Frickrolled

THE RENOVATION OF THE FRICK COLLECTION precipitated the greatest concurrence of art and architecture in the history of New York City. This phenomenon of the early 2020s had nothing to do with the Frick’s campus at Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nothing to do with the 1914 Beaux Arts pastiche of a mansion, arguably the last such of the first Gilded Age, commissioned from Carrère & Hastings by Pennsylvania coke magnate and sometime chairman of Carnegie Steel Henry Clay Frick, as a venue for his showy horde of European art history’s greatest hits. Nothing to do with the workmanlike 1935 annex, with its palmy skylit Garden Court and celebrated Oval Room gallery, plus a neighboring tower for the Frick Art Research Library, designed by John Russell Pope in fulfillment of Frick’s intention for his home to be in perpetuity a monumental gallery. Nor with later additions such as the small grassy quadrangle, tidy reflecting pool and all, added in 1977 east of Pope’s 70th Street entrance or a 1975 Reception Hall and now named for its landscape designer, Russell Page. And especially nothing to do with the recent slate of supplemental building works—27,000 square feet of new construction plus 60,000 square feet renovation, which together, and at the reported cost of $220 million, increase the museums’s display space by a third, accommodating a rise in annual attendance (from 250,00 to 340,000) over the last decade. Some airy temporary galleries, a 218-seat basement auditorium, an education center, plus a glassy gift shop and a velvety café, among other augmentations, combine to bring the big old house up, albeit at boutique scale, to the industry standard of the nearby Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums. These latest developments were undertaken to a design by the New York firm of Annabelle Selldorf (with Beyer Blinder Belle), whose own New York career took off with her deft 2001 transformation of a rather more modest 1914 Carrère & Hastings mansion fifteen blocks north into the Neue Galerie for German and Austrian fine and decorative arts—that now beloved jewel box for Schieles and strudels.

The real story was the Frickney. That appellation—with its New York City summoning of freaky humanity—should always be used in place of the formal designation the institution bestowed upon the temporary Madison Avenue satellite, the Frick Madison. The Frickney operated out of the superbly restored incarnation of the landmark 1966 Brutalist building by Marcel Breuer for the Whitney Museum of American Art from Thursday, March 18, 2021, to Sunday, March 3, 2024. You will of course be familiar with Breuer’s building: reverse-setback stepped facade in severe gray granite veneer; entry bridge over sunken garden sheltered by overhangs; oracular trapezoidal eye of that singular bay window above. When in 2014 the Whitney—following two embarrassingly polemical and rightly failed expansion proposals by the fascinating succession of Michael Graves (in 1985) and Rem Koolhaas (in 2001)—moved downtown to a pathetic late-stage Renzo Piano self-tribute medley in the Meatpacking District, the Breuer building was rented and rehabilitated (thanks again to Beyer Blinder Belle) by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What had been a rather run-down place was brought back to brilliance—all the way down to assiduously rewaxing the granite slab floors with Breuer’s own proprietary blend of finishes. As the Met Modern, the building housed some of that museum’s relatively dreary collection of twentieth-century art, plus memorable temporary exhibitions, during reshufflings at its own sprawling complex on Fifth Avenue. Until the Met, overextended by its own multiple renovations and additions, signed its lease over to the Frick. Now that the Frick has moved back out, the Breuer building—only its exterior and lobby protected by landmark status—has been sold to Sotheby’s and awaits an uncertain fate as private showrooms for the York Avenue headquartered auction house.

For those thousand and eighty-one days, the Frickney was the best art museum in the history of New York City. I’m certain that every artwork in the Frickney looked the finest and truest that it ever has or will—the most immediate, animate, inevitable, lucid, potent—since the moment each passed out of its maker’s hands. Breuer’s severe melancholia perfectly tempered the single vice of Henry Clay Frick’s taste: a tendency, somewhere at the edge of a Fragonard or an Ingres, toward the cloyingly dainty, fussy, shiny, and insipid. Certain pieces, such as Giovanni Bellini’s 1480 St. Francis in the Desert, granted its own chamber in which steady northern light from one of Breuer’s trapezoidal windows appeared to fall not merely onto the canvas but into the saint’s own eyes, seemed at long last to have come home—to themselves, to us, to time. The ingenious positioning and juxtapositioning of artworks, in an installation by Frick curator Xavier F. Salomon, methodically fulfilling and animating the compelling sightlines and surprising cross-axes so latent in Breuer’s architecture, was as good a justification as one will ever find for the peculiar and privileged and problematic museological practices of collection and contemplation. The Frickney’s atmosphere of urgent stillness in the presence of the work of human hands was a rare tonic for a contemporary subjectivity bombarded by that force-feed from the ubiquitous little screen. Something happened at the Frickney, at the crossroads of art and history, precision and ecstasy, murk and spark, that brought you to your senses. I remember St. Francis, Bellini. I remember the atmosphere, the light.

NOTHING LIKE THAT HAPPENS at the new Frick. Back where they started, the artworks recede into a cluttered visual field of colorful carpets; curtains; chandeliers; tables; chairs; sideboards; flowers; objets d’art; wainscotings and moldings and panelings; veiny marbled mantles and thresholds. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to move at your own pace. It’s hard to be still. Even in relatively uncrowded and lofty chambers, something in the labyrinthine layout and patchwork of building elements from 1914, 1935, and 2025, makes it hard to see the canvases from either close up or far away. A handful of especially treasured paintings has been promoted to newly accessible upstairs rooms, which have been restored to their appearance when they were the Frick family’s private apartments overlooking Central Park. The view up there, over the mansion’s lawn along Fifth Avenue and across into the emerald treetops of Springtime, is nice enough to remind the visitor to wish to be rich and to live nearby. On the gray and humid Thursday of my visit, the museum, for all its would-be grandeur, had the airless and restless atmosphere of a hectic public-school cafeteria on a rainy day. I ran across Bellini’s St. Francis, now rather incidentally installed over a mantel in one of many relatively low chambers and halls downstairs, crowded by a vast mahogany table that had been polished into dazzling oblivion. In such a setting the painting—rustic, modest, gentle—had mostly regressed, like so much else in the place, into a coruscating display of capital accumulation and an article of interior décor.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is due to some inevitable constraints within the wills and testaments of Henry Clay Frick, and how much can be attributed to the design decisions of Annabelle Selldorf. A proposed expansion in a 2014 proposal by the architecture firm Davis Brody Bond, at the minor cost of Russell Page’s little quadrangle, very rationally extended the low mass of Carrère & Hastings’ palazzo and extruded the high mass of Pope’s tower, resolving the whole into a low east-west bar and a high north-south bar—all deferentially enrobed in still more of the existing pale Indiana granite, chiseled into duplicate classical cornices and courses. This understated scheme may have been insufficient for the ritual of celebration—gratifying to institutions and reassuring to neighbors—that often attends the work of architects at Selldorf’s not inconsiderable fame and established approbation. Back then, Upper East Siders, perhaps willfully despairing at the projected loss of lawn, succeeded in squelching the proposed build-out. That he was among its more prominent critics—the mid-block garth was conceivably, “as important [to the Frick] as a tapestry or even a painting,” he told The New York Times—may explain why Robert A. M. Stern, a uniquely suitable architect at the crossroads of New York high society and academia, whose most scintillating successes have also been overlooking Central Park, seems never to have been in the running for the subsequent building works.

A decade later, retaining Page’s parklet and ducking under the usual sightlines and sky-planes, Selldorf’s intricate composition is more complicated than Davis Brody Bond’s. The library tower accrues another twenty feet on its southern side, with a lightly classicizing stone skin. Symmetrical to the base of that tower, across some big bits of glass, a stout four-story annex squeezes into the center of the block to accommodate special exhibition galleries and education facilities. Perpendicular to that block, a penthouse is set on top of the 1975 Reception Hall to enclose the gift shop, as well as a low, broad, and artificially skylit corridor that addresses the new café tucked into a coplanar level of the library tower nearby. Outside, this whole is less than the sum of its very many parts. It suffers from the familiar Manhattan problem, especially common among big residential developments in historic districts, of neoclassical-ish façades that become chopped and screwed by obligatory setbacks and cutaways. Jumbles when viewed in real-life perspective, such façades resolve into classical order only in the kind of painterly elevations reviewed by boards and commissions. Here, the ground-level pastiche of blind windows and rustication still enforces, Parisian hôtel particulier–style, local symmetry around that now immortal little lawn—a symmetry that comically gives way along the property line to the adjacent apartment building’s towering rear wall, oddly placed bathroom windows and all.

Inside, especially in the heightened Reception Hall off the main entrance with its elevators and pendant lamps, the Frick now feels a little like one of those surprisingly surviving luxury department stores some twenty blocks south on Fifth, or like a stately but sterile old hospital lobby somewhere over on York. In a far corner there’s a narrow cantilevered staircase. Brassy and glassy, it usefully connects the basement cloakrooms and bathrooms to the upstairs gift shop and café: In the considerable publicity around the reopening, this otherwise-not-especially-distinguished feature seems to have become the new project’s visual signature. On that gray Thursday of my visit, those stairs were as busy as Jacob’s Ladder. Meanwhile, Carrère & Hastings’ original and actual grand staircase—gracious, gradual, monumental, occupying a dim chamber just across the Entrance Hall from the Reception Hall—looked strangely underused. It’s a shortcoming of visual and physical choreography sufficient to inspire worry as to whether the legacy assets of the campus had been sufficiently leveraged in the latest design. At the bottom of the younger and lesser staircase, quite far underground, and to replace a Pope music room sacrificed in the expansion, there’s the surprisingly expressionist and steep auditorium. Recalling the shape of a peeled and senescing soft-boiled egg, with hidden cove lighting inside artful slashes and what sounded to me to be perfect acoustics, it’s appropriately glamorous, gratifyingly intimate, and utterly exquisite.

CRITICAL RECEPTION HAS BEEN RELAXED. Where it seems most credulous and incurious may be where it’s deferring most habitually to the presumed judiciousness and tastefulness of the city’s wealthy and powerful—rather than responding to any particular virtues and vices in the design itself. Taken generally at face value are the assertions made on Selldorf’s website: that the expansion “honor[s] the architectural legacy and unique character” of the campus; that it “harmoniously integrates the historic architecture with new additions”; that the older buildings are “respected with a vocabulary of materials that are a continuation of those yet unapologetically modern in detail”; and that “the entire project has been executed with sensitivity and restraint that unequivocally expands the Frick, complementing but not competing with its architectural legacy.” The Wall Street Journal’s Michael J. Lewis also uses that word sensitivity, along with subtlety, and assures us that in encountering the particular twists and turns in the stitched together campus—such as that steep cantilevered staircase—“we find a quality that is in short supply in contemporary architecture: humility.” New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson, under a headline calling the new Frick “a gentle intervention,” says that “it settles comfortably into the skyline, quietly getting stuff done. Here, inoffensiveness is a major achievement,” and that the architect has “performed a therapeutic intervention, helping the museum to grow, mature, and adapt without rejecting its past.” “To build out a beloved landmark in a historic district,” Davidson adds, “and slip in an extra 27,000 square feet of new construction practically unnoticed—that’s the work of a reverse cat burglar.” The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman reports that, “The expansion is about as sensitive”—there’s that word again—“and deft as one could hope for. At moments, as in a voluptuous new marble staircase and airy auditorium, it approximates poetry.… It moves the Frick squarely into the 21st century and seamlessly solves multifarious problems. And where it counts, it leaves well enough alone.”

Something about the cumulative vocabulary and tone of such assessments gives me the ick. I am still trying to figure it out. I think half of it is around gender. Architects who are also women seem so often required to perform being sensitive, and seem so often to have their stated sensitivity explicitly enlisted in their narratives of publicity. Even for a hybrid construction that is part landmark and part background building, part addition and part renovation, would the work of a male-identifying architect—especially of the masc aging-boy-genius, non-approximate-poet kind that remains the standard template—be so praised for its sensitivity? For its harmony; for its subtlety; for being inoffensive; for being quiet; for being restrained; for being unnoticed; for helping but also for getting out of the way; for being gentle; for being a relief; for being complementary; for slipping in; for not rejecting its neighbors and companions; for seamlessly problem-solving; for leaving well enough alone? For being so damn respectful and yet—lean in, baby—being so unapologetic? The problem with that last adjective is that it implies someone in greater authority, to whom one might apologize.

I think the other half of the ick is around class. Or maybe mere classiness. The updated Frick Collection is a fancy and pricey enterprise, and New Yorkers seem accustomed to the idea that therefore it must be a great one. But absent is the wildest and therefore truest greatness, the kind manifested at the temporary Frickney. Which was great precisely because it was accidental, emergent, surprising, sublime—greater than the sum of its parts and far surpassing the tediously realistic expectations of its makers. The Frick’s campus is now competent, sufficient, and abundant in its features and fixtures. Many complicated and costly problems have been comprehensively solved in complicated and costly ways. To my eyes, the project (necessarily so, given the choice not to follow the simpler 2014 parti) has very many seams—not seamlessness. Its vertical circulation (often the main spatial dilemma of urban museums) does not transcend the Manhattan problem of being steep and mechanical. The materials are luxe-signifying—all that marble—but the intricate and hectic experience of pushing through the spaces, both new and old, lacks calm and voluptuousness. The exterior ornament—neither really historicist nor modernist—seems well coded to pictorially penetrate the defenses of review boards but does not do much in the real world: neither to so skillfully complement-by-contrast, as in the nearby 1992 work of Charles Gwathmey at the Guggenheim, nor to wholeheartedly imitate, as in the nearby 1996 work of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo at the Jewish Museum. Maybe much of the new Frick’s critical reception is just another expression of the grade inflation that attends New York City’s grandiose self-imagination and amour propre. Especially when it comes to the generally mediocre quality of our architecture both historical and contemporary, relative to Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago. On East 70th Street there is evidence of skillfulness by all concerned—the financiers, the curators, the designers—but when I see such deference in critique, in which such skillfulness is not taken as a given but as something exceptionally worthy of praise, in which competence is treated as excellence (especially in our second Gilded Age in which we might be expected to better the first one), I worry.

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, the class system is older and the press is made of sterner stuff. Everyone has had more practice. The reopening of the Frick coincided with the opening of what is—if a credible critical consensus among Great Britain’s almost uniquely alive-and-kicking design press is to be believed—a failed renovation by Selldorf, commissioned to rationalize a circulation bottleneck at its ever more crowded entry, of the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery on London’s Trafalgar Square. This wing was the celebrated 1991 work of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Selldorf, equally facile in classicist, historicist, and modernist styles, chose for this project a determinedly modernist manner. Her update removes from the interior several fun fake (and even Tuscan!) columns originally inserted for scenography and choreography; pares a prominent overhanging mezzanine back to a not especially necessary piano-curve; encumbers the entablature with signage; replaces the original pomo color palette with a spectrum of grays; looks like a slice of junkspace copy-pasted from Heathrow Airport; and is felt by many to be like a carbuncle on the face of a beloved old friend. In 2022, Scott Brown, now ninety-three, responded in a public letter to renderings of the project, remarking that Selldorf “should return to the original plans and try to understand what they stood for.… Without this, the intervention is arbitrary, meaningless, and not grounded in a proper and respectful understanding of the role of access in this museum.” In an irony surely appreciated by that great genius of covert sarcasm and simulated innocence, by undermining everything defensible about the one good public building that Scott Brown and Venturi produced in their overlong careers, Selldorf’s design did at least validate the central thesis of their lifelong discourse, which was that all architects except them and their elect of cool friends were squares: doctrinaire, diligent, humorless, tasteful, and logical to a fault.

The long transatlantic shadow of the National Gallery may offer a key to the difficulty at the heart of the new Frick. The National Gallery was established at the start of the nineteenth century to prevent impecunious gentry and nobility of the British shires from selling their best Holbeins and Reynoldses into the collections of continental royals and other dubious foreigners. Its not-especially-distinguished building was designed in the 1830s by one William Wilkins, a manor house architect of low achievement who stretched out the agrarian typology of the countryside estate to comic shallowness and breadth, in order to command the full width of the new urban square at Charing Cross. By the end of the century, England’s agricultural collapse saw those masterpieces being bought up faster and faster from their cozy corners of country houses—with the National Gallery competing precisely against those Anglophilic American plutocrats, the Morgans, the Carnegies, the Fricks. Those new men built their own urban palaces in the image of the bucolic retreats from which so many of their adorning artworks were extracted. When Frick in 1915 contemplated his home becoming a house museum, he may have been influenced by how those depleted British aristocrats were beginning to turn their own estates and townhouses over to Great Britain’s National Trust to become museums of themselves. Today, urban mansions such as Frick’s occupy an uncertain cultural space between house museums—the preserved habitats of the prominent dead—and art museums. It was perhaps some kind of case for the former, against the modernizing and commercializing tendencies of the latter, that Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Henry’s great-granddaughter, in a June 2018 New York Times communiqué, argued against the then-proposed expansion of what she saw as the otherwise “authentic and intimate” structure that bears some of her splendid name. “The collection stands apart in New York’s bustling cultural landscape because of [its] quietude, a respite from the hectic experience of New York art museums [emphasis hers], just as Henry Clay Frick wished in his will,” she wrote. “I have watched anxiously as the Frick Collection has over the past 20 years embarked on a museum-like decorative arts acquisition program of hundreds of items.… I cannot agree with anyone who contends that an expanded gift shop and other entertainment facilities that would most likely be rented out for revenue-generating events are essential to the programmatic needs of a historic house museum.”

Her anxiety seems supported by the not entirely happy fates of such places as the Morgan Library and Museum—a McKim, Mead & White mansion acquired in 1902 by J. P. Morgan for his collections and ruined in 2006 by another late-stage Piano renovation and pavilion that confounded its circulation and (surprisingly, given its designer’s hoary reputation as Mister Sunshine) increased its gloom—and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum—a vast and darkling 1902 Babb, Cook & Willard pseudo-Georgian compound on East 91st Street that despite generations of installations and renovations has been a tough fit for the institution ever since it arrived in 1976. When I remember the old Frick, from a visit long ago, I recall it entirely as a quintessential house museum. My experience was exactly what I imagine to have been those of some circa-1900 agent for old Henry himself, venturing through some country house in deepest darkest Kent—a profound and somehow reassuring shabbiness in which his new money had finally patinated into the prideful pseudo-self-effacement of old, a dusty mystique in which the melancholy reverie of the place, seemingly a thousand miles and a hundred years away from Fifth Avenue outside, would as you wandered past many lesser daubs of dubious attribution thrillingly be broken—as ragged clouds are by the moon—by the brutal and beautiful pale visage of Sir Thomas Moore as searchingly rendered by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1527. Today’s New York City is in desperate need of such peculiarity, such particularity, such personality, such intimacy, such grit. When I compare this strange specificity to the generic global tidiness into which the Frick Collection has been scoured, I wonder if Martha Frick Symington Sanger had a point: that somehow the Frick was better when it was worse.

I wish things had gone differently. Had Selldorf treated that big old house as an artifact as strange and specific as the artworks it sheltered—as content rather than as form—she might have made her addition not in semi-imitation of its middling classical style and expensive materials. Instead, she might have intervened more in the manner of her signature triumph, the 30,000 square-foot home designed in 2014 for the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. That’s a building of excellence: both calming and energizing as needed, whose rigorous woodsy detailing, cast concrete walls, and skillfully orienting interior layouts almost fully elevate it from a smart exercise in contemporary modernist styling to an actual example of the timeless Modern ethos. I love to imagine the play of complement-by-contrast that would have transpired if Selldorf had, with the courage and optimism of an earlier era, brought that exact kit of parts from Chelsea to the Upper East Side.

Of course, as long as we are entertaining the unlikely: Imagine that, faced with the self-evident and unsought and catastrophic success of the Frickney, all the relevant institutions and individuals—board members, trustees, bankers, and above all architects—would have been possessed of the agility and audacity to course correct. And so made those miraculous thousand days last a hundred years or more. Imagine, given the high embodied energy and carbon cost of new construction and the forty percent that the building sector contributes to the current planetary load of same, how happy Mother Earth would have been without all that new construction. Both the duty of an art museum—to steward and share the collective human inheritance of the art we have made across the millennia—and the duty of a house museum—to show us something about that influential other country called the past—could have been fulfilled. The old Carrère & Hastings pile could have been restored and decorated (with the lesser artworks) into an artifact teaching us about the previous Gilded Age—this is what money looked like—to better enable us to resist the injustices of this one. Afternoon tea in the Garden Court (that palmy low atrium whose addition was Pope’s major move in turning the house into a house museum) would have been great. As for the rest of the Pope additions not occupied by the library, perhaps Sotheby’s (from whom the Breuer building would be spared) could have moved in and shared the place—acquiring even more prestige on Fifth Avenue than on Madison, with an even more Midas-like touch of class for the high-net-worth individuals who are its constituency. Everyone (except the Whitney, reaping what it sowed downtown in Renzo’s monument to every bad idea he ever had), comes out a winner.

BUT, I HEAR YOU SAY, the world doesn’t work that way. And, I say to you, why shouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t architects—those obliged to understand and enact the ethical stakes of aesthetic events and of the built environment more generally—be the ones to make it so? What cultural and economic and social conditions would have enabled such agility? One such condition would be an ever more serious affirmation that architecture is a service profession, not a high-carbon, high-energy, high-capital means of self-expression for architects. (“Every artist gets to express what they want to express in different ways,” Selldorf told Dezeen at a May 2025 panel on the occasion of the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing, “and I think architects do too.”) Another such condition would be a turn away from the gratuitous—yet still default—cycle of demolition and construction: Is the answer always a new building? No, no it is not. At our current conjuncture of hyperurbanization and climate change–driven polycrisis, the most interesting choices for living sustainably in dignity, density, and delight are always adaptive reuse, material harvest, and moratoria on new construction. These are the Aquarian fantasias that have me imagining a figure such as Jeanne Gang, were she to live up to her calling and reputation as a thought leader in the spirit of such New Age heroes as Cedric Price and Anne Lacaton at their most strident, telling New York City’s Museum of Natural History that given the current states of nature and of history they in no way needed a high-carbon, high-energy new wing—that will serve mostly, pace Martha Frick Symington Sanger, as a monetizable event space—but could simply install their desired butterfly habitat somewhere among their existing annexes and archives. Or imagining Annabelle Selldorf rising to her own occasion and conceding that, happily for natural history and for art history, no architect alive was ever going to top the Frickney. And then using all the cultural capital and technical skills that architects have in unique combination to push such an insight upstream against all the currents of commerce, commodified debt, and illusions of progress that would resist it. This, right now, is our profession’s call to adventure.

Maybe it all comes down to that familiar stupidity, the denial of death. Frick’s desire for his house, just as he knew it, to persist unchanged in perpetuity—like Isabella Stewart Gardner’s in Boston, like Albert C. Barnes’s in Philadelphia—was, though decorously sublimated into public spiritedness, also an endearingly and ridiculously human wish to live forever. The Frickney’s only rival as New York City’s greatest art museum is MoMA QNS, another thousand-day wonder that existed in 154,000 square feet of an adaptively reused staple factory in Long Island City from Saturday, May 21, 2002, to Monday, September 27, 2004. In contrast to the claustrophobic and frantic mess that is MoMA’s midtown campus after the additions and renovations that occasioned that displacement, MoMA QNS was an elucidating, liberating—and above all modern—experience of sweeping horizontal vistas, flowing and empowering optic and haptic movement, and radical juxtapositions. Monet and Pollock regarding each other across time under a highly serviced and seemingly infinite twenty-one-foot-high steel space frame was a waking dream out of the most visionary Mies collage.

Maybe there is something about believing that you’re designing only for the next thousand days that confers the correct mindset for building for the next thousand years: not a calcified rigidity and brittle certainty in the face of the rapid and unpredictable transformations wrought by the algorithmic, simulated intelligences of information technology; by those authoritarians who would terrorize us into fighting, freezing, or fleeing; by the cascade effects of the climate catastrophe and Sixth Great Extinction, but a sensibility of ever greater lightness of being. The author of MoMA QNS, architect Michael Maltzan, has written poignantly about where we look for permanence and where we seek change: “In a traditional architectural or cultural practice, to represent an institution is to assert their permanence within society. This static public identity, typically fixed in the form of a grand public stair, gives way [to] an expanded space of experience occupied and defined through movement.” When we visit a museum to ritually cherish its artifacts, we rehearse in miniature life’s cycles of attentive approach and inevitable departure, collection and recollection, coming and going. That is part of what museums are for.

Maybe what matters is not only the conserved and preserved art, whose archiving and curatorship tends it toward eternity, but the architect’s contributions toward eternity’s necessary complement: ephemerality. Toward moody atmospheres, mutabilities in daylighting, the inherently dynamic natures of biospherical homeostasis. Now when I look at the treasures of the Frick and the MoMA in their stultifyingly permanence-asserting marble-walled chambers, I still try to summon the radical contingency and reciprocity between their spaces and seekers that they achieved in their greatest and lightest architectural settings at the Frickney and MoMA QNS—in which their lesson was not only their own endurance, but ours. I feel as Selldorf did when she remarked to Dezeen in London, “I think it’s very interesting that as an architect, I remember works of art in the context of the space that I’ve seen them in. Whereas art historians see the work of art only, I remember the atmosphere, the light.”