Please Note: In accordance with SVA Theatre COVID-19 protocols, all visitors must show proof of vaccination (including booster, if eligible) and remain masked while indoors. Please click here for our current COVID protocols.

You are invited to a program of presentations in memory of DCrit faculty member Ralph Caplan (1925-2020), including a keynote lecture, “TMI: The Purpose and Pleasure of the Personal,” by writer and design historian Eva Hagberg, and remarks by Ayse Birsel and Leah Caplan. Followed by a reception 6:00-7:00 p.m. in the theater lobby.

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Eva Hagberg is an author, historian, and educator. She is the author of When Eero Met his Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect (Princeton University Press, 2022) and the critically acclaimed memoir How to be Loved (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She has published widely on design and architecture in publications like the New York Times, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, and more. She has degrees in architecture from Princeton University and UC Berkeley, and a PhD in Visual and Narrative Culture from UC Berkeley.

In Memoriam: Ralph Caplan (1925-2020) was a writer, editor, design critic, and beloved faculty member in the MFA Design Criticism program, a.k.a. DCrit, at the School of Visual Arts. He began his career in 1957 as a writer for I.D. magazine (then called “Industrial Design”), becoming editor in 1959, a position he held until 1963. Caplan continued to write design criticism for I.D. and several other periodicals and authored several books, including By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons and Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects. As a board member of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and as a consultant for Herman Miller, he was at the heart of conversations that shaped post-WWII design and design thinking, receiving the “Design Mind” award in 2019 from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Ralph taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts from 2009 to 2013.