Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture

Goldberger, Paul (2007)

This title is out of print.

Publication Details

Description

Since the early 1990s, The American artist Frank Stella (b. 1936) has been designing a variety of fascinating and complex architectural structures, including a band shell, pavilions, and museums. This informative book demonstrates how Stella's aesthetic has evolved since the 1960s from painting, to wall reliefs, to freestanding sculpture that extends into architecture. It accompanies the artist's first one-person exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Included are illustrations of the twenty-five highly inventive and imaginative works in the exhibition, which range from small models to a portion of a building in full scale. Also included are photographs of additional works by the artist and also of several buildings by architects who have influenced Stella, ranging from the Converse Library by nineteenth-century American H. H. Richardson that is located in Stella's hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, to Da Monsta in New Canaan, Connecticut, by Frank Gehry, a contemporary of Stella's. In his essay, Paul Goldberger, architectural critic for The New Yorker, quotes Stella: "Architecture might benefit from an infusion of the pictorial thought process, a process that is conditioned and defined by illusionism. I think the artistic process and painterly thought process have something to say to architecture today." This publication reveals the distinctive contribution that Frank Stella has made to the fulfillment of that idea.

Table of contents

Foreword
Philippe de Montebello

Acknowledgments

Frank Stella Architecture
Paul Goldberger

Checklist

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Exhibition

Frank Stella Painting into Architecture

Architectural thought has always informed Frank Stella's work, from the late 1950s when he shared a studio in New York with the architect Richard Meier to his recent stint as a professor at the Yale University School of Architecture. His early paintings, in black, aluminum, and copper paint, were forceful statements of a restrained, minimalist, and architectonic aesthetic. His later, explosive, wall reliefs anticipated the formal vocabulary made famous by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and other architects working in an expressionist mode. But since 1989, he has become increasingly consumed with designing structures and conceiving buildings himself.

Even those who have been following Stella's meteoric development over the last fifty years will be surprised by the youthful exuberance of his foray into architecture. None of his projects has yet been built, although he has come tantalizingly close to realizing an addition to a museum in Groningen; a Kunsthalle and garden complex in Dresden; a museum and sculpture park in Buenos Aires; a band shell in Miami; and a gatehouse for a prominent collector.

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