The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, designed by the New York affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, opened in 2023.
Far be it for me to engage in any starchitecture revisionist history, or even to take the first tentative steps in the direction of rehabilitating the major projects or figures of that era, the apex of which we might loosely fix on the historical timeline between the heady second half of 1997, when Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles opened to the public, and August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and in short order laid bare just how bereft of ideas about climate, housing, race, class, and regional culture architecture had become. A fixation with celebrity hollowed out architecture as it has so many other fields, never more clearly than when design-world stardom and the Hollywood variety came together in the form of the Gehry–Brad Pitt post-Katrina housing collab Make It Right, for whose architectural hubris residents of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward are…