Laurie Olin, RLA, FASLA, is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. Olin studied civil engineering at the University of Alaska and pursued architecture at the University of Washington, where Richard Haag encouraged him to focus on landscape. His involvement often marks the signature of OLIN’s distinguished portfolio of projects, which spans the history of the studio from Bryant Park in New York City to the Brancusi Ensemble in Romania.

Deborah Berke, FAIA, LEED AP, creates buildings that have presence and character — that rely on a discourse between a subtle hand and bold composition to become arresting architecture. Berke is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A., 1975; B. Architecture, 1977), The City University of New York (M. Urban Planning in Urban Design, 1984), and in 2005 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, her alma mater.

Suzanne Stephens, a deputy editor of Architectural Record, has been a writer, editor, and critic in the field of architecture for several decades. She has Ph.D. in architectural history from Cornell University, and teaches a seminar in the history of architectural criticism in the architecture program of Barnard and Columbia colleges.

Bradley C. Brooks is director of historic resources and assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Previously, he served as director of the McFaddin-Ward House in Beaumont, Texas, and as curator, then museum director at the Moody Mansion and Museum in Galveston, Texas. He received a B. A. in communication arts from Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and an M. A. in early American culture from the Winterthur Program of the University of Delaware. The Miller House and Garden marks his first foray into modernism.

Lincoln Schatz's generative portraits of nineteen leading American innovators, known collectively as "Esquire's Portrait of the Twenty-First Century," were created in 2008 on commission from the magazine. The portraits are on view at the National Portrait Gallery, as part of the "Americans Now" exhibition, August 20, 2010 -- July 10, 2011.

John Waters, John Summers, Alex de Renzy's wife Kathryn Reed, and other seminal figures of the sexual counterculture discuss San Francisco's Tenderloin district and the birth of smut in America. Smut Capital of America is the title of Michael Stabile's in-progress documentary which chronicles San Francisco's reign as the center of porn production in the U.S. during the early 70s. In 1969, San Francisco became the first city in the U.S.

June 29 2011
Painters of the Venetian Renaissance are best known for their monumental altarpieces, narrative and mythological canvases, and intimate works for private devotion. Many of the same masters engaged in the ornamental arts as well, painting panels for integration into beds, chests, musical instruments, and doors. Susannah Rutherglen describes this less familiar genre, traces the fortunes of surviving artifacts, and discusses their themes, styles, and relevance to the history of Italian Renaissance art.

With Pure Views—a special installation by some of China's most world-renowned contemporary artists (on view April 19-21) as the focal point for the evening, four of the featured artists (Hong Lei, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Zhou Chunya), along with critic Liu Chun and curator Lu Peng—will gather in a lively panel discussion about art in China today.