ICAM19: Adventures in Copenhagen

icam or the International Confederation of Architecture Museums, is an organization of architectural museums, centres, and collections, dedicated to fostering links between all those interested in promoting a better understanding of architecture. I was lucky enough to apply and receive a scholarship to attend their conference in September of 2019 in Copenhagen, hosted by the Danish Architecture Center in their new home designed by OMA call BLOX. Taking as its theme 'Migrating Ideas" the conference invited its participants to connect with their peers.

The Conference

Attending icam19 provided me with the opportunity to meet curators and archivists from all over the world giving me the chance to discuss acquisition policies, born-digital architectural records, fundraising strategies, exhibition ideas/approaches, and learn first-hand about Danish architecture and design. It was an incredible professional conference experience, that is incomparable.

The unique format of icam, enables you to get to know new colleagues over a relatively short period, which allowed me to develop and widen my professional network of consummate professionals from a variety of institutions: museums, centers, archives, collections, libraries, and educational institutions; connections that have already led to subject specialty knowledge exchange.

Sites visited

Aside from connecting with my peers during the formal conference, I was given the opportunity to visit sites and buildings that were incredible - here are some of the places I visited while in Denmark:

• Firm Visit: Henning Larsen

• Danish National Arts Library

• Grundtvigs Kirke(Kaare Klint, 1940)

• Bagsværd Church (Jorn Utzon, 1976)

• Boat Tour (Past, Present, and Future of the Harbor)

• Skovshoved Petrol Station (Arne Jacobsen, 1938)

• Bellevue Theater (Arne Jacobsen, 1954)

• Henningsen Residence (Poul Henningsen, 1937)

• Munkegårdsskolen (Arne Jacobsen, 1957)

Louis Smaus- New Addition to the EDA!

In January of 2018, the EDA was delighted to receive a donation of the work of landscape architect Louis Smaus, who practiced in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area from the early 1910s until his retirement in the 1950s. Smaus attended horticultural school near Hamburg, Germany where he began his career working as a landscape gardener at Paul Hauber Baumschulen. Smaus emigrated to the U.S. at age nineteen and found work, with a large firm in New York, as a landscape gardener of private and commercial grounds.

In 1910, Smaus moved to California where he worked at Stanford University and had charge of the Lathrop grounds. Following this Smaus became an employee of A.B. Spreckels, sugar magnate, and maintained the Spreckels estate in Napa, CA. In the late teens he joined the MacRorie-McLaren Company in San Mateo, CA who worked with major clients such as Mrs. Henry Allen and Andrew Welch and provided a majority of the plants for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Smaus went into business for himself as a Landscape Engineer in 1931, working on Milton Haas estate in Los Altos, the Lachman estate, among others, retiring in the early 1950s.

The collection contains drawings and photographs from Smaus’s time working with the MacRorie-McLaren Company circa 1915-1922. See below from some examples of the projects during this time: