Better Late Than Never

David Adjaye, the designer of the new Studio Museum in Harlem, and Frida Escobedo, the designer of the Met’s modern wing, came together for a discussion moderated by writer/architect Julian Rose at the New School that turned on the question “What does it mean for an artist to make architecture?” That’s how things were meant to play out, anyway. Escobedo’s arrival was significantly delayed, and Adjaye and Rose were left to parley about the artist Donald Judd, whose architectural projects Rose has written about for Gagosian Quarterly. (The gallery sponsored the talk.) For Adjaye, Judd’s designs “resonated [in] that space-making was a fundamental question of architecture” and showed a “new way of making.” The conversation remained at the level of rumination even after Escobedo appeared on stage forty-five minutes into the hour-long event and Rose asked for her thoughts on the relationship between the architect and the museum. The former, she said, is a bit player in the life of the latter, which is itself less a permanent object than a congealment of various historical and cultural narratives. “Well, I don’t know if I can talk about time,” she demurred.