Spectrum

Student’s summer richter research published

Nicole Kosanke ’14 and Assistant Professor of Communication Rachel Whidden’s summer Richter research project, “Parental Expertise and the Silencing of Science,” will be published in an edited volume titled Reasoned Argument and Social Change, slated for publication in 2012.

Consulting scholarly sources, parenting forums, online blogs, and popular media coverage, Kosanke researched the controversy over connection between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine and autism. Despite a plethora of scientific data denying the causal relationship, parents of autistic children continue to argue that the vaccine caused their child’s autism.

Schulze reviews alumnus’ third Wright book

Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower (Pomegranate Communications, 2010) was written and photographed by Mark Hertzberg ’72, who was given exclusive access to photograph Wright’s Tower, which has been vacant and completely closed since 1981.

Hertzberg has been director of photography at the Racine (Wis.) Journal Times since 1987. In the last ten years, he has added substantively to his personal record by turning his attention, as writer and photographer, to buildings in Racine that were designed by the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright. In 2004, he wrote Wright in Racine, and in 2006, he wrote Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hardy House. Both books have been well received.

Just published is the impressively researched Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower. The subject is a 15-story building notable for its tree-like “taproot” structure, in which alternating square floors and round mezzanines cantilever outward from a weight-bearing concrete central core. At present, its unoccupied interior is illuminated nightly. Attractive to look at, and functionally idle, it has been called (by Eric O’Malley of the PrairieMod website) an exquisite architectural corpse.

By: Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus, Franz Schulze