Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture

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.