Architecture professor builds a curating career

In the eyes of Professor Barry Bergdoll, CC ’77, Columbia is home to a giant toaster. As a student, Bergdoll participated in the long-standing tradition of mocking campus architecture—which began decades before today’s students criticized the Diana Center’s burnt orange glass and gave the building a slew of crude nicknames. “It was always said that the Law School was the toaster... and the Engineering School was the box that it came in,” Bergdoll said.

Today, Bergdoll has progressed from mocking boxy, gray Jerome Greene Hall to working at the Museum of Modern Art as the curator of architecture and design and teaching a seminar at Columbia once a year. His most recent project, the exhibition “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” is on view at MoMA through Oct. 11.

Bergdoll has been working at Columbia for 25 years, and at MoMA for three. Although it may sound like he has a lot on his plate, Bergdoll’s delicate balance of careers has been years in the making. “I’ve always been curating and teaching,” he said. “It’s just, in the past, it was a one-shot deal, guest curator for a specific exhibition.”

Continuing to teach while working as a curator is, in a way, a form of research for Bergdoll. “Still having the seminars and still working with students always allows me to be testing ideas in relationship to an audience so I don’t forget that they’re consumers of this,” he said of his work at MoMA.

But while the students Bergdoll works with in his seminar have already expressed a strong interest in architecture, he must cater his curatorial ideas to people who do not share such an interest, and who do not come to MoMA to see the architecture exhibitions. “The overwhelming majority of our visitors are not professional architects, so we’re not preaching to the converted. We’re trying to convert new people,” he said. “MoMA has always been associated with proselytizing in a certain way, getting more people into architecture, and therefore trying to improve the state of architecture.”
“Rising Currents” is the most recent front in this ongoing campaign. “At the moment, people might go to see the unbelievable exhibition on Matisse—everybody loves Matisse—and they stumble by accident into the ‘Rising Currents’ exhibition that I have up at the moment,” he said.

Accidental crowds are better than none, after all, and this unexpected audience is helping to make “Rising Currents” a success. “We know we’re capturing an audience—and the show is always crowded—that we wouldn’t get if that same show were at ... a stand-alone gallery,” Bergdoll said. The exhibition functions better in the context of MoMA as a whole because on paper, “Rising Currents” is not an attention-getter—it showcases the work of emerging architects asked to re-envision the New York waterfront in the face of global climate change and a rising sea level.

But even though “Rising Currents” grapples with a concrete architectural issue, for Bergdoll architecture is as much about appearance as practicality. He can never settle on a single favorite Manhattan high-rise, but he favors buildings with enduring beauty.

“I get wildly enthusiastic about a lot of buildings when I see them for the first time, so for me then the test is if I’m still wildly enthusiastic about them when I see them for the third time,” he said. “I can never pick a favorite.... It’s just like life—you know, you’re always torn between the old friends who you wish you would see every week and the new people who seem so exciting you wish you could have more conversations with them, and architecture is the same way.”

At times, Bergdoll comes off more like an everyman reminiscing about his college roommates or long-lost relatives than an architectural historian discussing buildings. However, one glance at the books and files that overflow his office shelves and spill onto the floor is a reminder that he is a busy professional who, like many scholars, just happens to have a quasi-sentimental attachment to the objects of his studies.

Yet while Bergdoll follows and loves architecture from all parts of the city and the world, he has paid particularly close attention to the new buildings cropping up on the Columbia campus. “I think the level of architecture on this campus has skyrocketed out of decades and decades of extraordinary mediocrity into something really quite extraordinary,” he said. “I’m really excited to see what the new science building is going to look like, once the connection between the campus and 120th and Broadway opens up.”

While the appearance of the Northwest Corner Building designed by cutting-edge Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo isn’t universally heralded among the Columbia community, Bergdoll advocated its potential to bring a new style of architecture to campus. “The Moneo building is a very intellectually challenging building, so I think obviously in its scale and its change in materials, it is startling for many people,” he said. “I suspect... that people will feel differently about it once they’re inhabiting it rather than seeing it as an alien object that has arrived.”

Although the descriptor “alien object” may not seem like a step up from “giant toaster,” Bergdoll continues to defend the Northwest Corner Building and what it means for Columbia’s architectural growth. When faced with the thought that the building looks like little more than an oversized air conditioning unit, he simply replied, “Well, there are some pretty beautiful air conditioners.”