Erwin Hauer in The New Haven Register · Dec 14, 10:24 AM
An excerpt of the article appears below. Full article is available here.
Designer Reborn: Professor, 83, reinvents architectural screen business
Sunday, December 13, 2009
By Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor
NEW HAVEN — Erwin Hauer, designer of architectural screens favored by the likes of famed architects Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer and recently enjoying a renaissance of his own works, is moving his business to a city neighborhood that is undergoing a renewal itself.
Hauer, 83, and Enrique Rosado, 42, a former student, are consolidating the design and production components of their company at the former Flint Ladder Company property bound by Chapel, Lloyd and River streets. A professor at the Yale School of Architecture for more than three decades, Hauer’s geometrically complex screens, mainly cast in durable masonry materials, but now also in wood fibers produced through digitally controlled milling machines, thanks to Rosado, can be found in New York, Miami, Montreal, Mexico City and Caracas, Venezuela.
The screens serve as room dividers or walls, mostly in corporate or commercial settings. Rosado credits Deputy Economic Development Director Tony Bialecki and development specialist, Helen Rosenberg, with getting them to locate in New Haven with its large supportive artistic community. “We could have gone anywhere,” said Rosado, who was at one point considering moving to a large farm. He bought two contiguous Flint properties in October for just over $500,000. “I think they are doing a very good job of developing that area,” Rosado said.
Hauer, who was born in Austria, came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1955 and a year later was invited by artist Josef Albers to study at Yale.
His professional rebirth is connected to the publication in 2004 of Erwin Hauer: Continua by Princeton Architectural Press, which documents his work as a sculptor and designer.
“It is rare for us to think of walls as works of beauty, however, those by Erwin Hauer make us look again. Erwin Hauer: Continua resurrects the extraordinary but little known work of this Austrian-born sculptor, whose designs of perforated and modular structures are symphomies of measured elegance,” according to a review in “Published Art 4,” an Australian publication.
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