"Of course, architects never do what you expect them to," Aaron Betsky says, and laughs. Last fall Betsky curated the Venice Biennale's architecture section, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, a project meant "not to solve problems but to get at what architecture might be," he explained when plans still were shaping. Now I've asked what indeed architecture might be.
Whenever I've interviewed Betsky, appointed in 2006 as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, our talk veers to buildings. We have met today simply to Talk Architecture, a core professional concern for him – he trained as an architect and before coming to the CAM was director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. I write about art so have the professional disadvantage of seeing architecture as sculpture writ large.
"It was very quickly clear that ecology is the new religion," Betsky says of the Biennale. "Architects now feel they must build into [their work] an argument as stewards of our natural resources. Almost every project presented made a case showing how architecture could help preserve and improve the environment, how to take shelter with a minimum use of resources."
Had he expected this response? "For me it was a kind of 'coming out.' You've been seeing it for some time now, but for me this was the first time to see so much together. It was not explicit, but was a red thread running through. Jeremy Rifkin [economist and ecological strategist] spoke, calling on the European Union to develop standards so that buildings are net producers rather than users of energy. Very ambitious.
The first time Betsky and I talked, he had said of Cincinnati "I love the logic of the landscape, the rhythm of the urban clusters," and now I ask him to enlarge on those thoughts. We have met on one of this winter's snowy mornings; he gestures to Eden Park's white landscape beyond his office windows and laughs again. His own house is on a hillside street so steep the neighbors band together to hire a plow as the city might not come for days. So hills can present problems, he says, but "what I love about Cincinnati is that it's an edge. It's where the glaciers ended, where the clean sweep of the Midwest – which has its own romance – ends and dives down to the sylvan hills of Kentucky. There's a mixture between Midwestern expanse and the density of the almost primeval forest, with the south of the city defined by the Ohio River winding its snaky course. So dramatic and so different from other American cities. For me there's a particular character to Cincinnati, and a great way of understanding it is the landscaping by George Hargreaves on the University of Cincinnati campus."
Like a piece of conversational telepathy, this comment leads directly to the question I want to ask next, I say, but we're not quite done with Cincinnati. What else about the landscape? He speaks admiringly of "the villages that nestle in all the little valleys of those hills, and the great radial avenues that just go on and out - Madison, Reading, Colerain. Especially on the west side, the hills are commanded by institutions, a seminary, a hospital, a high school, then dive down to a tight little bowl of a community. I wish we could have the public transport needed to make those communities continue. I want to celebrate them – stay tuned!"
We return to considering the university's Clifton campus, where Betsky taught architecture and design twenty-odd years before returning to head the Art Museum. "UC was a mess when I was here before. The problem was, it had begun on the hill and moved into the lower area with parking lots ringed by mediocre buildings. The divide was so strong – no sense of place, of coherence. That's why I think the best part of what's happened on campus is the Hargreaves landscape. It echoes the river and has created a sense of cohesion and place, with the best new building, the Campus Recreation Center, designed by Morphosis, at the heart of it, giving a clear focal point to the whole campus."
Betsky's architectural background strongly influenced the CAM board's choice of him as the next director, for an expansive building program was front and center on the agenda. Since then the economic picture has turned upside down. Where are we now, on that program, I ask. "We've been talking to our best friends to see to what extent they are willing to support it," he says, as he has said for some weeks and months. "Right now, we're stepping back, taking a breath, seeing what happens," he adds. "The board has accepted the building plan of Neutelings Riedijk Architects. Our internal work is continuing, to ensure that when and if we get back on track, we're ready to go. In the US almost every major project not near completion has been halted. Some people hope that public funds might include investment in cultural resources. But we must wait to see if that happens."
The British magazine, the Economist, recently carried an article on what it called "the Bilbao effect;" linking architect Frank Gehry's sensational Spanish museum to attracting new audiences to new, original buildings. What does Betsky think of that? He points out that Bilbao was not the first museum to take on a new audience with a new look. "The Louvre reorganization some years ago, and others, have been very effective in opening up great collections to a wider public. Where churches and palaces once were iconic anchors for a community, art institutions now perform that function. They draw people there, give an image to a community, display wealth inherited from the past, and become something of an open treasure house. Art institutions have become our new cathedrals and palaces. . .not just places to store and hold art, but vibrant and attractive and also contemplative community centers." Architecture, in Betsky's outlook, can be handmaiden to those goals.
Betsky is interesting on any number of subjects. We didn't talk about bicycling this time, although we have, but we did touch on the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, a project of Bernard Tschumi who designed the Lindner Center on the UC campus; the knotty curatorial question of the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum to Athens (arguments on either side, we agreed); the inevitable shifting of cultural resources as power changes hands, and assorted related topics. The plan, though, was a conversation on architecture. Mostly, we stuck to plan.
Photography by Scott Beseler
Aaron Betsky and art museum facade
Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum
Gehry building, UC campus
Bilbao, Frank Gehry's sensational Spanish museum, provided
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