The Shape of Things

Annabelle Selldorf has built a soaring career on gentle interventions, subtle forms—a design language of elegance and restraint. Dodie Kazanjian meets the architect of our moment.

A Annabelle Selldorf, the architect of the Frick Collection’s renovation and expansion, is leading me on a hard-hat tour of the site on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a few months ahead of the reopening. We are standing inside the beloved Beaux Arts building, on scaffolding inside a large, curving oval space that will be the new auditorium— something the old Frick never had. For some reason, I have a sense of enveloping pleasure and purity, as though I’m inside an egg. “I wanted this space to be the color of nothing,” Selldorf tells me. “I think it’s always fascinating how an overcast sky can be active and yet have no color.” When the workers were skimming and sanding and painting many undercoats of the same whitish primer on the ceiling, she realized that the “nothing” effect was integral to the space, and that no other color was necessary to produce it. “That’s when I thought, Okay, let’s stop. Let’s not do any more, because the less we do, the better.”

The nothing effect is a key to Selldorf ’s architecture, which has placed her at the top of her profession. “I think Annabelle Selldorf ’s goal is to create a space that you can feel but don’t have to focus on,” Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, says. “There’s a rigor and a Miesian order and attention to materials, but also a humanity in her work. She is one of today’s most thoughtful architects of spaces for art.”