Barry Bergdoll

EO

You’ve occupied a very specific place in culture not only because of what you’ve done, but also because of the way you’ve done it. Working at MoMA, Columbia, the storied history of both of those institutions and their relationship. How did it all start?

BB

There was no great plan. Everything just happened. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, but ultimately I was lucky enough to get a tenured position at Columbia. I had actually turned down a job at the MoMA some years earlier, just a few years after I began at Columbia. I felt that the museum then was too volatile to leave an assistant professorship job. I started teaching at about 28 or 29. Almost immediately, I was offered a job as assistant curator in the department, but it was a complex political situation with Philip Johnson, who was the power behind the scenes at the MoMA, especially in the Department of Architecture and Design.

He wasn’t there, but was very much involved until the day he died. He had interviewed me, and so did Stuart Wrede, who was the head of Architecture and Design at the time. Johnson clearly was trying to set up a coup against Wrede and I felt I was a pawn in this game. I decided that trying my chances at Columbia was perhaps the less perilous route. I’m really lucky they hired me in the first place and that I was ultimately awarded tenure. I really love teaching. I really love scholarship. I love what I’m doing. I was a student at Columbia, so I’m very devoted to the school.

EO

Who were you before Columbia? And what drew you there?

BB

First, I was torn between whether I wanted to be an art historian or an architectural historian. At that time there was no such thing as a program to become a curator. So many people who want to come to Columbia say, “Define for me how you became a curator.” And I tell them, “I never became a curator. I just curated things.” I worked in a museum, but the idea that you would be trained as a curator didn’t exist then. You would be trained on the job.

As a teenager, I discovered my passion for art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and then I discovered there was a field called art history. Being from a sleeply suburb of Philadelphia, Wallingford, I thought it was too good to be true. “You can actually study that? That’s legitimate? That’s just too wonderful. I’m going to go to Columbia and study art history.” I arrived in New York as a young, coming out, first-year student in the 1970s. The city was bankrupt and on fire and I was so excited to be here. I started to think, “Actually, what I’m really interested in is cities.” I was so happy to be out of my dull suburb and to be in a city. This is actually even how I feel today. I love New York. I’m committed to New York.

It quickly became clear to me that I was actually more interested in architecture out in the real world, on the street, in the shape of the city, and the debates that were happening about that. I religiously attended the Wednesday night lectures at the School of Architecture at Columbia. There was one lecture a week. There were four channels of television, and there was one lecture a week. Everybody experienced the same thing rather than the fragmented world we live in now, where no two people have the same experience of a day or a week. I was enthralled by listening to people speaking about how they made architecture.

EO

What happened to art history for you?

BB

I did architecture within art history. At that time, there weren’t many PhD programs in Schools of Architecture. The history of architecture was an integral part of the history of art, as it still is. There wasn’t a debate of whether it belongs in the professional school or if it belongs in the academic setting of art history. That wasn’t a question for me. I was hanging out in the architecture school because I loved hearing about how architects worked and how they thought. I thought briefly that I should become an architecture major, a program that had just been instituted at Columbia. But then the people who were leaving school were talking about going to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and designing elevator banks and figuring out men’s rooms. I thought, “That’s not what I want to do. That sounds really corporate and deadening.”

Because one has great insight in retrospect, I’m able to tell students now that I didn’t major in architecture because I love architecture too much. I’m too passionately interested in architecture to be just solving one problem after another. I like a more global view, and I like a larger field of action that’s not possible for most single practitioners. So then I got on the path to become an academic architectural historian.

EO

Was that apparent to you from the jump, or did that realization happen in the later part of college?

BB

It happened by the end of the second year. It was clear that I was much more interested in the courses in architectural history than in the technical education. To this day, I can teach as much painting and sculpture as I can teach architecture, but my own work is on architecture and urban planning. My realization also coincided with the rise of architecture museums. The Museum of Modern Art had had its department of architecture for decades, but new institutions of architecture were created in the ’70s and ’80s. The Canadian Center for Architecture, the German Architecture Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the National Building Museum in Washington.

EO

So you weren’t really a student of the Institute for Architecture & Urban Studies, that movement?

BB

I never signed up there as a student, but I went to a lot of the public programs and exhibitions, and I knew people who went there. After I decided I wasn’t going to the design studio, I never had any doubts that I wanted to be a historian. I’m primarily a historian, but I also became progressively more and more interested in contemporary issues, specifically when I was at MoMA. When I was curator there, I thought, “This is an astounding platform that I’ve been given. I can both use it for my historical interest and as an activist.” I started to write texts and talk about how you could make the museum department into an activist department and what that would mean. But it was never a unitary vision. I was always interested in a panoply of things.

EO

When you were speaking about these rising institutions of architecture, I was thinking about Phyllis Lambert and the Seagram Building, Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Robert Caro. When did The Power Broker come out?

BB

The mid ’70s maybe, but I finally read it during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, I asked myself, “What can I do that I don’t normally do? This is a time out of time.” I could read big books for which I had never had the level of concentration to read previously. So I read Caro and then I read all of Proust.

I met Phyllis Lambert in 1972, long before I was at MoMA; in fact when I was starting my doctoral thesis research in Paris. She was recommended to meet me by a London book dealer named Ben Weinreb who helped form her library. I knew him from my years in Cambridge and from my mentor there, Robin Middleton.

EO

Incredible. I was going to ask you to tell me about Cambridge.

BB

Cambridge is a very important part of my life. It was the happiest years of my life. I went to Cambridge in between two extended moments at Columbia. Robin Middleton was a tutor of mine. He now lives in New York and is in his 90s. He’s a fascinating figure in his own right, a great scholar of French 19th century architecture among many other things. He knew Ben Weinreb, who was probably the preeminent dealer in rare books on architecture, and of prints and drawings, and architectural archives. He was instrumental in helping Phyllis build the collections of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, which has the third most important architectural library in the world.

EO

What was the cultural and social reception and positioning of CCA at the time?

BB

It was the early ’80s, so the Canadian Centre for Architecture was still an institution in formation. It had not yet built a building. It hadn’t yet moved everything to Montreal. It was between a back office inside the Seagram’s building and its future site in Montreal.

Phyllis was in the process of creating the institution and was looking for people who would be curators and staff members in this new institution, and she was recommended by Robin and Ben to meet me. She came and found me when I had just arrived in Paris to work on my doctoral dissertation in the fall of 1982. She was just opening an exhibition of the CCA’s incredible photography collection at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. She invited me to that opening, and then afterwards took me out and said, “I’d like to offer you a job in our new museum.” And I said, “Oh, that’s really exciting. The timing is bad because I’m one week into a one-year fellowship in Paris, so I’m actually not looking for a job right now, but I will be.”And she said, “Okay, well, we’re going to stay in touch.” We became great friends and over the weeks she has often come to spend time with us in the summer on Long Island. She’s an extraordinary person in the way she cultivates young people.

But I didn’t take her offer because two years later, I was simultaneously being interviewed for assistant professorship at Columbia, where I was finishing my dissertation. I said to her, “Look, I’m really torn between the museum and the university. I think both interest me. I love the concrete work of the museum, but I also love the academy. I love teaching and I like writing. This is a really difficult position to put me in.” By this point now, I’m 29 years old and being offered a job in an opening architecture museum and I’m being offered a job, admittedly on a difficult tenure track, in the best and most committed art history department in the country. What an embarrassment of riches. So I said to her, “I think one can move from the university to the museum, but it would be very difficult to go the other way around.” So I ended up staying with Columbia, but my desire to bridge the spaces of exhibition and the spaces of teaching has been there from the very beginning.

EO

I just interviewed Sadie Coles, who told me about leaving a position at Arnolfini in Bristol to go to London and work for Anthony d’Offay. She recalled people telling her that once you make that jump into the gallery world, you rarely return to institutions. But the schools of thought tied to those institutions still carry weight. What did you make of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses?

BB

I read Jane Jacobs in high school. She was integral to my turn from art history to architecture. In college, I wrote a paper on Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction of Architecture. It was on critiques of pure space and dealing with the messiness of the city, and more inclusivist approaches on how to think about design and how to affect change. I wanted to interpret them as two prophets of a productive critique of modernism. That was in 1975. I was a sophomore, so nobody was really talking about postmodernism yet. Retrospectively, so many people apply postmodernism to this period before the word was on people’s lips.

EO

You didn’t take the Phyllis Lambert job. But as the CCA grew and started to become what it is, did that feel like a missed opportunity?

BB

There have been an amazing number of really lucky outcomes in my life, where almost every time I turned something down, the opportunity didn’t disappear. So even with seeming ultimatums like, “I’m in front of an anguishing life decision—if I take this path and that path is excluded,” turned out to not be that consequential. Often, within a short period of time, the other path was still open. That was incredibly lucky. I look at the people I’m teaching today and I think the world has changed.

EO

Indeed, the world has changed.

BB

So much. Sometimes I almost feel guilty. Very few people have the luxury of that anymore. But specifically to the question of a missed opportunity with the CCA: it wasn’t a hard break with Phyllis.

When I told her I wasn’t coming to the CCA, no sooner did she say, “I want you to come up and look at some material to do an exhibition.” And then I proposed an exhibition to her. Instead of working on the book I was supposed to be finishing for tenure, I was teaching at Columbia and preparing an exhibition for the opening of the CCA building. It was Le Panthéon: Symbole des Révolutions, organized in collaboration with the Caisse des Monuments Historiques (National Institute of Historic Monuments) in Paris for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. It opened first in Paris in 1989 and then traveled to Montreal, where it became the second exhibition on the walls of the brand-new building. So in a sense, I didn’t take the job at the CCA, but I was working for the CCA anyway.

EO

I was going to ask about Mark Wigley and Deconstructivist Architecture at MoMA in 1988—a curatorial thesis that shaped how theory entered exhibition form. Fifteen years later, he left Princeton to succeed Bernard Tschumi as dean at Columbia, where one of his first initiatives was a collaboration with the CCA.

BB

The Deconstructivist Show at MoMA. In a certain way, you’re hinting at the battles of the period that now seem rather quaint. There was this huge confrontation between history versus theory that raged on for about a decade. It was extremely exhausting and very unproductive. But there are also phases in my life that are involved with what I think was a rather false debate. Anybody in that period would have felt that Mark Wigley and I were like polar opposites. We were set to be archenemies. In reality, we’re very good friends.

Janet Abrams, who was a student at Princeton at the time, worked for Blueprint magazine which I wrote for. She invited me to the Deconstructivist symposium at the Princeton School of Architecture. During a lunch break, we went to the hardware store to buy an old anti-rat product called d-CON, that you could spray around if you had a rat problem. So we bought a can and put it on the lectern of the auditorium at Princeton during the lunch break, so that when everybody came back for session two of the d-CON show, there was rat poison. The “rivalry” was just bad pranks.

EO

What did the show feel like for you?

BB

It felt like what it had the ambitions for, to define a new unity in the period’s avant-garde practice. But in that too it felt very dated, nostalgic even, since I don’t think by the late 20th century that unified front was still easily possible. Much to the consternation of many to this day, at that time it was still possible to aspire to defined the spirit of the age—whether it was formal or stylistic, or whether it also had very profound theoretical, ideological underpinnings. If there’s anybody left on the planet after the Trump White House has burned it down, people will look back and say that the d-CON has to be the final moment when people believed in the Zeitgeist.

EO

It seems the central figures of that moment and architecture—you, Mark Wigley, Rem Koolhaas—weren’t professionalized by recognition so much as by authorship: by constructing the very platforms and conditions they moved through.

BB

I hardly thought of myself in their league at the time! I’ve rarely launched into something because it was a vehicle to get to my destination. And happily, as more and more things were made possible for me and the doors didn’t stay shut, I became braver about taking risks, rather than needing to continuously be safe. And over and over again, since I managed to be simultaneously at the Museum of Modern Art without leaving my faculty position at Columbia, having two institutions was extremely empowering. I could take risks at MoMA, and if they told me, “You’re out of here,” I could reply, “Okay, I have another job, see ya.”

EO

What is your relationship to risk? When did the stakes feel high for the first time?

BB

I’d like to say that I was really out there hang-gliding at some point, but that would be really dishonest. I could take great risks, precisely because I had a safety net. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much because I owe a lot to Columbia for being so lenient for a very long time. They let me go on a leave of absence initially for three years—which turned out to be the better part of a decade—to take the job at MoMA. I don’t think that Columbia’s idea was that allowing me a leave was going to make me more risk-taking at MoMA. They just kindly didn’t want to let me go so easily. But that did make it possible.

When I got to MoMA, I thought to myself, “I’m not here to do a job. I’m here to figure out an important thing to do. And I can take these risks because I don’t know how long I’m going to be here.”

EO

What did MoMA represent to you at that moment?

BB

I was given this instrument that is MoMA. It’s an unbelievable platform. There are unbelievable resources. You can really get things done. I had to ask myself: What’s the point of doing this job if I’m just going to play it safe?

The Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA is the weakest department in the entire museum because many would be just as happy to close it tomorrow. If you go into the archives, you can see that the whole history of the place’s thinking is, “Oh, it might disappear next week.” I’m exaggerating a little, but the commitment has never been a thousand percent. Philip Johnson helped subsidize it for a long time.

EO

What made you take the role?

BB

At that point, I thought, “Why am I taking this role? I’m now a tenured professor of architectural history at Columbia, an institution where I’m surrounded by amazing colleagues, and where I’m not the only architectural historian fighting for architecture in a curriculum. If I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art, then I have to figure out what I can do that I couldn’t do at Columbia.”

In many bureaucratic fights at MoMA, I would find myself saying something like, “You know what? I’m not here to figure out what you want me to do. I’m here to figure out what I can do, given that this is an unbelievable bully pulpit for the discipline and the practice of architecture, both for architects and for the public.” It was the 75th anniversary of the department the year that I joined. In this place that’s been crafted over 75 years, my role was to answer to the challenge rather than to try to figure out what makes the bureaucracy happy all the time.

EO

While you were at MoMA, Mark Wigley was serving as dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

BB

I remember a prominent architect saying, “Isn’t that a role reversal? Shouldn’t Mark be at MoMA and you be the dean?” It wasn’t an insult; it was actually somebody who wanted to say they thought I would be a great dean. What a bizarre idea that is. By that point, all the history versus theory drama was way behind us. Mark and I saw ourselves, in a sense, as partners in crime. We had lots of discussions about how we could turn our respective roles into a win-win relationship, about how we could amplify our force collectively.

EO

When you were doing the fellowship in Paris, did you feel like you had contemporaries? Delirious New York had just come out in 1978, Learning From Las Vegas in 1972—who felt of your generation in that moment?

BB

On the state side, Mark Wigley was at Princeton. K. Michael Hays was emerging at that period. Most people would have perceived that I was much more from the old stodgy historian side of the equation, and that Mark and Michael were the Young Turks of theory. When I was in Paris as a graduate student, I didn’t even know who Mark Wigley was. Mark burst on the scene with Philip Johnson in 1987—precocious, fresh from New Zealand. I became extremely aware of him quickly through Assemblage, the journal Michael Hays helped invent.

I thought of the d-CON show as an extremely valiant effort to claim that a group of architects represented the cutting edge of the moment, or at the very least that it was a bit in the image of the International Style show, which would have been 55 years earlier.

I was never a fan of deconstructivism. I found it overly complicated and an awful lot of arbitrary angle-making. I thought that there was a huge intellectual slippage between constructivism and deconstructivism, and that this marriage between a late Russian and early Soviet avant-garde artistic movement and French theory was not a completely convincing collision of things. In retrospect, it’s extraordinary how excited people could get about a show at the Museum of Modern Art. It seems to me less and less possible for us to think that a show like that is something of enormous consequence. I tried to change that during the period that I was there. I don’t know how successful I was, but it wasn’t through putting stylistic labels on something I chose for the moment.

It’s just so bewildering to me to hear your perception as a newly minted 30-year-old. You’re putting me together with a group I never really thought of as mine.

EO

It’s not just that you witnessed that period—you were moving through it as it was forming. Your relationship to that history feels reciprocal; it was shaping you as much as you were helping to define it. I thought of Phyllis because I’d been reading the introduction to Building Seagram.

BB

That’s interesting. There’s a funny story connected with the preface I wrote for her. Phyllis had been one of the founders of the International Confederation of Architecture Museums in 1979. When I was at MoMA and I started attending the meetings. I had already been to some as an outsider, and then I became the vice president (my ICAM colleagues intended that I would then become the president, but I left the museum.)

These were the years when her book was in process and she was extremely upset at ICAM for reasons I can’t remember. She would not be upset if I said this, but she has a formidable temper. There are a myriad of stories. Anyway, I knew she was upset about something, and the phone rang, and I thought, “Oh God, it’s Phyllis. She’s going to berate me about this ICAM thing, and I just can’t let it go past ten rings, it’ll go to a voice message. I’m just going to have to stand up to her anger.” I picked up the phone, and she said, “I have to talk to you about something.” I said, "Yes, I know you do. What’s upsetting you?” She said, “Nothing’s upsetting me. I’m just finishing this book, and I think you should write the preface. Would you do it?” I was so relieved that she wasn’t screaming at me about ICAM that I said, “Yeah, of course.” By the time I hung up my phone, I thought, “Oh my God, what have I just agreed to do? Writing the preface to a Phyllis Lambert book?” She was also privy to the fact that I had written an anonymous reader’s report on her first version of the book.

EO

You did Mies In Berlin while you were still at MoMA. What did Mies mean to you?

BB

That was long before I went to MoMA finally in 2007; it dates to the moment after I had first turned down an offer to work there in the 1990s. It’s another story of a door that didn’t close. After declining a position at MoMA offered by Philip Johnson and Stuart Wrede, my pal Terry Riley took the job instead, and no sooner was he in the role than he phoned me and said, “Would you do a Mies exhibition with me?”

I said, “Terry, I’m not an expert on Mies.” And he said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I want you to do this exhibition with me. I’m just tired of all these people who have preconceived notions of Mies. I want somebody who can have a fresh point of view. Also, I don’t read German, and you do. And you really know the history of Berlin.”

So once again, I turned down the job, Terry took it and almost immediately became head of the department, and I ended up co-curating a major exhibition with him.

In terms of contemporary architecture, it was an interesting moment. And it was partly Terry’s perception, partly his luck, because I don’t think the world was preoccupied by Mies, but the world of architecture was open to thinking about him again. Mies had been modernist, reductivist, criminal number one for quite a number of years. He was hated by the postmodernists—he embodied everything they were positioning themselves against.

Rem Koolhaas had a rivalry born of admiration with Mies from the very beginning. You can see it everywhere in his early work, taking Mies on as a symbolic father figure. I do think it was generational, a need to grapple with the heroes of the modern movement. But I also think—it may sound obvious—Koolhaas is a profoundly visual person. He saw things in Mies others didn’t: the materials, the textures, the patterns, not just the abstract grid or the rationalized, industrialized modernity. He saw whole aspects of Mies. It was for that reason Terry and I asked Petra Blaisse if she wanted to design part of the exhibition.

EO

And what about the Seagram Building? Did it resonate at the time?

BB

The Seagram Building was the baby that managed not to get thrown out with the bathwater, if you will. People continued to appreciate the plaza and understood that Seagram was not an abstract object plopped on Park Avenue, even if it was often accused of being the progenitor of those windswept plazas that cropped up with the redevelopment of Sixth Avenue. People recognized that the Seagram Plaza is a room in the city, dependent on the sidewalls of the other buildings. In that sense, it’s not an abstract imposition. It’s an intervention very specific to its context.

EO

Rem Koolhaas is a deeply visual thinker—that’s the disconnect people often miss. His work gives language to the image, but the image always comes first. It has to stand on its own, as its own architecture—just as text, theory, and storytelling each form distinct structures meant to coexist, not collapse. They’re meant to remain autonomous, independent, yet in conversation with one another. It’s a kind of yes-and logic: yes, they’re connected, but they’re not the same. How were you responding at the time? Was it textual, visual? How did your beliefs manifest?

BB

He is profoundly visual. As much as he’s a very important theoretician, he’s also an extremely instinctual actor. I don’t know if this responds to what you’re reflecting on, but I’d like to think I’m also a visual person. In some ways it goes back to history versus theory. One of the uphill battles as an art historian and educator is that students are very verbal—they want to fall back on text all the time. They’re constantly looking for the text to explain everything. If you start telling them something about Rem and they can’t find where Rem said it, they don’t believe you. And you have to say, “Just look at it.” Sometimes they’re doubtful: “How do you know that what you see has any legitimacy and truth?”

That’s why we’re art historians and not historians. Historians are dependent on text. We have much more than text. We are working with creative objects. We have to have a way of understanding them, interpreting them, reacting to them, debating with them, and so on. Not everything is going to have textual support. There’s an overlap between what Rem writes and what he makes, but it’s not complete.

EO

There’s a literacy that requires one to understand the context of the time, or is earned through experience rather than through education. That’s what’s strange about college. There’s not a singular method being applied. Everyone’s coming at the discussion with different tools.

BB

Thank God. There’s a sub-theme of generational difference going on in our conversation: you’re interested both in what I do, but also in me as a product of a generation. That’s intensifying a feeling I’ve had for a while: I’m getting older, and I’m feeling incredibly lucky not only for many of my circumstances, some of which I’ve recounted to you, but also for the time I’m from. I’m from a not particularly prosperous family in the white middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia. And yet at that time it was possible to get a partial scholarship, although I had to work two jobs all the way through college. It was possible to go to an Ivy League school in Manhattan and study art history. The only students who I feel can have any of that confidence today are from extremely wealthy families. And nonetheless I’m teaching students who I just don’t think have the luxury of taking time to figure it out. You keep asking me questions as though I knew what I was doing.

All of the people I met didn’t just say, “Would you like to have a job at the Canadian Centre?” They also became people who shaped the way I thought about possibility. The only thing that was mine from the very beginning was that I was always interested in the contemporary world. I didn’t think of history as some refuge to dive into. I always thought what we’re invested in as historians has very much to do with where we are now.

Something that drove me crazy was students coming out with one or two versions of essentially the same closed-mindedness. They would say, “I love the history of architecture, but I’m not interested in contemporary architecture.” And I’d say, “Well, then I guess you’re not interested in architecture, are you?” How can you be interested in one architecture and not another? How can you be interested in the Gothic and not in what’s being built down the street right now? And the opposite: students saying, “I’m not interested in the past, I’m only interested in contemporary architecture.” Well then you’re not interested in architecture either. Why are you only interested in what’s happened in the last five minutes? You’re surrounded by older “things.”

EO

Your work often moves between the historical and the sociological, grounding social history and its protagonists within architecture’s evolving contexts. At Columbia, scholars such as Mabel O. Wilson, Felicity D. Scott, Lucia Allais, and Mark Wasiuta have expanded that discourse—treating architecture as a cultural, political, and media system rather than a self-contained discipline. Reinhold Martin’s work, by contrast, interrogates architecture as an apparatus of ideology and infrastructure, revealing how buildings organize knowledge, labor, and power. Wigley and Koolhaas approach it differently—through representation and performance, through the image as language—while Hal Foster situates these debates within a broader cultural and aesthetic field, tracing how art and architecture mutually construct the conditions of modernity.

BB

I don’t know where it came from, but I am a dyed-in-the-wool historian. I see anything, any situation, and the first thing I want to know is, “How did it get to be that way?” I know many people are not that way, but it’s hard for me to imagine a mindset that isn’t intrigued to ask those questions. Even on the simplest level: “Why is this where it is? Why did it take that form? What are the circumstances that led to it being this way? What are all of the factors that explain this object’s origins?” I’ve never gotten bored of asking those questions.

EO

What are some of the answers to those questions on the project you’re doing now?

BB

This project is on the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and it will be at the Bard Graduate Center on 86th Street in January 2026. I was invited to do it. I suppose some people have greater initiative than I do and they dream up projects and see them through. Increasingly, because I have a reputation, people come to me and ask me to do something and then I think, “Okay, this sounds interesting, how can I shape it?” So I can’t say this is my project and I sold it. I was invited by the director of the Bard Graduate Center to do the exhibition. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it under these conditions, these conditions, and these conditions, and this will be the thematic approach.”

Moreover, it’s very timely, because while we’re preparing the exhibition, Notre Dame will have been the greatest historic restoration project of the 21st century so far—although it seems like rebuilding the city of Los Angeles will exceed it.

EO

And in that context you’ve been fighting Macron?

BB

I have enormous respect for Macron, but yes I disagree with some of his stances about Notre Dame. And I have been involved in the group that’s pushing back against President Macron, because he’s determined to leave a 21st-century contribution to the fabric of Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s a noble idea, but I think we’re going to lose the fight. He actually did some amazing things at the French Pantheon along these lines with the amazing installations by Anselm Kiefer. But now he’s trying to denigrate Viollet-le-Duc, the 19th-century restorer who saved the cathedral from near collapse, and who admittedly imprinted it with his own vision of the French Middle Ages. There’s no need to denigrate Viollet-le-Duc, and no need to rip out what he did that wasn’t damaged by the fire. Macron wants to tear out 19th-century windows and replace them with 21st-century ones.

EO

So much of that comes down to light.

BB

Exactly. And that’s why it’s such a terrible idea. Those stained-glass windows are not just paintings in a translucent frame. They transform the progression and quality of light as you move through the building. They are part of the overall aesthetic, the spirituality of the building. They’re intentional. You can’t take out these light gray and white windows and replace them with something dark blue. You ruin the whole sensorial progression of the building.

EO

Because the materials themselves hold the context of the work. They project an aura that reflects their moment of making—a here-and-nowness that communicates even as it ages. The materials quite literally hold the history and context of the work at their center.

BB

Yes, exactly. And when you alter them, you erase that dialogue. It flies in the face of UNESCO conventions, so it risks losing Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité their designation altogether. If you go on YouTube, you can see me explaining to the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris why this was a terrible idea. Macron doesn’t understand that changing the glass doesn’t just change the image—it changes the entire atmosphere, the experience of time that the building contains.

EO

Someone posted a picture of the Notre Dame interior the other day and the light looked different—they cleaned it or something.

BB

I’ve become great friends with the architect in charge of the restoration, Philippe Villeneuve. I was on a Zoom call with him just before you came. He took me for a preview right before it opened to the public back in December, and they really hadn’t figured out the lighting. It was much too severe. But I’m sure they’ve since adjusted it. He told me the light had 36 settings, so I’m sure I didn’t see all 36.