The University Art Museums is establishing a Department of Architecture and Design in collaboration with the Graduate School of Design. Noted architect and contemporary art collector Graham Gund has provided a $1 million gift to support architecture exhibitions at Harvard and enable the creation of the new curatorial department at the Art Museums.

Brooke Hodge, director of lectures, exhibitions, and academic publications at the Design School, has been named to lead the new department. As adjunct curator of architecture and design, a newly created position at the Art Museums, Hodge will oversee programming and exhibition collaborations between the Art Museums and the Design School.

The Department of Architecture and Design builds on previous collaborations between the Harvard University Art Museums and the Design School, such as a 1998 exhibition highlighting the Villa Planchart by Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Future collaborations include an exhibition on European architecture in 1000 C.E., which will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum in fall 2000; an exhibition on "Windshield," a 1937 international style house by Richard Neutra, the only Neutra house on the east coast of the United States (Fischers Island, N.Y.); and an exhibition on the influence of Le Corbusier on Japanese architecture of the prewar and immediate postwar years (co-organized with the Kamakura Museum in Japan and designed by Junzo Sakakura, an important follower of Le Corbusier.)

The new department will draw on the scholarship, collections, and archives of the University Art Museums and the Design School to develop collaborative programs and exhibitions. Together, the extensive holdings of the Art Museums and the Design School include original drawings and plans, architectural models, design objects, faculty and student projects, and archives of distinguished faculty and practitioners including Josep Lluis Sert; Marcel Breuer; Walter Gropius, who in 1969 donated to the Busch-Reisinger Museum more than three thousand prints, drawings, and photographs documenting his architectural work from 1906 to 1946; and Le Corbusier, whose only two buildings in this hemisphere, the Curutchet House in Buenos Aires and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, are uniquely documented in the Design School’s special collections.

"As a teaching and research institution, this collaboration gives the Harvard Art Museums an unprecedented resource in architecture and design – an area that is growing rapidly in the art museum community," says James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. "The new venture allows us to draw upon the collections and scholarly strengths of the Art Museums and the Design School to support our exhibitions as well as our teaching, research, conservation, and professional practices programs."

Adds Peter Rowe, Dean of the Harvard Design School: "Our exhibition program has been an important dimension of the Harvard Design School for students, faculty, design professionals, and the public. By joining forces with the Art Museums, that program is being raised to a new level at a time when more and more art museums are recognizing architecture and design as essential components of their mission."

The $1 million gift from Graham Gund will be used by the University Art Museums and the Design School to establish the Graham Gund Exhibition Fund, which will support a wide range of architecture and design exhibitions to be presented at both institutions. The gift comes from one of the country’s foremost collectors of contemporary art and president of Graham Gund Architects, an architecture firm of national renown. Deeply committed to the arts, Mr. Gund holds many leadership roles including trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has served as a member of the visiting committees of both the Harvard Design School and the Harvard University Art Museums. The Gund family have been longtime supporters of the Harvard Design School; major gifts toward the creation of George Gund Hall – which opened in 1972 and houses the Design School – came from the George Gund Foundation and the Gund family.