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 history of architecture, and I think those are definitely on the shortlist of the most spectacular.” But, as Beal himself was keen to point out, these two projects have historically overshadowed the rest of Yamasaki’s career, something he hoped the book would serve to amend. The book is not, however, a work of architectural history. As Scott highlighted in reading a small passage, Beal’s own personal narrative as a “lapsed architect”—his encounters with, rubbings up against, and experiences in the worlds of both architecture and art—saturates the prose. “What I wanted do to”, said Beal, “was to write about architecture in a way that felt closer to my own experience of it, which is quite personal…and most architectural writing isn’t terribly personal.” The event concluded with conversation over mezcal and wine spilling out into the street through the open panels, and, if it’s any indication, leaving behind a previously full, now barren book-sales table