Architecture Books – Week 48/2024
Anyone up for a trip to the museum?
This newsletter for the week of November 25 looks at Building Culture, the recently released book featuring sixteen interviews between historian Julian Rose and architects responsible for the design of some of the world’s most famous museums. The book prompted me to dig a couple of relevant books — one on museums, one a book-length interview with an architect known for museums — from my archive. In between are the usual headlines and new releases. Happy reading — and Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow US readers!
Book of the Week:
Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space by Julian Rose (Buy from PA Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
Last week the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art announced the six finalists vying to design the museum’s latest expansion, coming two decades after the Kansas City, Missouri institution built Steven Holl’s Bloch Building, then the first addition to its 1933 neoclassical edifice. The half-dozen names are a familiar lot, especially to people who pay attention to museum architecture: Jeanne Gang, Kengo Kuma, Renzo Piano, Annabelle Selldorf, Weiss/Manfredi, and Kulapat Yantrasast (WHY). Three of the six finalists (Piano, Selldorf, Yantrasast) are among the sixteen architects interviewed by Julian Rose in Building Culture, and we can grow that number to four if we include Holl, whose 2007 building — located to the west of the old building, counter to the the competition brief at the time, which mandated the addition on the north — will make their lives for the next few months a bit tricky. Further making the prospect of “integrating the campus, the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park, and the two existing buildings into a cohesive new experience” difficult is Walter De Maria's One Sun / 34 Moons, a site-specific artwork in a shallow pool on the north side of the 1933 building that brings light to the underground parking garage added by Holl. Put another way, Holl’s rule-breaking design just delayed the museum eventually putting a building to the north — or that’s my assumption at this point in the process — so I’m curious to see what the finalists come up with and if De Maria’s artwork remains in place.
In the context of the Nelson-Atkins competition, one could see Building Culture as a roadmap for anticipating how architects will react to the brief and what kind of proposal the museum will choose next spring. The architects in the book’s pages — the four mentioned above plus Elizabeth Diller, Frank Gehry, Richard Gluckman, Water Hood, Liu Yichun, Denise Scott Brown and Kazuyo Seijima, among others — have created very distinctive and diverging designs for art museums, but their conversations with Rose foreground how they approach the two main aspects of the typology: presenting art and accommodating visitors. The first traditionally veers between so-called white cube galleries, which provide neutral containers for art, and more overtly “designed” spaces that might create a tension between art and architecture, or may even challenge artists to respond to the architecture, as in site-specific commissions. The conversations illuminate that the design of galleries in museums today is far from an either/or dichotomy, and issues like decolonizing history and responding to wider demographics is changing how certain objects are presented. The latter issue gets at the experience of visitors, which is paramount in art museums, lest they would just be storage depots or private repositories. Those experiences have changed dramatically in recent decades, with the explosion of the art market, blockbuster exhibitions, and the large numbers of people descending on museums, things that were interrupted but not otherwise greatly impacted by the pandemic. That said, while the enormous popularity of the Louvre, the Tate, MoMA, and other museums around the world bodes well for the future of museums — at a time when the future of just about anything, be it a discipline, an institution or something else fairly well entrenched, seems uncertain — it can make visiting a museum to appreciate art trying, to say the least.
Although the interviews I read did not address the issue of overcrowded museums, they are full of insight on the relationship between art and architecture. Rose, a senior editor at Artforum from 2012 until 2018, when and for whom many of the sixteen interviews took place, is a very capable interlocutor, thanks in large part to his extensive knowledge of art and architectural history, as well as the PhD on the origin and evolution of museums of contemporary art he is working on at Princeton University. So he is able to talk with the sixteen architects about their work in the cultural sphere but also about important artists and exhibition, theories of art and architecture, and collaborative practices between artists and architects. Although the publisher describes the book as a “collection of interviews,” I see them as conversations; instead of questions and answers, they are back-and-forths, with Rose’s commentary sometimes as lengthy as the architects he is speaking with (the spread above, with Rose and Kazuyo Sejima, is a good example of this). I thought, somewhat cynically, that Rose could have “padded” his questions/comments when they made the leap from audio to print, but having attended a book launch last week at the National Academy of Design, when Rose spoke with architect Annabelle Selldorf and artist Donna Dennis, I witnessed firsthand how knowledgeable and responsive Rose was in listening to their comments and moving the conversation forward.
In the end, the book’s value is found in learning about these sixteen architects — about how they think of art and design museums, but also about their personal experiences and how those inform how they think about the world and how they design. One may see photos of Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton and think the sculptural glazed roof is just Gehry being Gehry, but he explains how it is a practical response to a height restriction and the need to display art. Elsewhere we learn that, even though a young Annabelle Selldorf lied on her resume to get a job in an architecture office and “they very quickly realized I knew absolutely nothing,” she slowly absorbed things and now her museum spaces and buildings are some of the most sensitive to the art on display and the people looking at it. And to bring this review full circle, Steven Holl tells Rose about his collaboration with Walter De Maria on One Sun / 34 Moons, with the two talking “endlessly about the light and how […] the water would reflect it and refract it, and with De Maria refining it over the course of two years. I’ve always appreciated the artwork, more so when I saw it in person a decade ago, and even more so now, when reading about it in Building Culture. I can only hope the six finalists understand the artwork’s significance as they work on their designs, though reading about the experiences, influences, and museums of a few of them in this book makes me optimistic.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
The Architect's Dream: Form and Philosophy in Architectural Imagination by Sean Pickersgill (Buy from Intellect / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Sean Pickersgill draws on a broad range of subject areas, including film, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, and economics, to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based on an understanding of the principal drivers for change in society.”
Documents and Histories: Women in Architecture by Gianna Bottema, et. al. (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for NAi010 Publishers) / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first installment in nai010’s new Women in Architecture series, Documents and Histories offers a many-faceted exploration of multivocality in architecture.”
The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design by Kenny Cupers (Buy from University of Texas Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis.”
Everlasting Plastics edited by Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving, Joanna Joseph, and Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt (Buy from Columbia University / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — This perpetually delayed book (I had it listed in both Week 26 and Week 39), an extension of the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, explores “the infinite ways in which plastics permeate our bodies and our world.”
Fantasy by Bruno Munari (Buy from Inventory Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Never-before translated into English, Bruno Munari’s Fantasy (Fantasia, 1977), invites the reader to explore their own imagination, creativity, and fantasy through a journey in Munari’s mind and work experience.”
The Land Is Full: Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects edited by Bradford McKee (Buy from Phaidon/The Monacelli Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A celebration of parks and public gardens by renowned landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, whose designs reflect the histories that are held in the land.”
Transforming Mathildenhöhe: A World Heritage Site Site – The Refurbishment of the Exhibition Hall by scheinder+schumacher by Falk Jaeger (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This richly illustrated volume tells the story of [the Exhibition Hall at the Mathildenhöhe Artists’ Colony designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich] while showing readers how [schneider+schumacher] have allowed it to speak again for itself, at the same time introducing new voices with the addition of contemporary elements.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
It’s that time of year, when coverage of holiday gift books and best-of-year lists are as numerous as other book-related headlines.
Edwin Heathcote lists a handful of books on architecture and design in the “Best books of 2024: Art, Design and Fashion” at the Financial Times.
Cammy Brothers has a list of holiday gift books on architecture — “books [that] can take you places, allowing you to visit fascinating buildings around the world without the hassle of getting there” — at the Wall Street Journal. (Blocked by a paywall? Same piece can be found at MSN.)
Faber has announced its acquisition of architect Elsie Owusu’s The World that Jack Built, to be released in 2027. The book “exposes how a narrow demographic of elite architects, developers and designers continue to build an out-dated world for people who look, think and live as they do.”
The RIBA Journal has a piece by Owen Hopkins in the context of Postmodernism: Architecture That Changed Our World, the new book by Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman that is a “redesigned and refreshed edition” of their 2017 book Revisiting Postmodernism. (Here is my review of the earlier book.)
Read Elias Baumgarten’s review of Anna Heringer’s Form Follows Love: Building by Intuition – from Bangladesh to Europe and beyond, “a monograph, biography, and manifesto all in one” done with author Dominique Gauzin-Müller. (Full disclosure: I edited the English translation of the text, originally in German.)
From the Archives:
If reading Julian Rose’s Building Culture made you wanting more, but say on other aspects of art museums rather than just their designs, then I recommend The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith. Before the book came out in 2021, Smith had previously served as directors of National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery and chief executive of the Royal Academy. The book presents short descriptions of around forty art museums in four chapters, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1939 to the West Bund Museum in Shanghai in 2019. “The selected museums are briefly profiled across a few pages with at least a couple of images each,” I wrote in my review in 2021, just after the book came out. “The short descriptions are far from exhaustive, obviously, but they allow Saumarez Smith to hone in on the most important aspect(s) of each museum, be it their clients, their buildings, or the artworks they contain.” I also wrote:
“Saumarez Smith's involvement in architecture projects at the Royal Academy of Art and other institutions greatly informs the book's fifth and last chapter: ‘Key Issues.’ Here, in an effort to take stock of the last half-century — though primarily the years from 1982, when he started working at museums, to near the present — and address some of the challenges museums are now facing, the author touches on the roles of clients and architects, as is to be expected, as well as to the rise of private museums, the ‘morality of wealth,’ globalization, and the ‘digital world,’ among other issues. The key issues find him referring to museums earlier in the book and reiterating timelines that should be familiar to readers by the time they get to this chapter; the latter is helpful in getting a clear understanding of Saumarez Smith's take on the evolution of art museums in modern times, while the former pushed me to go back and read such case studies as the one on MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art), a museum I had no familiarity with before opening this book.”
An architect know for the design of museums but who is missing from Julian Rose’s book of interviews is Tadao Ando. But one can learn a great deal about Ando and museums via Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando, which was published by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2002, on the opening of its new Ando-designed home. As the title indicates, the book features seven interviews conducted between Michael Auping, then chief curator of the museum, and Ando, when he was in Fort Worth for site visits. I featured the book on my blog in 2006, writing that Auping’s “questions tend to be specifically about the museum in Texas or generally about architecture and Ando's life” and therefore lead “to the reader learning a great deal about Ando and his views on architecture.” I concluded that “this book is valuable for its peek into the mind of an architect who creates buildings of a transcendental nature.”
One thing I did not mention back in 2006 was the book’s design, which is very well done. The gray cover recalls Ando’s distinctive concrete walls, complete with grids of circles set in relief into the chip board. The blue of the taped spine hints at the page design, where Auping’s questions are in blue text and Ando’s answers are in black text, while the cover sketch also hints at the illustrations inside — all sketches by Ando, most of them of his design of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. These features, in concert with the heavyweight off-white paper, make the book a special object appropriate to the opening of the Ando museum more than twenty years ago.
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