Phoenix Architect Wendell Burnette to Lecture at APDesign

News release prepared by: Emily Vietti, 785-532-1090, evietti@k-state.edu

Sunday, September 11, 2011

PHOENIX ARCHITECT WENDELL BURNETTE TO LECTURE AT APDESIGN

MANHATTAN - Wendell Burnette, AIA, Principal of Wendell Burnette Architects in Phoenix, Arizona, 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, Tennessee, 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. He is an assistant professor at Arizona State University and lectures widely in the United States and abroad. 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.

The work of the Wendell Burnette Architects has been presented in the United States and abroad and has received local and national awards including a 1990 Young Architects Award from Progressive Architecture magazine, a 1999 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, a 1999 P/A Design Award, three Record House Awards in 1996, 2000, and 2006, and a 2007 National AIA Honor Award for the Palo Verde Library/Maryvale Community Center.

For any questions about the lecture, please contact Emily Vietti at (785) 532-1090 or evietti@k-state.edu.