Aaron Betsky


Aaron Betsky, director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture + Design, is a widely published critic on art, architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Architecture Matters, Making It Modern, Landscrapers: Building With the Land, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, Queer Space, Revelatory Landscapes, and Architecture Must Burn. Internationally known as a lecturer, curator, reviewer and commentator, he writes the blog "Beyond Buildings" for architectmagazine.com. Director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, he has also been President and Dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin,director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and was founding Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As an architect, he worked for Frank O. Gehry & Associates and Hodgetts + Fung. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003 he co-curated "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio." Born in Montana, he grew up there and in the Netherlands.

Early life

Betsky was born in Missoula, Montana, but moved with his family as a child to the Netherlands, returning to the U.S. for college at Yale. He graduated from Yale University in 1979 with a B.A. in History, the Arts and Letters and received his Masters of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture in 1983.

Career

From 1995 to 2001 Betsky was Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 2001 to 2006 he served as director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. He has taught at SCI-Arc. In 2020 he was appointed director of the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech University.

Writings

Betsky has addressed the historically gendered nature of architecture, the unique qualities of Dutch design, and consistently advocated for an interpretation of architecture that transcends physical building. Another recurrent theme in his writings is a call to embrace and reimagine the American suburban landscape. Betsky has championed temporary or pop-up architecture as a democratic antidote to architecture's traditional "ridiculous obsession with eternity." He has often called for the renovation and adaptive reuse of old buildings rather than wasteful construction of new ones: "When will we learn that adaptation and reuse is so much better?"
Betsky has written monographs on the work of numerous 20th and 21st century architects and designers, including Zaha Hadid, I.M. Pei, UN Studio, Koning Eizenberg, MVRDV, Renny Ramakers, Jim Olson, and James Gamble Rogers, as well as treatises on aesthetics, psychology and human sexuality as they pertain to aspects of architecture, and is one of the main contributors to a spatial interpretation of Queer theory. His essay "Plain Weirdness: The Architecture of Neutelings Riedijk" won the 2014 Geert Bekaert Prize in Architectural Criticism. He has made significant contributions to architecture history and theory, including a scholarly monograph on early-20th-century architect James Gamble Rogers and an analysis of buildings embedded in the earth, Landscrapers: Building with the Land. His 2016 book on the history of Modern design, Making It Modern, was listed on Metropolis magazine's "Top 50 Design Books to Read This Fall." His 2017 book Architecture Matters, which Interior Design magazine called "a delightful ramble through a lively, well-stocked mind," offers "46 Thoughts on Why Architecture Matters," among them “Why Architecture Is So Cool,” “How Dreams Die in the Process,” “How Perfection Kills,” “Why It All Happens in China,” and “What We Can Still Learn From the Greeks.”
In addition to his books, Betsky authors a twice-weekly column for Architect Magazine, the "Beyond Buildings" blog, and is a contributing writer for Dezeen magazine www.dezeen.com. His articles, published in various magazines such as ArtForum, Architectural Review, Architect, Blueprint, and others, include critical ideas for improving the built environment, for example: "We need to start from the qualities of the interior that usually come from furniture and furnishings, while also paying attention to the thoughtful use of light, scale and sequence. This means that pattern and decoration, arrangement of furniture and fixtures, ways in which buildings respond to the body, and the ability for the interior to both cocoon us and create a relationship to a larger world through frames and views, need to be the seed of all design."

Publications