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K-State Today

September 12, 2011

Phoenix architect Wendell Burnette to lecture on campus today

Submitted by Emily Vietti

Wendell Burnette

Wendell Burnette, American Institute of Architects member and principal of Wendell Burnette Architects in Phoenix, is giving a lecture titled “Crafting Space” at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 12, at the Leadership Studies Building Town Hall on the Kansas State University campus. The lecture is free, and the public is welcome.

Burnette, who is also the College of Architecture, Planning & Design’s Regnier Visiting Chair for 2011-12, is a self-taught architect with an internationally recognized body of work. His architectural practice is engaged in a wide range of private and public projects. Burnette’s work is concerned with space, light, context and community. He is a native of Nashville, Tenn., who discovered the southwest desert as an apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.

His eleven-year association with the studio of Will Bruder culminated in a six-year design collaboration on the Phoenix Central Library. Current projects include residences both in Phoenix and around the country, the Palo Verde Library/Maryvale Community Center, the Phoenix Children’s Museum, the Scottsdale Teen Center and a hotel/spa resort in southern Utah. His design philosophy is grounded in listening and distilling the essence of a project to create highly specific architecture that is at once functional and poetic.

Wendell Burnette’s approach toward architecture stems from his extensive travels and self-investigation through Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In the United States, specifically the American deserts, he has absorbed a unique, regional understanding of place.