Light Construction: A Museum of Modern Art Book
Written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Terence Riley, the museum's chief curator of architecture and design, has identified a new design sensibility. Architects are once again concerned with beauty, and their desire to create beautiful buildings and structures is manifesting itself in the guise of "light" in all senses of the word: transparency, luminosity, weightlessness, and ephemerality. From Renzo Piano's glistening, undulating airport in Japan to Jean Nouvel's Cartier Foundation in Paris with its layered glass surfaces, these projects use glass and other semitransparent or reflective materials to create optic complexity and a new form of beauty that is at once tactile, sensual, and cerebral.