previews January 2005

Josep Lluís Sert

Will this timely retrospective of Catalan modernist Josep Lluís Sert successfully resuscitate the legacy of the neglected and underrated postwar architect, best remembered for designing a studio and foundation for Joan Miró? After all, Sert’s low-key buildings lack the robust bravura of those designed by his more celebrated European peers like Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen, who also settled in the US and crafted concrete-and-glass institutional buildings during the 1960s and ’70s. With drawings, photographs, models, and videos related to ten

print November 2002

“Out of Site: Fictional Architectural Spaces”

Recent exhibitions like “Out of Place” at MCA Chicago, “Artists Imagine Architecture” at ICA Boston, “BitStreams” at New York’s Whitney Museum, and “010101” at San Francisco MoMA have confirmed two preoccupations among a new generation of artists: with architecture as well as with digital technology.
In “Out of Site,” associate curator Anne Ellegood gathers works by fifteen artists, most of them emerging, who bring the themes together. Evaluated individually, the works of this motley crew are uneven. But in narrowing her focus to include solely those that depict “fictional sites.” the curator

previews May 2000

House Show: The House in Art

Of late it seems every second artist has something to say about a subject regular folks from Martha to Hillary also get passionate about: the house. Tapping into the art-world rage for things architectural, Deichtorhallen curator Zdenek Felix has assembled a wide range of works that probe the “conceptual, sociological, ecological, political, and aesthetic” implications of the domestic structure. Whether this eclectic selection of roughly one hundred works, including photography, video, models, and full-scale prototypes by the likes of Andreas Gursky, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Rachel Whiteread,

print November 1999

FRAMES OF MIND

“A BICYCLE SHED is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” Although written in 1943, these opening lines from An Outline of European Architecture, Nikolaus Pevsner’s textbook history of the discipline, still sum up the way most design professionals distinguish architecture from ordinary structures. Buildings become “architecture” when they transcend the utilitarian—when, in other words, they approximate “useless” works of art.

If my colleagues aspire to the validation commonly accorded works of art, who can blame them? Every aspect of the architectural profession—clients whose

architecture April 1999

Edward Durell Stone and Paul Rudolph

AS WE APPROACH THE MILLENNIUM, in architecture as in fashion, our appetite for salvaging designs from recent decades grows ever more voracious. But would some artifacts do well to simply remain in the closet? Many fail to see how critically maligned buildings might get better with age, and on the short list of most endangered mid-’60s structures are Edward Durell Stone’s Huntington Hartford Building and Paul Rudolph’s Beekman Place triplex.

The city’s recent selection of David Child’s proposal for replacing the Coliseum on Columbus Circle has cast a spotlight on its vulnerable neighbor, Two

print October 1998

ARCHIGRAM: DESIGN ON THE FUTURE

Fashion folks like Tom Ford and Muccia Prada aren’t the only design predators these days mining the ’60s and ’70s. Look inside virtually any current design publication—Elle Decor, Wallpaper*, even House Beautiful—and you’re sure to encounter spreads showcasing shag carpeting, Lucite chairs, and lava lamps. High architecture culture has jumped on the bandwagon as well; recent exhibitions in New York like “Achille Castiglione: Design!” at MoMA, “Utopie’s Inflatables: The Inflatable Moment” at the Architectural League, and “Shiro Kuramata” at the Grey Gallery all take a retrospective glance at the

Joel Sanders