CHRISTIAN NARKIEWICZ-LAINE

Christian Narkiewicz-Laine is a Finnish/Lithuanian/American architect, architecture journalist, critic, writer, painter, and poet. He was educated in architecture at the Université de Strasbourg in France and studied archaeology at the American School of Archaeology in Athens, Greece. He finished his studies at Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois and studied at the American Academy in Rome with the Critic’s Prize from The Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

 

He worked as the architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and editor of Inland Architect in Chicago. He was the special architectural consultant for Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises in New York, Washington, DC., and Chicago.

 

Since 1989, he has been the Museum President/CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and has functioned as the Museum’s chief curator. He has organized major exhibitions on architecture and design at museums across Europe and North and South America. He has authored numerous publications and books on the subjects of architecture and design. He taught architectural history and aesthetics at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 2007, he also became the Director and CEO of The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, based in Dublin, Ireland and Athens, Greece.

 

As a poet, he has completed and published several volumes of his own works including: Distant Fires (1997); Baltic Hours (1999); and Greenland (2003). Baltic Hours was republished in a Lithuanian/English edition by Baltos Langos (2007). In 1999, he collected and published the lost and forgotten manuscripts Inspiration: Nature and the Poetry (Complete Poetic Works of the Chicago Architect, Louis H. Sullivan). In 2009, he published American Poets Against the War along with over 100 major U.S. poets and literary figures as an anti-war anthology against the War in Iraq and the Bush Administration.

 

In his most recent poetic work, Rings Around Saturn (2014), the poet explores a mystical dialogue with nature, the universe, and the higher realm of being.

 

Rings Around Saturn was nominated for a Pultizer Prize in 2015.

 

His paintings, sculpture, and video works have been shown in museums and galleries across Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

 

In 2013-2014, the poet-artist also issued two new books of his contemporary works of painting, sculpture, video, and installations: Praxis (with introduction by the Italian Architect, Alessandro Mendini) and The Emperor’s Fleet is Burning.

 

In 2018, Narkiewicz-Laine discovered the lost and forgotten American poet, James Gates Percival, considered to be the “father of modern American poetry,” together with his writings out of print since the 1880s. He launched an international rebranding of Percival and initiated the re-publication of Percival’s most important works, including Prometheus I and II in 2018 and Clio in 2019 by Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.

 

In 2018, he also re-published The Galena Guide, which was originally published anonymously by the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project in 1937, discovering through research and investigation that the book was actually written by the famous Chicago writer, Nelson Algren.

More informations about Christian Narkiewicz Laine at www.cknl.eu

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