Debris of Separation

SEPARATE THE ART FROM THE ARTIST. That is the procedure so often suggested for the ethical dilemmas presented by works of art whose makers break bad. Caravaggio, we are reminded, was probably a murderer—for that, would we deny ourselves The Supper at Emmaus (1601)? It gets slipperier when living practitioners of violence might yet benefit, in capital or status, from our consumption or appreciation of their art or might solicit our effective complicity in their deeds from our engagement with it. The separation of art from artist can be given a reassuringly cerebral sheen with an invocation of the close readings proposed by the mid-twentieth-century American school of New Criticism, whose adherents suggested that a body of literature is best understood as an exclusively self-referential and self-contained phenomenon in its ethics as much as its aesthetics. From the French literary criticism once fashionable among architects, no assertion is more famous than the one made by Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” that “literature is that … oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

But there is no separating the architecture from the architect. The reason the formula fails is that architecture isn’t art and architects aren’t artists. The fantasy of separation suggests the possibility of some kind of ethical circuit breaker between the social or material conditions of a work’s production and of its consumption. For art, the question can be left open for another day. For architecture, which is quintessentially a social endeavor, a collective practice, and a profession of service—closer to medicine or cosmetology than to painting or music—there can be no such breaks. In its consequential obligation to be of service a building is never, in Barthes’s phrase, “external to any function,” and that functionality includes a continuous system of relational ethics that allows no separation: between its makers or—through the work itself—between its makers and its users. The word work applied to any work of architecture covers not only the material and spatial artifact of a building but all the work of its designers and builders to bring it into being and all the work undertaken by its dwellers and users to bring it to life.

The question of separation arises in the architectural profession because of our culture of cruelty. It is not news that our classrooms and offices are so often places of humiliation, exhaustion, and a wide range of exploitative and extractive practices that repeat in familiar cycles of abuse and habit. I used to think this culture would simply die out with its experts: those very many men and very few women who arose in the second half of the twentieth century, for whom this sort of behavior was an aspect of the projection of private power and public persona. Such a projection may have been particularly compelling in a profession historically so culturally misunderstood and so materially undercompensated. Without the support of agents, managers, and other representatives typical of other creative professions, and with no fixed position in the slippery social hierarchy between capital and labor, architects as far back as Vasari have been especially prone to cosplay as artists—complete with that assertion of ethical discontinuity between artificer and artifact. Or prone to act like swaggering titans in the image of their highest net worth clients. Add the timeworn Romantic genius role—and its seeming license, even necessity, for eccentric and imperious behavior—all too available to would-be celebrity architects since its modern hypostatization in Ayn Rand’s grotesque 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, and you have the ingredients of a toxic brew.

IT WAS AT AN EXTREME of a broad range of expressions of this culture of cruelty that I placed, when I first heard it, the news that the celebrated Ghanian British architect David Adjaye—recipient of a 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal and a 2017 Knight Bachelor by the grace of Queen Elizabeth II, and in America famously an author (along with J. Max Bond Jr., Phil Freelon, Ralph Appelbaum, and many others) of the 2016 National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC—was subject to allegations of misconduct. As reported and documented in July of 2023 by the Financial Times, three female employees based primarily at Adjaye Associates’ Accra office described, at intervals over 2018 and 2019, sustained patterns of mistreatment and violence, including sexual harassment and sexual assault. “He told me to be a good girl and be quiet,” one of the women told the FT, detailing an alleged incident of sexual contact without consent; she recalled later thinking, “My career’s going to be over if he’s pissed off with me.… He can block opportunities and give me a bad reputation.… His network is vast.” The newspaper quoted a statement from Adjaye that was provided by his lawyers: “I absolutely reject any claims of sexual misconduct, abuse or criminal wrongdoing. These allegations are untrue, distressing for me and my family and run counter to everything I stand for.” He added, “I am ashamed to say that I entered into relationships which though entirely consensual, blurred the boundaries between my professional and personal lives.” In a September 2023 report by the Architect’s Journal, a former employee anonymized as Laura described a “culture of bullying, oppression and fear” at the firm’s London branch, along with dysfunctional working conditions similar to those reported by the FT at Accra, all subject to what she called a “cult of David.”

As its leader withdrew from public life, Adjaye Associates appointed new personnel to manage its Accra, London, and New York offices. The recent completion of several major projects whose design and development partially predated the allegations—including the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria; and, locally, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Princeton University Art Museum—seems to have inspired a new volubility from their principal designer. (Though not visibility: He was not present for the opening ceremonies in New York or New Jersey, at which the allegations went unacknowledged in remarks by his colleagues and clients.) Appearing on an episode of the Superurbanism podcast this past November, Adjaye said, “There was just an interest in just destroying.… And what can I do? I, you [sic] can’t fight those kinds of social waves; all you can do is go underwater. Wait, let the wave go over and hope there’s something when you come up.” Around the same time, in an interview with Architectural Record Adjaye responded to a prompt that “your name has been missing from the conversation for the past two years” with seemingly inconsistent assertions:

In light of the biographies of their architects, we who are obliged to use buildings cannot easily cease that use—ask anyone stuck with an authentic Philip Johnson. But nor can buildings be fully understood in ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the circumstances of their designing. “When the abuser is a publicly known, creative person, there is an added layer of complication,” wrote Daniela Soleri in the 2017 Medium essay in which she alleged a longtime pattern of abuse perpetrated by her late father, the cultish and visionary architect Paolo Soleri. (The accusation was reported further in a 2020 article in The Guardian.) She continued, “The work itself argues against you, is a source of power for him. You are challenging his successes and everything his work means to anyone who has gained from affiliation and decided that he and his work are essential to their own identity.” This possibility applies an unusual moral burden to any discussion of work by anyone subject to such imputation, especially when—as is the case with David Adjaye—the allegations are ongoing and may never be civilly or criminally adjudicated. As I write and you read, shall we stay aware of how the mere fact of these words, regardless of their content, may, in Daniela Soleri’s formulation, energize the works as such a source of power?

One cannot know the extent to which the final designs of the two new Adjaye Associates buildings in New York and New Jersey may have been affected by such working conditions as have been reported about its London and Accra offices or by the outer or inner lives of their principal in advance or consequence of disgrace. The $300 million Princeton museum is overwrought and overscaled, an exercise in excess, superabundance, and redundancy to which, one can imagine, nobody was able or willing to say no. The $160 million Harlem museum, by contrast, is an underperforming and underrealized exercise from which its designer’s attention seems to have faded away and whose signature features do not support the ambitious claims made regarding them. The good news is that, at a powerful confluence of aesthetic research and ethical engagement with their constituencies and communities, museums are buildings that rapidly leave the concerns of their original architects far behind.

THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART Museum is big. Its massive and boxy presence tips the balance of the central campus’s bucolic Cantabrigian fantasia toward something more closely resembling the suburban office park complexes, light manufacturing facilities, and warehouses that are the university’s neighbors in central New Jersey. The 146,000-square-foot complex—replacing a sprawling but low accretion of late-nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century classroom and gallery buildings—features some eighty thousand square feet of exhibition areas, along with the Department of Art and Archeology, with its celebrated Marquand Library. The building crowds into many sight lines at the newly dense campus core, but it’s hard to locate the front door. A generous interpretation of this is that, as a notional campus within a campus, the building invites entrance from all the points from which it can be viewed, but to approach from these points of visibility is to encounter blank walls and dead ends.

Once you’ve found and used the main entrance, which is set back deeply across a semisunken pit below a massive undercroft, all that square footage feels unpromisingly empty. The continuing entry sequence diverts you, as if in a fairy tale, through three Portentously Named Chambers: first to a high and long passage called the Entrance Hall; second to a dim atrium called the Grand Stair Hall, whose stairs face the wrong way in plan, sending you backward, albeit upward, to the galleries above; and third (in the likely event that you overshoot the backward stairs) into a circulatory appendix called the Great Hall, which leads nowhere. It’s not clear what this last room is for or why it would be great. But, perhaps because of the picturesque effect of some Brutalesque hammer beams, a rendering of it—so much cooler than the real thing—was the project’s signature publicity image for years. The combined effect of these Portentously Named Chambers is far less than what might have been that of any one of them alone.

The backward stairs in the Grand Stair Hall feature very many materials and features—bits of bronze-colored metal, some scalloped insets for handrails evoking some well-known I. M. Pei details at the East Wing of the National Gallery (1978), an undelightful reveal in which a heavy cast-concrete parapet is raised an inch or two above a heavy cast-concrete floor plate. But as with the Portentously Named Chambers, each of the elements, because they have nothing to do with one another but adjacency, is less than the sum of its parts.

At the top of the stairs is a disorienting gallery called the Orientation Gallery, which leads to the many galleries where the art is eventually to be found. These further rooms, jittery in detailing and repetitive in succession, recall the upscale, duty-free labyrinths at airports, or suggest a high-chiaroscuro IKEA. As drawn on the maps on the walls, nine so-called pavilions are singled out—should one miss the reference, a sketch published in Architectural Record refers to the famous mid-twentieth-century design exercise of the nine-square grid. But in lived experience there is vanishingly little difference between these interior “pavilions,” the interstitial circulation spaces, and the professedly restful breakout rooms at the plan’s periphery.

The art and artifacts try to keep up. They have been arranged by their curators in dense and vast assembly across walls and floors—scores of related objects in tight rows and arrays, like soldiers in formation—or else very small items have been placed in big cases. As if in such accumulation they could capture the attention that, in all that superabundant space in such disorienting configuration, is so easily dispersed. The material palette is maximalist: There’s concrete, polished and hammered and admixed with stone aggregate; there’s fancy polished stone, notably deployed as what appears to be a kind of adhesive veneer on the walls and ceilings of thresholds; and terrazzo and wood, mainly in mass timber matrices above. The plan and cross section of those matrices closely recall the skylights at Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art (1974), though on inspection their actual structural performance does not seem to warrant their great visual weight overhead. There are isolated bravura gestures such as a singular epic—though not especially necessary—cantilever over a sheltered terrace along the west façade and a big glass floor inside—winsomely placed over a Roman mosaic—that are technical achievements. On the south façade are some circular porthole windows with heavy, angled lids that look operable but aren’t.

All of this accumulates into something uncanny and evocative and retrospective—as if you threw Kahn’s famous buildings at Yale, plus some of Adjaye’s own celebrated early studios and galleries for the Young British Artist scene, plus a preponderance of projects by Adjaye’s erstwhile mentor, the British museum specialist David Chipperfield, into an LLM. In effect, though, the work that the Princeton Art Museum ended up recalling most for me—all the way down to the portholes—was that of the New Formalist Edward Durell Stone. His midcentury projects, in the shadow of Minoru Yamasaki and Gordon Bunshaft, sought a modern kind of portent in big blocky volumes wrapped in stone veneers, shot through with grand staircases, adorned with insistently delicate metalwork screens and stridently dainty metallic fixtures. Such stuff—accessible, belabored, glittering, bathetic—is strangely enduring.

The director of the Princeton Art Museum, James Steward, appears ready to sound philosophical. To Architectural Record last October, from within the fraught context of the museum’s gallery for European art, he said of Adjaye, “It would be a fiction to pretend that someone else designed it.” But he added, with a perhaps studied detachment, and eliding that architects aren’t artists, “We have to find ways to separate the work from the maker.… How many of these artists would we be able to exhibit if we couldn’t do that?”

Maybe Steward can take such an empyrean view because at Princeton the investment is high but the stakes are low. The museum and its university are well-resourced institutions with an inherent mission of learning and adapting over the very long term. Because of its currently unnecessary surplus of capacity, the building should be sufficient to serve that mission for the next two hundred years. Its abundant supply of high-energy and high-carbon materials will enable it to serve as a legacy platform—rewarding, over those coming centuries, the sustainable strategies not used in its all too conventional peak oil methods of construction. That surplus space and those rich materials will support creative and adaptive reuse to enhance legibility, density, and utility; will allow interior operations of backfill and infill; will allow full-circle cycles of architectural salvage and material harvest; and so will become useful.

AT HARLEM, THE STAKES APPEAR higher, and so the missed opportunities appear more poignant. Founded in 1968 in a rented loft on Fifth Avenue between 125th and 126th Streets, the Studio Museum is known both for its attention to global and local artists of the African diaspora and for its significant support, through annual on-site residencies, of generations of emerging artists. It had been located since 1982 behind the handsome historic façade of a 1914 former bank building on the south side of 125th Street, facing the landmark Brutalist Adam Clayton Powell Federal Building (1973) on its anomalous plaza. An adaptive reuse retrofit by Max Bond introduced an intricate system of mezzanines, partitions, overlooks, landings, and other playful and mindful interventions in service of curatorship but also of the see-and-be-seen procession and promenade that have been part of such modern civic institutions’ society expression and sociable mission since, say, the lobby of the Garnier Opera House in Paris. A luminous entrance pavilion in channel glass, by Rogers Marvel Architects, plus an auditorium and updated gallery and support spaces, were added in 2001. This was all destroyed. Demolition and construction on the same site required a seven-year closure.

The new seven-story, 82,000-square-foot structure doubles the former gallery spaces and adds such features as a rooftop terrace (with landscaping by Studio Zewde) and a piney 150-seat auditorium that intriguingly shares a ceiling with the entrance lobby from which it descends and from which it can be divided with a monumental curtain. Though they descend, not ascend, the wooden bleachers are described in promotional materials—in reference to the raised, semipublic steps before town houses and brownstones that have historically enriched the spatial and social lives of the neighboring streetscape—as a kind of stoop. The descent to the auditorium level from the lobby level can be commenced—at least notionally—from the sidewalk outside, where a few steps take you down to a small sunken space addressing some glass doors in the façade. These outdoor steps were blocked, I observed on several visits, by the kind of galvanized steel police barriers used to control crowds and direct parades; one hopes that these do not become more of the city’s many ostensibly temporary features—such as the infamous sidewalk scaffolding sheds or the keep-off-the-grass wire fencing in Central Park—that become curiously permanent.

The most successful room is the ground-level gift shop, which is configured to push forward from the building line, as the adjacent outdoor entry area recedes—and so, through generous glass walls and a bench-like sill that carries round from the façade’s complicated composition of big rectangles heavily enframed in gray precast concrete, brings some of the interior landscape to the streetscape and vice versa. (This otherwise accommodatingly bench-like sill was also blocked, during my visits, by a police barrier.) Inside, an abundant catalogue of materials and subtly articulated ceiling and floor planes bring a visual brilliance and even a sacral feeling to this minor chamber. Above it, there’s a double-height conference room and adjacent studios for artists discernible from outside by their solid walls and high, north-facing clerestory windows. Overhangs and setbacks add visual depth to the surface and enhance the graphic effect of the precast concrete frames. Once you move past the highly wrought façade, you may notice that the degree of detail, legibility, navigability, ingenuity, and even apparent construction quality all fade out. The three principal galleries feel undersized relative to the scale of the whole building and in need of daylighting. One of them has a dramatic barrel-vaulted ceiling. Midblock, and beneath a pyramidal skylight up on that roof terrace, there’s an atrium that extends the full height of the building, which, though it occupies a substantial portion of the internal volume, features—because of its narrow north-south width relative to its depth—surprisingly little daylight. Visually cold and very bright diode lighting supplements the photons, though not the warmth and movement, of the sun.

Ascending that atrium is a monumental staircase, its solid parapets and soffits in mottled gray terrazzo. Its massive and graphic presence against the white walls of the atrium suggests a sculpture, although such an effect may have been better achieved by an actual sculpture. Despite a pleasant overlook to the lobby from a lower landing, the staircase is mostly too deeply inset and low-ceilinged for seeing and being seen and offers little prospect—one can dream of the Guggenheim ramp—onto any nearby art. Unusually, even its handrails are detailed in the very same terrazzo as the balustrades and soffits. Its seams are irregular and the petrochemical goop inside them is much apparent. A simpler straight-shot stair rises from the fourth floor to the sixth along the upper half of a party wall, whose slot, brighter than the atrium, benefits brilliantly from a south-facing window up at its apex.

In moments of grace, windows on 124th Street frame views of church spires—St. Martin’s Episcopal, Mount Neboh Baptist—in the nearby skyline. The installation of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s 1973 Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape, a hierophantic assemblage of bronze, copper, and hemp, in something like an inverted bay window relatively low in that rear façade gives to the sculpture an exquisite mantle of that cityscape and gives to those on the sidewalk below a glimpse from ordinary life of this extraordinary artifact. Outside, the conversation I had with a passing stranger about this artwork, who noticed my gaze up at it from the south side of 124th Street, was a gift from New York City in all its characteristic density and serendipity and one small fulfillment of the Studio Museum’s stated mission.

The greatest good done for the museum by the Adjaye Associates building may have had very little to do with its actual architecture. The seeming promise represented by a novel structure; the unusually striking though not, as it turned out, especially accurate preconstruction renderings; the global celebrity and former public dignity of the architect—all may have been instrumental in the Studio Museum’s parallel accomplishment of a $300 million capital campaign. This sum covered not only the construction costs but a reported $23 million cash reserve and a $52 million endowment—after starting out at only a reported $10 million in operating funds and no endowment at all. Alas, it would likely have been far harder to raise such a sum around a project of mere renovation, addition, or adaptive reuse. In the absence of an effective public sector, dramatic architectural renderings of something new give private philanthropists something to believe in. The destruction and construction of buildings—despite the ever more unsustainable and unnecessary environmental irresponsibility of these actions—can still confer an old-fashioned sense of occasion. The Studio Museum’s erstwhile building “had been added to and changed so many times that the idea of starting fresh is critical,” Adam D. Weinberg, then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, told The New York Times back in 2015. “Its time has come.”

BUT TIMES HAVE CHANGED. Even, at the exponential pace of climate change, just over the last ten years. This far into the Anthropocene and at the dawn of a post-energy-surplus era, routinely defaulting to new demolition, new extraction, and new construction—of finding that exciting or entertaining—is an ever less interesting choice. Practices of repurposing and upcycling can be understood as new actions of transformative power. What may once have connoted precarity or scarcity can now be seen as a model for post-fossil-fuel abundance and cultural excellence. Witness how the desperate ingenuity of postwar Italian cucina povera, cooking without waste, informed the fine art movement of arte povera, which resignified humble materials into exquisite artifacts beyond the dreams of any Duchamp ready-made. Museums, precisely because they connect our ancestors to our descendants through ourselves, might become especially interested in practices that do not abandon inheritance. Such destruction as that of its robust 1914 building by the Studio Museum will come to matter more and more. Cycles of disuse, misuse, and abuse, of everything from places to planets to people, can be broken.

Could it be that architectures that take a longer view, and that are more collaborative and reciprocal and participatory with ancestors and neighbors and workers and users—that is, architectures of adaptive reuse—may also be architectures that heal a professional culture of cruelty? Showy and detached and hyperformally expressive buildings cannot be merely coincidental with showy and detached men who believe they have a lot to say. Buildings that seek attachment, encounter, mediation, collaboration, and integration into existing built fabrics and communities may encourage—may even require—different behaviors from their designers.

In communities, such as Harlem, that have historically faced threats of erasure under the classist and racist regimes of urban renewal, strategies that with more complexity consolidate new and old are especially interesting. In 1964 and 1965, the feminist poet, author, and designer June Jordan proposed Skyrise in Harlem, a visionary design published in Esquire magazine in the aftermath of the so-called Harlem riot of 1964, prompted by the killing by an off-duty police officer of the fifteen-year-old James Powell. Developed in dialogue with Buckminster Fuller (to whom it is sometimes incorrectly exclusively attributed), Skyrise featured a networked field of twelve gracefully hyperboloidal towers filled with 1,200-square-foot apartments to accommodate potentially tens of thousands of people and theoretically capable of construction in a mere thirty-six months. It wasn’t—conventionally—an adaptive reuse project, but as with adaptive reuse it sought to conserve and integrate as much as possible of the existing built environment. Among so much that is remarkable about this speculative vision is that unlike the contemporary “clearance” projects of which it was a critique (and anticipating the no-displacement regeneration of public housing developed by such contemporary practitioners as Lacaton & Vassal), Skyrise proposed to leave in place, below a seven-story datum, all architectures extant and active. On completion of the towers, as Jordan wrote to Fuller, people in Harlem would, “literally move up into their new homes,” and only then would the ground conditions be reimagined and reoccupied as a new commons. As much as the also-fascinating eco-tech details of the towers, it’s this timeline overlap and mutual reliance between old and new that is of ever more interest today. No inevitable loss of embodied energy or local memory. No closure for thirty-six months—much less seven years. Nobody has to wait it out.

This kind of project is necessarily a collective action. It enlists, in Jordan’s words, “everyone willing to participate.” Such a radically participatory and community-driven vision—with its intellectual and emotional and physical labor undertaken in mutually accountable cooperation by its own makers and users—would have the additional benefit of undermining the systems and structures within which the architectural profession’s culture of cruelty has long persisted. Disrupting a culture of cruelty is not merely a matter of disempowering and isolating those who have practiced it. It is a matter of redesigning the conditions under which such practice is enabled and encouraged.

Even at smaller scales than the near-utopian ones envisioned by Skyrise, one can imagine such an expanded field of participation liberating architects from the narrow and brittle socioeconomic roles and performances into which they cast themselves. Only the overfamiliarity of these overlapping archetypes with which architects use performances of celebrity and personality to navigate their social and economic precarity—the aged boy genius in his desperate leather jacket, the jester among high-net-worth individuals, the silky courtier, the worldly consigliere, the disruptive founder, the wise child, the design thinker, the cult leader, the artist, the sage, the seer, the maverick, the maestro, even just the unusually tall man—prevents us from seeing how they are all each in their own way a peculiar drag.

But in their falsity these roles are insidious: The court jester who feels humiliated by his role may in a sadomasochistic turn humiliate the members of his own little court; the aspiring Howard Roark who suppresses the quintessentially collaborative work of design—that necessarily interdisciplinary, lateral, communal, and sociable practice—may respond strangely when that suppression inevitably becomes impossible, may resent and punish those upon whom his dependence becomes undeniable. Those who, in a range of inspirations from British self-conceived insouciance to Dutch self-conceived bluntness, confuse being a genius with being insufferable may, when they reliably fail to discover the former in themselves, instead focus on achieving the latter.

THE OBSOLESCING BUT STILL influential developer-driven fiction of the starchitect—so convenient for branding and instant gravitas—applies its own pressures to the more general hazards of neurosis and narcissism offered by any culture of celebrity in which a single person and their persona, however false or fragile both may be, become a vessel for the shared dreams or delusions of many. These hazards may be compounded when our enthusiasm or credulousness about a persona becomes, consciously or not, especially willful as a consequence of hopes for all people who may share the identities of class, race, sexuality, gender, or more, of which that persona may be a singularly rare or notionally pioneering representative. A world in which there need be fewer famous and would-be famous architects seems likelier to be a world in which there are fewer cruel and would-be cruel ones.

Fame also appeals as a substitute for, or an indirect means toward, the material wealth that architects generally accrue so minimally relative to their labor and that labor’s value to society. In the reporting undertaken by the Financial Times and the Architect’s Journal, allegations against Adjaye are contextualized in a picture of a practice that was run in a state of financial risk and operational unpredictability—the precarity and uncertainty of which may have lent themselves to patterns of manipulative and coercive behavior. Chronic cruelties can lay the foundations for acute cruelties.

The illusion of any separation between the maker and the work—and between the work and its user or subject—can be beautifully dispelled precisely by the kinds of social and spatial practices practiced at the Studio Museum, in which the studio and the gallery are all under the same roof. And in which, thereby, those who make and those who experience art are placed into a spatial and social commons. Imagine conditions—such as in practices of adaptive reuse, renovation, and regeneration—in which the designers and the dwellers of a building are similarly in continuous contact, collaboration, and communion. Such a participatory practice opens up architecture to the sacramental work of many hands. One beautiful detail of the Bible story of the Supper at Emmaus, painted by Caravaggio in 1601, is that the students do not recognize their old teacher when they regard him standing alone on a road but only later, side by side, without any particular hierarchy, in the divine experience of cooking and breaking bread together.

Any architect’s assertion that, in Adjaye’s words to Architectural Record, “I made the buildings” is undone by the self-evident truth that those mysterious places called buildings are continuously made by their users as much as anyone who may have at some point happened to design them. Made even by noticing, by witnessing, by waiting, by telling, by asking. In the ceremony and publicity around the Princeton University Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, as a substitute for the absent principal, the unglamorous journeyman work of the architect of record, in this case the ubiquitous Cooper Robertson (now Corgan), was unusually centered. Authorship and moral ownership of the project were, in this faltering way, expanded outward toward ever greater—actual and acknowledged—participation. At the Studio Museum press day last November, Erin Flynn, the Corgan principal who had served in that role for both projects, even gave a speech. But it is the words she gave around that time to a news outlet about working on the Studio Museum during those seven years of closure that have endured in my mind. “Every time I left during construction,” she said, “people would ask, ‘When are you reopening?’