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An Unsolved Problem
On Denise Scott Brown’s inconvenient legacy
About twenty years ago, I knocked for the first time on the big red door of the architecture studio of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates. Ten days earlier, I had been wandering the stacks of the Fine Arts library at the University of Pennsylvania, searching for sources for a paper on South Street, one of Philadelphia’s main thruways, when a librarian directed me to Denise Scott Brown’s 1968 plan for it. I knew little about architecture or city planning; I was a first-year graduate student in anthropology. But I was interested in cities, and her street plan grabbed my attention, mostly for the way it prioritized the needs of residents, like the construction of more and better housing. Scott Brown had created it with activists fighting a highway that the city was trying to build through their neighborhood. I emailed her. She replied a few days later, telling me to come see her at 9:30 a.m. the following Saturday, the only time she was free.
At the studio, a friendly gray-haired man wearing a button-down cardigan answered my knock. He guided me down a hallway to her office and, just before saying goodbye, leaned in to say, “It’s great you’re interviewing her. She doesn’t get the credit she deserves.”
“Oh?” I remember saying. I was surprised and a little puzzled. South Street was the full extent of my knowledge of Scott Brown’s work. I knew nothing about this lack of credit; I didn’t even know who this man was, showing me to her office and offering this mysterious compliment. I laughed anxiously, thanked him, refocused, and went into Denise’s office.
Fixing a Whole
Julie Becker’s Whole is a hard artwork to exhibit or even historicize.
by Kat Herriman
Julie Becker spent her life in Los Angeles. She ended it there too. Becker’s 2016 obituary appeared in Artforum three days before the artist’s first solo show in a decade closed at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. This survey pulled drawings from all different eras of Becker’s short, brilliant, patchy career; it touted recent work, out of context. Nowhere in the curatorial statement did the word whole appear and yet since 1999 Becker had been consumed by it, the name for a project without end. Evidence of Whole’s concerns bubbled up anyway like the boiling cauldrons Becker often drew. One work from 2015 bore the inscription “I must create a Master Piece to pay the rent. How do I do that?” And written in haste, maybe later, in answer: “Circles, circles, lots of round and round we go.”
All Sides of the Wall
Talking with Elizabeth Diller about the Museum of Modern Art and the Shed.
In 2019, Diller Scofidio + Renfro completed two important projects for prominent cultural institutions in New York City: the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, and the Shed on Manhattan’s West Side. In an interview with NYRA, Elizabeth Diller explained her ambitions for each and pointed to the firm’s longstanding interest in art:
We love to do museums. And we’re used to being on all sides of the wall. You know, as an artist, that means tearing that wall down. From the point of view of institutional critique—something from when I was educated—the moment that you step into the institution, that wall, that gallery is something that you want to take on. But from the point of view of someone curating shows, what you want out of a gallery, and the freedoms you want—you don’t want the architecture to get in the way. You don’t want it to be so loud, but maybe you want something to brush against.
Read the entire interview here.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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