'Architecture = Art' Inside a Work of Art

'Architecture = Art' Inside a Work of Art

World-Architects
John Hill - September 05, 2025

All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects

More than fifty architectural drawings from the collection of Susan Grant Lewin are on display at the Modulightor Building, the Midtown Manhattan home of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, until September 20. World-Architects visited Architecture = Art: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection to look at the drawings and see how they fit into the Rudolph-designed space.

Historian Jordan Kauffman's 2018 book Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 has numerous photographs that depict exhibitions of architectural drawings in New York City galleries, particularly those run by Leo Castelli, Max Protetch, and Judith York Newman. The two decades of the book's subtitle were the heyday of architectural drawings being considered akin to art—as objects to be bought, collected, and sold. With the rise of computers in the 1990s, architectural renderings supplanted drawings, effectively making the presence of architectural drawings in the art market brief, a cultural blip.

Installation view of Architecture = Art: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection

One person collecting drawing in that heyday was Susan Grant Lewin, who many New Yorkers now, myself included, know as a publicist for architects as well as for artists and designers. In the seventies, as an editor at House Beautiful, the interior design magazine first published in 1896, Lewin began collecting architectural drawings. That collecting continued into the eighties, when she switched roles and became creative director at Formica, where she would occasionally commission architects and designers to create objects out of laminates the company produced. Some of the first drawings visitors to Architecture = Art encounter, after stepping out of the elevator onto the fifth floor of the Modulightor Building, are actually sketches—by Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, James Wines, and others—for such objects.

Architecture = Art is spread across the fifth and sixth floors of Modulightor, a New York City landmark whose interior was further designated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission earlier this year. Rudolph designed the building as showroom and headquarters for Modulightor, the lighting company he founded in 1976 with Ernst Wagner, as well as an office for his architectural studio and with two duplex rental apartments. The exhibition occupies what was the upper duplex, which was added more than a decade after Rudolph's 1997 death but followed his original plans. The narrow and long two-story gallery exhibits Rudolph's masterful manipulation of surface and space, highlighted by the spiral stairs close to the north and south ends and numerous asymmetrical openings, both vertical (windows) and horizontal (floors and skylights).

At times, gazing at drawings from Lewin's collection was reminiscent of the photographs from Kauffman's book, especially in places where the (for the most part small) drawings are grouped together, as in the photo above. In other places the experience felt domestic, as with the shrine-like display of drawings by Stanley Tigerman atop the fireplace at one end of the sixth floor, shown below.

Installation view of Architecture = Art: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection

The alternatively artistic and domestic qualities of the two-story space make Modulightor a nearly ideal space for displaying smaller scale artworks, such as those in Architecture = Art. Speaking with Architects + Artisans last month, Lewin described the space as “the perfect architectural venue in which to take in these visionaries’ artworks,” though the abundance of natural and artificial light makes it difficult to take in the drawings free of distracting glares, something that should be evident in the photographs here.

One important bit of information missing from the captions for the dozens of drawings (and a further selection of photographs by architectural photographers on display) is dates. Sometimes the architects signed their drawings with a year, as with Charles Moore above, or the date of a drawing can be surmised by the project it depicts, but for the most part Lewin and curator Eshaan Mehta have let the drawings exist on their own visual merits, not as objects within a chronological continuum. Nevertheless, the drawings still convey how architectural drawings changed in the years during which Lewin collected them, as well as how architectural ideas were often rooted in the drawings architects produce—a situation that has been fading since the digital turn that began in the nineties.

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2 Modern NYC Interiors Landmarked

2 Modern NYC Interiors Landmarked

World-Architects
John Hill - May 23, 2025

Modulightor Building Apartment Duplex (Photo courtesy of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission)

New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) recently designated two modern buildings with Interior Landmark status: the former Whitney Museum of American Art, designed by Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph's Modulightor Building Apartment Duplex.

Of the tens of thousands of properties under the purview of the LPC, interior landmarks comprise a minority—just one-third of one percent. Most of the 38,000 landmark properties are located within the 157 historic districts spread across the five boroughs. Individual Landmarks are fewer, numbering 1,465, but the total number of interior landmarks is only 125. (The smallest category is Scenic Landmarks, which includes Central Park and eleven other sites.) The LPC is the only body in the NYC government that has a say in how a building looks: changes to landmarks and properties within historic districts go before the commissioners for approval. While this process tends to maintain the exterior appearance of existing buildings, the spaces behind those facades can be maligned or destroyed if their interiors are not protected. The most notable recent loss, at least in the vein of modern architecture, was Alvar Aalto's Kaufmann Conference Center near the United Nations.

Logically, most Interior Landmarks are found within Individual Landmarks, like with the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library and the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. Curiously, before the former Whitney Museum of American Art was designated an Interior Landmark on May 20, it was not an Individual Landmark. Instead, the exterior of the building at 945 Madison Avenue gained landmark protection through geographical circumstances: it is located within the Upper East Side Historic District, designated in 1981. Fittingly, this week's vote makes the former Whitney both an Individual Landmark and an Interior Landmark. 

The impetus for the vote was the Whitney's sale of the building to Sotheby's in 2023. Although the Whitney moved out of Marcel Breuer's 1966 building in 2015, decamping for a new building designed by Renzo Piano in the Meatpacking District, the museum leased out its old building first to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then to the Frick Collection. Sotheby's subsequent announcement to work with Herzog & de Meuron on renovating the interior raised concerns over the loss of notable interior elements, including the lobby, the lower level adjacent to the “moat,” and the main stairwell at the front of the building. While these spaces were included in the interior designation, the gallery floors on the upper levels were omitted, regardless of numerous preservationists testifying for their inclusion. Regardless, Herzog & de Meuron's restoration of the Park Avenue Armory, just a few blocks away from the former Whitney, points to a likewise sensitive approach for Sotheby's. “Similar to our work on the Park Avenue Armory project,” Jacques Herzog said last year, when it was announced his firm would be transforming the building from a museum to an auction house, “we will be approaching the Breuer project with excitement and with respect for its original vision.”

Just over a mile south of the former Whitney sits another modern building just named an Interior Landmark. The Modulightor Building, designed by Paul Rudolph between 1988 and 1993, and built in phases before and after his death in 1997, was designated an Individual Landmark in 2023 and then designated an Interior Landmark on May 6, 2025. The building at 246 East 58th Street is owned and occupied by the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, which hosts exhibitions and holds regular open houses. Rudolph designed the building as a showroom for the Modulightor lighting company that he created in 1976, an office for his architectural studio, and with two duplex rental apartments. 

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Architectural Posters as Works of Art

Architectural Posters as Works of Art

World-Architects.com
John Hill - March 11, 2024

Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972-1982) is on display at the Modulightor Building, the New York City home of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, until April 7, 2024. Drawn from the collection of architect Judith York Newman, owner of SPACED Gallery of Architecture, the exhibition features forty posters that served as announcements for architectural exhibitions, lectures, and other events. Here we present a selection of the posters on display.

Although Judith York Newman is not as familiar a name as Max Protetch and Leo Castelli, fellow gallerists who held architectural shows in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, SPACED Gallery of Architecture, established in 1976, is notable as the first gallery in the city devoted to architecture. Unlike Protetch and Castelli, who were dealers of art with occasional shows of architecture, Newman was educated as an architect (at Cornell University) and worked as an architect as well as an educator and editor, all within the realm of architecture. Therefore SPACED, as the name implies, focused exclusively on representations of architecture, presenting prints, drawings, photographs, and models on architects and buildings over more than 40 years (the latest show was held in fall 2019).

While Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972-1982) is not limited to posters for shows that were held at SPACED, theirs are some of the first posters visitors encounter when stopping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the Rudolph Institute's Modulightor Building. Notable among them is Architectural America (at top), an early show in 1976 that was advertised with text literally cut and pasted atop an image of Jasper Johns' Three Flags (1958). Just as the literature for Designing Decades describes its contents as encapsulating “a pivotal moment in time before the internet age,” the collage of text on art in this poster — clearly visible in the original on display behind glass — captures the techniques of those pre-Photoshop days.

Other posters from SPACED on display at include, among others, a few by illustrator David Macaulay, clearly a favorite of Newman's, and one from a 1977 exhibition of the drawings of Lebbeus Woods. Posters from other venues span from the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou, both in Paris, and the RIBA Heinz Gallery in London, to the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and Brooklyn Museum, both in New York City. The last venue staged Women in American Architecture, the influential exhibition organized by The Architectural League of New York in 1977. It presence in Designing Decades comes in the form of the text-heavy “Historic Chart Relating Architectural Projects to General and Women's History in the United States,” revealing that, while many posters opted for striking graphics to hook people, some served as vehicles of disseminating information beyond the confines of their exhibitions.

Designing Decades is spread across the fifth and sixth floors of Modulightor, the building Paul Rudolph designed for the lighting company of the same name in the early 1990s. The fifth and sixth floors were added after Rudolph's death in 1997 but were based on extant designs by the famed architect. As such, a visit to the exhibition is recommended as much to see inside the Rudolph building as for seeing the posters on display. If anything, the posters hung across the two floors have a hard time competing with the architectural complexity of the spaces. Nevertheless, Newman and the Rudolph Institute did a good job of placing the posters in sometimes unexpected places — at stair landings, for instance — turning the posters also into invitations to explore Rudolph's interiors.

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