Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Kristin Miller

Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism

by Mark Linder

MIT Press/282 pp./$40.00 (hb). In a scholarly discourse, Linder asserts his theories on architecture and its role in minimalist art and modernist concepts. A thorough reading of critics Clement Greenberg, Colin Rowe, Michael Fried and artists Robert Smithson, John Hejduk and Frank Gehry, provides evidence supporting the importance of the role of architecture in minimalist artwork. Linder's approach is quite literal and specific tracing, drawing and describing the overlapping spaces where art and architecture converge. Well-illustrated with architectural drawings and sketches, the concepts of space from the late 1960s are displayed, reanalyzed and seen as pivotal in the emerging dialogue of minimalism. An interdisciplinary approach, this text is integral for scholars in architecture and art history alike.

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Kristin Miller is a graduate student at Visual Studies Workshop.