Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Working since the age of 16, Swiss architect Mario Botta (b. 1943) has become a prolific and well known crafter of space, designing a huge array of places of worship, private homes, and museums, perhaps most notably the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Church of San Giovanni Battista in Mogno, Switzerland. His use of traditional masonry over the streamlined steel and glass of so much modern architecture creates strong, self-confident buildings that pull together the contrast between the weight of his materials and lightness of his designs.

Studying architecture in the Italian cities of Milan and Venice, Botta began his professional career working under giants of Modernism such as Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier himself, whose religious buildings at Ronchamp, among others, influenced the goals of Botta.

Botta is perhaps most well known for his museums -- attracting international attention for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s. Museums are perfectly suited to Botta's geometrically pure, counter-intuitively light style of design and his ability to draw on the deep classical traditions that ran through Western architecture -- honed after nearly 50 years of continuous work that shows little sign of slowing, with his projects in more recent years including the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte.

As such, his reputation as an architect of traditional materials is impressive, something only helped by his keen ability to recognize and incorporate vernacular styles of the area into his work, while still keeping the building recognizably distinct. He has worked on projects across the world, from Tel Aviv to San Francisco, and most recently has expanded into Asia.

Loie Fuller

Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller

Loïe Fuller was a visionary artist who crafted a novel genre of performance, one that combined billowing costumes with dazzling lights and projections to conjure transformative imagery of hypnotic beauty. 

Born Marie Louise Fuller 1862 in Fullersburg, Illinois, she embarked on an early theatrical career as an actress and singer in vaudeville, stock companies, and burlesque before developing the dance style that made her famous in the early 1890s. 

Through experiments with silk drapery and colored lights, she evolved her first Serpentine Dance. Thereafter, the genre became known as "serpentine dancing" and was widely imitated. Fuller was heralded as a technological wizardress for her many stagecraft innovations, which included: doing away with scenic elements and plunging the theater into total darkness; harnessing a revolving disc of colored gels to shine ever-shifting multi-hued patterns on her swirling skirts; projecting images (such as photographs of the moon's surface) onto her garments; lighting the stage from below, as in her famous Fire Dance to create the illusion of being ringed by flames; and choreographing shadows and silhouettes. 

Fuller's 1892 debut at the Folies Bergère in Paris catapulted her into international celebrity. Her performances enraptured the fin de siècle artists, poets and intellectuals. She was depicted by artists in many media and became influential in such movements as Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Cubism, and Futurism. Fuller's serpentine dancing lies at the origin of Modern dance. 

Although they later became rivals, Fuller helped the career of a young Isadora Duncan. Ruth St. Denis was an admirer of Fuller and choreographed works in homage. At the turn of the 20th century, Fuller brought dance to the cutting edge of Modernity, and her energy and ambition made her one of the most influential American women of her era. 

Fuller died in Paris, France, on January 2, 1928.

Your Vision Will Become Clear

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy 
1897; oil on canvas

Pablo Picasso, Meditation (Contemplation), (late 1904), watercolor and ink on paper