In 2010, I interviewed Barry Bergdoll in relation to my work educating the public about Marcel Breuer, which had become a necessary aspect to the preservation effort to save Breuer's final building, The Atlanta-Fulton Central Public Library, from demolition. I had been leading that effort for a number of years, and along the way Bergdoll and many others signed the petition I drafted on behalf of the building and its terraced plaza and monumental sculpture by Richard Hunt, entitled The Wisdom Bridge. At the time, Bergdoll was (is) a professor at Columbia University, and he also held the title of Chief Curator of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. What follows below is a video from a lecture Bergdoll gave in 2015 at Harvard University, entitled "Learning from the Americas: Gropius and Breuer in the New World." For those who may be unaware, Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus, and Breuer was one of his star students, and subsequent partner on numerous collaborations in Europe and the United States. Also, they both taught at Harvard in the years after the closing of the Bauhaus - before, during and after the end of World War II.
