The Domains of Sleep

January 26, 2005 (Wednesday) / 5:00 pm

B1 Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street

The Domains of Sleep

Sleep Space as a Blueprint for Understanding Architectural Modernism

Louise Braverman

Architect

Whether college dorm room, outdoor hammock, all-weather papoose, or lunar space capsule, the settings in which we sleep are an index of the prevailing architectural culture. New York architect Louise Braverman examines sleep environments in the 20th century to explore changing ideas of what it means to be architecturally modern.

Ms. Braverman is winner of three awards—AIA New York State, AIA National Housing Award, and BSA/AIA New York Chapter Housing Award—for her groundbreaking design of Chelsea Court, a low-income housing project in New York City. She also was one of 18 architects selected to be in the exhibition Affordable Housing: Designing an American Asset at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., which ran from February 28–August 8, 2004.

Louise Braverman's awards extend well beyond her recent honors for Chesea Court. In 1997, she received the I.D. Annual Design Review, "Best of Category Award" in the Environment Category, for Maps + Movies at Grand Central Terminal, New York City.

Other honors for Ms. Braverman include: Emerging Voices, The Architectural League, NYC, 1996; Auction of “Red Ribbon House,” Sotheby’s, NYC, Architects for ARF, 1996; AIA Long Island Chapter Award for Design Excellence, 1994, for House at Ninevah Beach; and The Museum of the City of New York Topic Files, "Rebuilding a Haven", The New York Times Home Section, May 12, 1994, for House at Ninevah Beach.

What caught our literary eye was her 1993 New York State Council of the Arts Funding Award for Design for Poets House in SoHo, where her placement of poems and other fragments of verse on walls celebrates Braverman's belief that, "The movement of words across a plane is like a human body moving through space."