Stanley Greenberg: Architecture Under Construction Art Institute of Chicago
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In his new book, Architecture Under Construction, Greenberg records the prehistory of an eclectic array of recent buildings by big-name architects, providing a corrective for the kind of photographs that eventually presented them to the world. As it happens, the last building included in the book is the Art Institute’s Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing, in which a dozen of Greenberg’s 30-by-40-inch black-and-white prints are on display through September 6 in a show called “Stanley Greenberg: Architecture Under Construction.” Greenberg’s 2007 view of the new wing shows its open stairwell ringed by girders, scaffolds, and ladders—hardly a pristine space for art. Yet the photograph makes a work of art of this mess, turning its pattern of crosses and circles into something resembling a painting by Mondrian.
Greenberg also takes a look inside two of Daniel Libeskind’s recent works: his Denver Art Museum, with its witch’s hat pointed out and up, looking like something out of a giant silver Lego set, and his addition to the Royal Ontario Museum of Art in Toronto. Both feature gravity-defying “crystals” attached to more traditional forms—a play on I.M. Pei’s glass pyramids at the Louvre and Washington’s National Gallery. Libeskind’s tetrahedrons are hardly classical, bursting out of the sides of buildings. Yet Greenberg shows us that even these wild constructions are built on rectilinear frames.
