Summary

Richard Gluckman is an architect who creates spaces comparable to minimalist art. His careful consideration of the basic components of architecturestructure, scale, proportion, material, and lightproduces buildings and interiors that heighten the perception of physical space and what is contained in that space. Subtle design elements, all drawn from a vocabulary of modernism, characterize his distinctive projects. More than fifteen projects for artists, collectors, and museums are presented in this volume, including the Gagosian and Mary Boone Galleries in New York; the Mori Arts Center in Tokyo, Japan; the Museo Picasso Malaga in Spain; the Perelman Building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the recently completed expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the design for the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio in San Francisco. Gluckman has designed a wide range of other building types, all influenced by his exploration of the relationship between art and the space it inhabits. Included here are residential works (a loft in Tribeca; a house in Austin, Texas; and his own weekend house on Long Island); a library for P.S. 192; the renovation of Kenyon Hall at Vassar College; and One Kenmore Square, a downtown New York apartment building with an undulating facade.

Author Biography

Richard Gluckman is a principal of Gluckman Mayner Architects, established in New York in 1977 as Richard Gluckman Architect. He studied architecture at Syracuse University, where he returned in 2005 to design the Warehouse, current home of the School of Architecture.

Detlef Mertins is an architect, historian, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His essays on the history and theory of modern architecture have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs. He is editor of The Presence of Mies and of the English translation of Walter Curt Behrendt’s The Victory of the New Building Style.

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Excerpts

From: Introduction

Moments of Immediacy
Detlef Mertins

As criticisms of late modernism destabilized architectural culture in the 1970s, many architects looked to historical styles and populist imagery to invest their work with meaning. Richard Gluckman, on the other hand, discovered that meaning itself could be redefined within modernism by learning from a certain species of minimalist art. Through his early involvement with the Dia Foundation and artists such as Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra, he developed an approach to design that remained distinctive even as more and more architects were touched by the ascetic imperative. While minimalism in architecture has generally assumed the guise of a more extreme version of modernist form—more tautly abstract and crystalline, more ruthless in its suppression of windows, doors, moldings, and flashings, often coupled with a richer palette of materials or luminous lighting—Gluckman went further from the start, learning other, more structural lessons as well. He recognized that the role of architecture changed when, in the 1960s, artists sought to engage it more actively by pulling their work off the wall and into the space of the viewer—into the real spaces of galleries, warehouses, city streets, and landscapes—reframing architecture as it was framed by it. Gluckman absorbed this turn so thoroughly that he was soon able to adapt the strategies developed for displaying art to mediate other kinds of experiences as well.

Gluckman’s exposure to artists who broke with modernist abstraction came in 1977 when Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil commissioned a renovation of their Manhattan townhouse, including the installation of works by Cy Twombly and Blinky Palermo as well as by De Maria, Judd, and Flavin. Flavin’s work was especially eye-opening for substituting fluorescent lamps for architectural moldings and transforming spaces such as stairs into volumes of colored light. It was Flavin, Gluckman recalls, who first eliminated baseboards, transforming walls and floors into pure planes against which to situate his work. A few years later, the architect participated in the installation of De Maria’sBroken Kilometerin a Soho loft, a work and a setting that broke decisively from the immersive environment of white cube galleries, which had become popular for displaying abstract art. By isolating art from the outside world, eliminating windows, and neutralizing architectural features, these galleries had suspended both art and viewer in a timeless and transcendent world. Reduced to pure perception, stripped of worldliness, and disembodied, the viewer, in this mode of reception, dissolved through immersion in the art object. This mystification of the artwork was soon criticized for its claims to authority, power, and value. In contrast, De Maria used the old pressed-metal ceiling, castiron columns with classical capitals, and sprinkler pipes of the existing building as foil for his piece. At the same time, its rows of brass rods, arranged with machine precision on the old hardwood floor, served to recalibrate the rhythm of the space. The reciprocal inflections between the art and the architecture implied a definition of abstraction situated in the world itself, not outside or above it. Here abstraction was revealed as a procedure, rather than a thing, a procedure for measuring the world and negotiating the relationship between geometry and matter, embodiment and disembodiment; it no longer represented one side of such binary oppositions. Gluckman recognized that by using architectural means, artists such as Flavin and De Maria were able to achieve a “new and immediate relationship between the viewer, the object, and the space around it.” Placed in an unexpected and more awkward perspective, the viewer was launched into a space of action, having to grapple with the wo

Excerpted from Framework: Gluckman Mayner Architects by Richard Gluckman
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