Publication

  • Tony Smith Architecture Catalogue Raisonné
    John Keenen
    Author
    Christopher Ketcham
    Contributor
    MIT Press and Tony Smith Foundation, 2024
  • GRANTEE
    John Keenen
    GRANT YEAR
    2023

Tony Smith, The Glass House, 1954. Charcoal on paper, 12 1/8 x 18 in. Courtesy Tony Smith Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Tony Smith remains best known for his monumental sculptural constructions, the works that would secure his success in the 1960s and his continued artistic legacy. Yet Smith began his career as an architectural designer and architecture remained his focus for over two decades, from the late 1930s to the mid-60s. He designed and built nearly a dozen structures and conceived of designs for hundreds of other projects, including private residencies, apartment complexes, churches, civic projects, and utopian metropolises. This publication brings together all of Smith’s architectural projects—both built and unbuilt—for the first time. They are extensively documented through new and archival photography accompanied by unpublished sketches, drawings, and models. Through a rigorous formal, historical, and critical interpretation of this body of work, Tony Smith Architecture Catalogue Raisonné advances the existing scholarship on Smith’s architecture, and important, yet little-known facet of his practice.

John Keenen received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in 1979 and a master’s of architecture from Columbia University’s School of Architecture and Planning in 1983. Along with Terence Riley, he started the internationally recognized architectural practice Keenen/Riley (K/R) in New York City in 1984. Keenen has taught, lectured, and exhibited his work at numerous academic institutions, including Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Texas at Austin. Keenen has twice been the recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and has twice been a finalist for the prestigious International Andrea Palladio Award for Architecture. In 1998, he curated the architecture section of the retrospective Tony Smith: Architect Painter Sculptor at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2004, he curated an exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York titled Poul Kjaerholm: In Context. From 2012–17 he served as a trustee of the Design Trust for Public Space in New York. Keenen is a founding partner in PARALLEL, a cultural advisory firm opened in 2015, that provides strategic planning for public and private arts institutions. The work of the firm includes curatorial services and exhibition design, collection development, master planning, and architectural programming.