Alan Buchsbaum
And architectural salvage
My favorite piece of writing about interiors is Janet Malcolm on art critic Rosalind Krauss’s loft, which opened a 1986 New Yorker profile. So good you need to read it in full:
Rosalind Krauss’s loft, on Greene Street, is one of the most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room … among other rarities, an antique armchair on splayed, carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris fabric; an assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped Art Deco table clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss—which are most of the things in the world, the things of “good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.
Krauss has constructed a world in which her mastery over the meaning of objects is complete. Her living space is also where she edits October, an academically respected, wildly unreadable art magazine; in both its appearance and function, the loft is an emanation of her aesthetic authority. But Malcolm turns the tables by introducing another context — that of mainstream taste, a group in which she implicitly includes the reader (“the things we see in one another’s houses”). The odd chairs and difficult art compact into a stock type: an elite with narrow, incomprehensible taste, indifferent to the interests of normal people, one of which is the desire to be happy in one’s home.
I’m a Janet Malcolm stan, but in this fight, I defend Rosalind Krauss’s loft, which is a good deal more expansive in its imagination than Malcolm gave it credit for. It was built in 1976 by Alan Buchsbaum, an architect and interior designer who worked on a series of peerlessly freaky apartments New York throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. He co-owned the building on Greene Street with Krauss and artist Robert Morris, source of the “assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece” on the wall. Buchsbaum lived upstairs, in his own loft, and hung a matching piece over a “dining pit” — a piece of his own invention, an upholstered slab with a lox-colored marble table popped out of the middle. Feet dangled in the central well as you ate. The loft also featured a curving glass brick wall, lit with airport runway lights; in 1982, Buchsbaum moved to the first floor and built a puddle-shaped hot tub in a doorless bathroom. “Our whole feeling about nudity has changed,” he quipped to the New York Times. “If you’re friendly enough to live with somebody, then it’s not too far-fetched to bathe in front of them.”
I borrow a lot of ideas from The Mechanics of Taste, an out-of-print Buchsbaum monograph I found at Aeon Books about a year ago (also on eBay). The drama of his designs masks a surprising practicality: the industrial materials he put to novel use were cheap and easy to find on Canal Street; the countertops he carved into undulating curves used space efficiently in small kitchens. For a teen’s bedroom, a client hired Buchsbaum to “do something to get all her stuff off the floor for virtually no money,” so he drove wooden wedges behind cheap Formica cabinets to set them at odd angles. The pursuit of strangeness is a constant in his work — he hated the stereotypical “beige, shiny, and well-coordinated” New York apartment and worked sedulously against it. But he didn’t seek shelter in the obtuse or academic: “There was no apparent theoretical rigor” to his work, writes his collaborator Stephen Tilly, “but more a restless intuitive search for interest, pattern, surprise, drama.”
A restless, intuitive search for things that move or surprise us — what are we doing with the objects that fill our lives if not this? My defense of Krauss’s apartment, which Janet Malcolm correctly observed was so rigid in its aesthetic order that a single Hallmark figurine landing on her counter would trigger a catastrophic meltdown, is simply that she liked it that way. Its esotericism was less a rebuke than a reflection of priorities: having a normal apartment just wasn’t something Krauss cared about. Neither did Buchsbaum. He died of AIDS in 1987, tragically young. Bette Midler, whose Tribeca apartment he filled with skirted satin sofas and a ginkgo leaf-shaped onyx sink, sang “The Rose” at his funeral.
CHEAP MATERIALS WITH AURA
CD storage shelves; studio backdrops; radiology light box ($200); colored latex tubing ($20), sheet metal liquidation; plexi panels “believed to have been used for disco floor,” $15; balustrade; custom storage with angled top; broken marble slabs ($15)
Industrial materials have gotten more expensive since Alan Buchsbaum’s day, but New York City is still full of cheap or free objects that can be put to poetic spatial use. Search for “salvage” and “liquidation” on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist; some other search terms include “broken slab” and “architectural.” The estate sale platform AuctionNinja can be hit or miss for building materials, but there is an amazing architectural salvage auction ending this Thursday.
Many of the best places to find cheap architecture ingredients in NYC are not online — check out Big Reuse for furniture and cabinets, Kas Carpet Showroom for suspiciously cheap rugs, and Fabscrap for textiles.
RECOMMENDATIONS BOARD
“Find what you’ve been missing”
RECS GIVEN
Re: sleek black pants with a high waist-to-thigh ratio, Meghan recommends Big Bud Press. Vintage Pendleton Wool and Liz Claiborne wool are also worth a look.
Re: socks, Maggie’s Organics as a daily driver (chunky, but there’s a lightweight version); if you’re looking for the fancy stuff, Tabio and Yahae
I wrote about Areaware, a design-forward home goods company that is closing bc tariffs nuked their entire business model. Read here.
If you are enraptured by men’s Olympic figure skating, I cannot recommend the anime Yuri!!! On Ice enough. It is so beautiful; each figure skater’s routine is animated by a different person to highlight the differences in style. Adore!!!
SEEKING RECS
Things to do in LA!
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