Current Exhibitions

Dewey Thorbeck Travel Sketches: An Architect's Recordings of Natural and Human Landscapes

September 25-December 27, 2009

Dewey Thorbeck, of the award-winning firm Thorbeck Architects Ltd, is the founder and program director for the University of Minnesota's Center for Rural Design, partially funded by the State Legislature and sponsored by the College of Design, the College of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resource Sciences.

Early in his career, Thorbeck received the Rome Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome and travelled extensively throughout Italy and Europe. Since then he has travelled all over the world - including the village of Machu Picchu in Peru, the Lofoten Islands of Norway, Shanghai in China, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico - to sketch places that he finds have a strong and close integration of architecture and landscape. He states that, "To me the most beautiful places in the world are those that express this connection in a profoundly human way."

Thorbeck's sketches brightly, sweetly, and energetically tell stories about places, people, and culture. They are windows to the world that invite visual exploration of how people live in their environs. Currently at work on a book, Architect's Travel Sketches: A visual review of human and natural landscapes, Thorbeck will illustrate his views of the world as an architect, teacher and researcher.

Sponsored by Norway House, College of Design, and University of Minnesota Libraries