Barry Lewis’ “live” tour of this website
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Barry Lewis is available for lectures, conferences, seminars and other types of speaking engagements.

Possible lecture topics
Past speaking engagements

U.N. Panel - Oscar Niemeyer: A Vision for the City

Barry Lewis

U.N. Panel 12-15-11 Photo by Mina Marefat

Upcoming events for the public:

The City Transformed, Part Two, Spring 2012
(Series of 8 lectures / series only available)

Wednesdays 6:30pm-8:00pm Feb 1-Mar. 28th, 2012  NO CLASS WED MAR 14th. 
Cooper Union Continuing Education

Registration for Spring 2012 Continuing Education classes began January 5th. The registration period closes January 27th.
*Students MUST enroll on time, Jan. 27th is the deadline. The Cooper Union switchboard, 1-212-353-4195, is open Mon-Fri 10:30am-5:30pm.

Cooper Union Continuing Ed enrollment

New York — its buildings, planning and growth from the 1890s to the present.  Emerging by 1900 as a world capital of one of the globe’s most important economic and political powers, New York has used successive styles every generation to re-make its skyline: the Beaux-Arts (the1890s-1920s), the Art Deco (the 1920s), the Art Moderne (the 1930s), the Mid-Century Modern (1950s-70s), the Post-Modern (1980s-90s) and finally the current Modern Movement Revival.  These styles have been more than adequate to express the city’s particular vibrancy.  We will be looking at that ever evolving phenomenon called New York thru the lens of architectural history so we can “read” the skyline images as well as the ordinary buildings that crowd our city’s streets.

For a detailed course curriculum, click on the upper left tab, Courses/Cooper Union Continuing Education.

Homes of Early New York: Birth of an American Style—Colonial and Federal Houses in New York City
Thursday, January 26th, 2011, 6:30pm
New-York Historical Society (at the Society’s home, 170 Central Park West at West 77th Street)

New York and its environs have a surprising collection of houses from the Colonial period through the era of the early Republic. Looking at homes as diverse as the Dutch and Georgian Wyckoff in Brooklyn and the Greek Revival Bartow-Pell in the Bronx we will see both the evolution of early American home design and why these earlier eras, in their Yankee simplicity, served as templates for the modernisms of our own time.

The Music Halls of 6th Avenuen
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 6pm New York School of Interior Design, 170 East 70th Street, New York, NY T/ 212.472.1500

Midtown Sixth Avenue between 1900 and the 1950s played a brief role as New York City’s boulevard of music halls. It began with the short-lived 1853 Crystal Palace, America’s first world’s fair, on the site of today’s Bryant Park. By the 1900s the 4,000 seat Hippodrome opened at 43rd Street with its wondrous mechanical stage, by 1927 the Ziegfeld Theater went up at 54th Street as extravagant as the Follies themselves, and in 1933 2 music halls opened as part of the Rockefeller Center complex, the now-demolished Center at 49th Street and the landmark Radio City Music Hall at 50th. By the 1950s most were gone and by the 1970s the Music Hall was almost lost as well. Today Radio City Music Hall remains to remind us what it was like before text messaging and YouTube, when we gathered in public places and enjoyed en masse popular entertainments presented in fantastical architectural venues.

This lecture is free and open to the public but reservations are needed.  Email rsvp@nysid.edu or call NYSID at 1.212.472.1500 X 405.  NYSID events are listed at is http://www.nysid.edu/publicprograms.

Greenwich Village: The First Bohemia
Thursday, May 10th, 2012 6:30pm
New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at West 77th Street

Bohemians, that is, struggling artists, first became noticed in New York in the 1850s thanks to Walt Whitman and his rowdy crowd meeting at Phaff’s on Broadway. But Bohemia finally earned its own zipcode in the 1910s when the avant-garde generation including John Sloan and Edna St. Vincent-Millay re-christened the area around Washington Square as “Greenwich Village”. Their re-naming of a down-at-the-heels slum with an artsy sobriquet still influences us today. We will see what they accomplished and what happened to the neighborhood they transformed; and how the “Village” inevitably gentrified—not in 2011 but by 1922, bringing a chorus of “naysayers” that its Bohemian days were forever over.

Prohibition New York: Art Deco of the 1920s
Thursday, May 24th, 2012 6:30pm
New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at West 77th Street

Art Deco was the signature style of the boom times we call the Jazz Age.  In New York, it coincided with Prohibition, the automobile, the movie palace and the coming of age of the skyscraper.  All these phenomena represented a new society that was breaking down Victorian mores and literally kicking up its heels.  Art Deco, with its name rooted in Paris but its thrill of the skyscraper rooted in Berlin, was the perfect expression of a society where alcohol was forbidden but the automobile could set you free.  It all came to sudden halt on that horrific day in 1929 when the stock market crashed.  By 1932 Art Deco looked to Depression weary New Yorkers like a hangover from New Year's Eve.  Join us to see New York's first self-conscious embrace of the "new"-- the last time "modernism" had fun.