Aaron Betsky - ‘Do You Know Where You Are?…’ (2021)

Do You Know Where You Are? Do You Know Who You Are? Knowing and Not Knowing the Work of Frank van der Salm

Essay from 2021 by Aaron Betsky, the American critic of art, architecture, and design. He was the director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture + Design until early 2022.

Trained as an architect at Yale , Betsky is internationally known as a lecturer, curator, reviewer, and commentator. Director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, he has also been president and Dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin (originally the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture), director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014), and a founding Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001).

“This new scale dwarfs, above all else, the human presence and it is this lack of human bodies that is the most characteristic aspect of this artist’s work. (…) That both the new metropolises of Asia and the business centres of the Western world, the passageways in its subway systems and the transit areas in its airports, as well as the offices and hotel rooms that fill in their cells are inhuman, is a trope, which does not make it less true. That quite a few photographers have latched onto such aspects only confirms their importance.”

Date: March 2021
Essay by Aaron Betsky. (English)
Download the complete essay in PDF HERE