Blog author Conrad Skinner AIA is an architect and artist with a background in dance.

He was born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts.  His grandfather, architect Henry S. Churchill designed the first Bauhaus-inspired building in New York and was on the team that produced America’s largest public housing project, the Queensbridge Houses.  His mother trained as an architect. His father is a naval architect.  He received a BA from Reed College where he majored in art and minored in dance.  He earned his Master of Architecture degree from the University of New Mexico.

In the late seventies he lived in Tokyo where he studied Japanese and absorbed the cultures of contemporary Japanese art and the Butoh dance form.  In 1980 he showed sculpture at the Gallery Te.  Returning to New York he fabricated and installed pieces from the Fireworks Series for sculptor Dennis Oppenheim while participating in shows with the COLAB group.

In 1985 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he concentrated on architectural design.  He designed the Arthur Stieren voice studio at the Santa Fe Opera and numerous modifications to the theater’s “guts”, backstage and orchestra areas.  He curated two art shows, Camp: Art and Sustainability and Art X Architects.

In 1970 he saw Paolo Soleri’s exhibition “Arcology, the City in the Image of Man” at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.  The show changed the American conversation about architecture and urbanism.  A year later he attended a Soleri lecture at Reed. Determinism and human behavior was a hot topic in schools. A student questioned Soleri about freedom in his planned cities.  Soleri snapped back, “Do you think you’re free?”. That was the takeaway.

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