Unfolded

Description:


"There's a secret trapdoor, a kind of magic key into every project," says Bartholomew Voorsanger, whose life and work are chronicled in 'Unfolded: How Architecture Saved my Life.' The book, by award-winning author Alastair Gordon, is more of a personal memoir than a conventional monograph, tracing as it does the architect's picaresque journey from an orphanage in the Bronx to an adoptive family in San Francisco, to the ivied halls of Princeton and Harvard, to an apprenticeship with architect I.M. Pei and the establishment of an independent practice in 1978. A signature sensibility - minimal yet elegantly crafted, with a jeweller's attention to detail - evolved through early commissions - a private barge on the Hudson River, a master plan for the Brooklyn Museum - in which he explored the inherent mysteries of form, scale, and light. A glass-and-steel addition for the Morgan Library (1992) was hailed by the New York Times as an artful "combination of intimacy and grandeur. For the Asia Society in Manhattan, Voorsanger created a luminous garden courtyard and a serpent-like staircase which was based, in part, on a Ming Dynasty flask that the architect found in the museum's collection.Undulating trajectories of work and life intersect throughout the story. In many of Voorsanger's projects there are suggestions of a pilgrimage across space, a sequence of opening and closing, turning and unfolding, as with a series of pavilions designed for the World War II Museum in New Orleans, the wing-like roof of a mountain retreat for Russian oligarch Roman Abromovich, a twisting control tower for Newark Airport, or the highly sculpted interior of a