Sigrid Miller Pollin
PRINCIPAL
Sigrid Miller Pollin, FAIA was born in Trenton, New Jersey and spent most of her youth in Rhode Island. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College in Art History in 1971 and a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1975. Before moving to Amherst, Massachusetts with her family in 1998, she was Chair and a professor of architecture in the College of Environmental Design at the California Polytechnic University Pomona. Sigrid is a Professor of Architecture Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Department of Architecture and principal of Miller Pollin Architecture.
Sigrid has practiced architecture and been registered through the National Council of Architectural Registration Board (NCARB) in New York, California, Nevada and Massachusetts. Her work has been published in numerous publications over the years including Global Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Houser Magazine in Germany, Ville Giardini in Italy, Boston Home and Design New England. It has been featured in various books including World Cities Los Angeles and 21st Century Houses: 150 of the World’s Best. She has received architectural awards from AIA New England, Inland California AIA, Western Massachusetts AIA and the Boston Society of Architects.
Throughout her career in architecture she has explored connections between art and architecture. In 2011 Sigrid began collaborating with architect Stephen Schreiber, and landscape architect Jane Thurber, in exhibits of drawings, bas reliefs and paintings related to interpretations of patterns found in the landscape, called Field Notes. The overlaps they have explored between art and architecture, the natural environment and the built environment have led to a total of eight collaborative exhibits thus far. In 2018 an exhibit of architectural models produced in California and Massachusetts by Miller Pollin Architecture was held at the John Olver Design Building Gallery at UMass Amherst. In fall of 2018 Miller Pollin’s mixed media drawings exploring the cellular structure of selected plants was featured in a three-person show at UMass’s Hampden Gallery along with New York artists Joan Weber and Paula Elliot. She describes this recent body of work as “looking inward beyond the surface and into the space that nature creates every day.”
Translations: Architecture / Art
This book examines the architecture and artwork of Sigrid Miller Pollin. Miller Pollin has created a rich body of work, from residential and academic buildings to furniture and artwork inspired by the natural world. Her design sense and deep understanding of space and color combine to present an oeuvre worthy of study. As a book about a practicing female architect who has successfully woven family, work, and art into a creative life, it offers inspiration, anecdotes and examples for women entering the professional world of architecture.
Erratic Boundaries
Erratic Boundaries is a collection of ten pen and ink drawings by architect and artist Sigrid Miller Pollin, coupled with ten ekphrastic poems by poet and economist Jane D’Arista. The drawings pull the viewer into fanciful natural and constructed visual moments. The book title is embedded in Poem IV. It invites the reader into an osmotic ricochet from poem to drawing. Here, sky rises like a canopy above erratic boundaries where land and water meet- boundaries so elemental we borrow their irregular connections to name the ragged edges of human life: birth, death, youth, age and what we call love and loss..