Collection Dialogues: The Addison’s Architectural Legacy

On May 18th, Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950, presented The Addison’s Architectural Legacy, the first in a series of three Collection Dialogues. Beginning with a discussion of the architecture and landscape planning of the Addison’s architect Charles Platt, who was also responsible for the sweeping redesign of the Phillips Academy campus from 1923-1932, Susan led us through the design decisions for the Addison’s expansion and restoration by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, completed in 2009. Her presentation concluded with a discussion of the current roof project by Robert Olson and Associates.

Along with drawings by the architects involved in the Addison’s restoration and expansion and the roof project, Susan presented oil paintings from the Addison collection by Platt, including Cornish Garden (A Garden in Snow), shown above, which reveals Platt’s continuing interest in the relationship between landscape and architecture. Photographs taken by Platt during visits to Italy shed light on the design aesthetic of the classically-inspired architect whose vision shaped not only the Addison and the Andover campus, but the Freer Gallery of Art, the Lyman Allen Museum, the campuses of the University of Illinois, Rochester, and Dartmouth, and numerous notable homes and villas.

We hope you’ll join us for our two upcoming Collection Dialogues:

Wednesday 1 June 6:30 pm
Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries
with Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Art After 1950 and of Photography
A “beneath-the-surface” examination of the intriguing and complicated conservation challenges facing curators, using examples from the Addison collection such as paintings by Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, watercolors by Winslow Homer, and albums by John LaFarge and Peter Sekaer

Thursday 16 June 3:00 pm
American and British Silver
with Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director
Be among the first to see a newly acquired teapot that belonged to Phillips Academy founders Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips and Samuel Phillips, Jr., along with other examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century silver

For more information, please visit our website.