furniture, fashion, and interiors, positioning these “extra-ordinary” things as pivotal to his conception of domestic architecture, and his understanding of the modern world from the 1890s to the Second World War. Riemerschmid’s dynamically designed objects invite the reader to experience a radically and rapidly changing Germany from their unique perspective, as they engage—on direct, material terms—with its tumultuous cultural politics. This book uncovers a new, yet materially grounded history of modernism—one that was there all along, but told now, and for the first time, by modernist things, themselves. It argues for the seminal status of Riemerschmid’s “extra-ordinary” objects in the development of modern architecture, and for their capacity to revolutionize our understanding of its history today.