September 12, 2011
Phoenix architect Wendell Burnette to lecture on campus today
Wendell Burnette, American Institute of Architects member and principal of Wendell Burnette Architects in Phoenix, 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, Tenn., 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. 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.