Space Framed: Works and Projects [Paperback]

Richard Gluckman (Author), Hal Foster (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2000

From one of his earliest projects for Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, founders of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Richard Gluckman has closely aligned his work with the world of art and artists. Over the past twenty years, Gluckman has created distinctive spaces for numerous art galleries and museums and developed installations with such notable contemporary artists as Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Jenny Holzer, and Walter de Maria. But Gluckman's vision extends beyond art world commissions to include residential, commercial, and public projects. Deeply informed by the minimalist and site-specific artists Gluckman has encountered throughout his career, his work displays a consistent restraint that, as Gluckman himself writes, "allows for more emphasis on the basic architectural components: structure, scale, proportion, material, and light." The result is an architecture of powerful simplicity that has been applied to a wide variety of projects throughout the world.

Space Framed: Richard Gluckman Architect presents thirty-eight buildings and projects with carefully composed photographs and detailed presentation drawings. Featured projects include various buildings for the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the renovation and addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum Competition, the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and the Museo Picasso in Malaga, Spain. In addition to generous illustrations and an introduction by the architect, Space Framed features an insightful essay by noted critic Hal Foster.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As much as one might like to walk through midtown Manhattan in the early 1950s and regard the Seagram Building and Lever House in all of their modernist boldness, undiluted by the near-unbroken flanks of cheap, boring knockoffs that now obscure them, it would be wonderful to travel back to late 1970s SoHo or early 1990s Chelsea in the same city to look at the work of Richard Gluckman before it became virtually indistinguishable from the interior of nearly every chic restaurant, boutique, or coffee bar to open in Gotham in the last decade. Of course, Gluckman's work--which has transformed the neglected ghosts of our urban-industrial past into light-as-air art/installation "frames" for such projects as New York's pioneering Dia Center for the Arts (1987-1997), Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum (1994), and the galleries of art-world heavies Paula Cooper, Mary Boone, and Larry Gagosian--is interpretable on many honorable levels. As Princeton architecture professor Hal Foster points out in his brief essay, which is included here, these honor the edict of Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich to "not design--strip the room to its essentials so you know what it's about"; or, as Gluckman himself notes in his own slightly longer essay here, they frame not only the art, but also "the viewer as well," through their sparing, judicious use of beams and columns, or scrims and skylights.

Well, that's all fine and good. But, because so many of Gluckman's projects are preservation-conscious retrofits, instead of ground-ups; and, because minimalism is to him not only a style but a self-imposed mandate in his frequent mission to provide the perfect context for someone else's artistic vision, it's hard to look through the smashing interiors of this beautifully produced softcover book and come away wowed by his choices--which tend tactfully toward the stripping or refinishing of surfaces, redirection of light, and removal and/or retaining of various walls, columns, and other old structural elements. Yes, these vast, dramatically lit expanses of gleaming plaster, blond-wood wall panels, and stainless-steel fittings are handsome; but, in the early 21st century, unfortunately, and despite the thought and care that Gluckman no doubt put into their use and installation, we now can enjoy much the same cold, chicly postindustrial gloss at our local Banana Republic or Starbucks (and it's no surprise to learn here that Gluckman has designed stores for Versace and Helmut Lang that don't look much different from his galleries).

That's why the more interesting work here are the exceptions, such as the private-residence "House for an Artist and a Writer" on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (1994), whose warm gray shingles, massive chimney, and simple "front porch" make one feel right at home, without for a moment suggesting that the house is trying to fit completely into a traditional regional style. Also notable is the little jewel of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe (1997), another renovation project in which Gluckman's hand is no heavier than in his East Coast art spaces, but in which most surfaces are finished in the warm adobe colors of the region--providing a welcome break from the near-ubiquitous shades of gray that Gluckman, it seems, thinks are most appropriate as art backgrounds. These glowing, sandy expanses are also a wonderful counterpoint to the florid color of O'Keeffe's own canvases, and generally make one wish that Gluckman, an admirably context-sensitive architect, would do more work in such warmer and less uptight climes. --Timothy Murphy

About the Author

Hal Foster is professor of modern art at Princeton University and coeditor of October. His most recent books are Compulsive Beauty and Return of the Real.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Monacelli Press (October 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158093045X
• ISBN-13: 978-1580930451
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 0.8 x 11 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,451,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars timely book, October 22, 2000

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This review is from: Space Framed: Works and Projects (Paperback)

It seems it is the proper time to look at Richard Gluckman's career. If you wonder why very respected people such as theater-guru-director-trained-as-architect Peter Wilson has chosen Gluckman as the architect for his studies center, this is your book. It is difficult to capture minimal architecture in the printed page. Almost-nothing-projects such as --by now much copied art spaces-- New York's Gagosian Gallery or DIA Art Foundation or andy Warhol Museum get in this book a fair two dimensional presentation.