Source: Larry Bowne, 785-532-1174, lbowne@k-state.edu
News release prepared by: Diane Potts, 785-532-1090, potts@k-state.edu
Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007
COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE, PLANNING AND DESIGN OPENS 'TOP HATS' EXHIBITION IN K-STATE'S CHANG GALLERY
MANHATTAN -- The College of Architecture, Planning and Design exhibition "Top Hats" is now available through Friday, Jan. 11, 2008, in Seaton Hall's Chang Gallery at Kansas State University.
The free exhibition is open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is funded in part by the K-State student fine arts fee.
An installation of small-scale color photographs mounted on temporary partitions and the gallery walls, "Top Hats" looks at a seemingly banal feature of the Manhattan landscape: the three-story walk-up apartment building. In their sites and context, the apartment buildings stand out. These triple-decker rental buildings are interspersed in a community of owner-occupied homes. The apartment buildings, built from the 1960s through the 1980s, are in neighborhoods that achieved their abiding character decades earlier and can contrast sharply with their neighbors.
The apartment buildings in the "Top Hats" exhibition are ringed by a mock Mansard roof. The roof dominates the type and is its most distinguishing feature. It covers nearly half of the vertical gallery wall surface and often projects from the plane of the wall several feet. The Mansard itself, popularized by the French architect Francois Mansart, first emerged in 17th-century Paris as a device to lower property taxes. In the exhibition, the roof serves to give the modest structures a false appearance while at the same time appealing to the social aspirations of their builders and their occupants.
Larry Bowne, assistant professor of architecture at K-State, has provided explanatory text for the exhibition. An image of an iconic French mansard chateau is part of the exhibition, as well as variations of the song "Mansard Roof" by the Vampire Weekend.
"Top Hats" emerged as an exhibition out of a spring 2007 seminar at K-State, "Some Manhattan Apartments," which addressed similar themes. The exhibition was designed, prepared and installed by K-State architecture students B. Elvis Achelpohl, Kansas City, Mo., and Michael Friebele, St. Peters, Mo., under the direction of Bowne.