C&RL News, May 2009
Vol. 70, No. 5
Syracuse University Library has received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create a digital scholarly edition of the works of Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. The project, entitled “Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work, 1922–1955,” will run from May 2009 through April 2011 and culminate in the release of the Web-based edition in May 2011. Breuer began donating his papers to Syracuse University Library in 1964. Today, the Syracuse Breuer collection includes thousands of original oversized drawings and blueprints, correspondence, and photographs. Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary in 1902. At the age of 21, he went to work in the office of Walter Gropius, founder of the modernist Bauhaus School of Design. He and Gropius emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s, where they taught at Harvard University and maintained a joint architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1941, Breuer established a singular reputation for his “bi-nuclear” house, which organized physical space around new modes of day-to-day life. By the mid 1950s, Breuer had designed some 60 private residences and had begun to undertake large-scale, institutional projects like the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953), the Whitney Museum of Art in New York (1966), buildings on the campuses of New York University and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1970).
University of Massachusetts (UMass)-Amherst’s W.E.B. Du Bois Library will digitize an estimated 100,000 items from its Du Bois collection thanks to a $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation. The project will provide online access for the first time to original diaries, letters, photographs, and other material related to the journalist, social analyst and activist, and a founder of the NAACP. Once the materials are scanned and cataloged, UMass-Amherst will work with Verizon to identify documents to include in Thinkfinity.org, Verizon Foundation’s free educational Web site that provides resources to enhance teacher effectiveness and improve student achievement. Included are Du Bois’s letters to and from presidents and public figures such as Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Albert Einstein, and Mohandas Gandhi. Over his extraordinarily long life—from his birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 to his death in Ghana in 1963—Du Bois witnessed or took part in many of the most important social movements and events in United States history, from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Du Bois vigorously explored many approaches to fighting racism, including integration, separatism, cultural and political groups including communism, expatriation to Africa and more.