Portrait of the Architect

On Tuesday night, a masked-n-vaxxed crowd gathered at Storefront for Art and Architecture to hear artist Justin Beal speak on his new book, Sandfuture, with architectural historian Felicity D. Scott of Columbia GSAPP. In opening the event, Executive Director and Chief Curator José Esparza Chong Cuy remarked that Storefront was a “fitting space” to host the launch of a book “very much about New York City and the built environment,” since, with the iconic facade panels opened to the street, the gallery became “a part of the noisy city we all live in.” Certainly, the active street life served as a welcome counterpoint to the noise-cancelled, sterile environment of zoom calls.

Beal opened with a short reading that gave a peek into the multiple threads woven together in this biography-cum-history of Minoru Yamasaki, the architect famously, or infamously, of the World Trade Center towers in New York and Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex in St. Louis, “two major projects that exploded on live television, thirty years apart,” as Beal put it. “There are very few events in the histo…