Email
samson@wpi.edu
Office
Salisbury Labs 014
Phone
+1 (508) 8315000 x5370
Education
BS University of Chicago 1980
PhD Harvard University, 1988
Professor Samson teaches art history, and his scholarship is in the history of architecture, especially the modern period. He studies and explains the moments of transition when styles change, and the spread of avant-garde creations into general currency. He is also interested in the history of industrial design, and enjoys introducing his students to it, revealing the complex background of forms and ideas behind common household objects. His architectural history courses explore both the left- and right-brain aspects of built form. Expression and function are intimately intertwined in all the visual arts, and Professor Samson demonstrates in his courses that expression is as important as function--in some cases, more so.
Research Interests
History of Modern Architecture
Architectural Theory
Scholarly Work
"Charles Eliot Norton." In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Supplement: The American Renaissance in New England, Third Series, ed. Wesley Mott (Dearborn: The Gale Group, 2001)
"Philip Johnson" and "Paul Rudolph." In The Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures, ed. George Haggerty (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000)
"Aesthetics of Landscape." In The Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, ed. Wesley Mott (Greenwood Press, 1996).
"What the 'Bilbao Effect' Can Do To, and For, a Campus," Chronicle of Higher Education, Campus Architecture Supplement, April 28, 2006
"'Unser New Yorker Mitarbeiter:' Lewis Mumford, Walter Curt Behrendt, and the Modern Movement in Germany." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55, no. 2 (June 1996): 126-139.
"Bauhaus." In Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History, ed. Thomas Adam (ABC/Clio, 2005).