Background

Although Betsky was born in 1958, in Missoula, Montana, and grew up in The Netherlands.

Education

In 1979, Betsky graduated from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, the Arts and Letters and, in 1983, he received Master of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture.

Career

Betsky brings vast and varied experience as a curator, manager, historian, critic, and in creating architecture exhibitions to the Biennale di Venezia. From 1983 to 1985, he worked as an instructor at the University of Cincinnati. From 1985 to 1987, he worked as a designer with Frank O. Gehry Associates, Inc., in Venice, California, and then, in 1987, he worked for Hodgetts & Fung. In 1994, Betsky was a coordinator of special projects, as well as a teacher at Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, California.

Between 1995 and 2001, Aaron was Curator for architecture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was also a director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) of Rotterdam - one of the most important architecture museums and centers in the world - from 2001 to 2006, for three editions (2002, 2004, 2006) he held the post of Commissioner for the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia’s International Architecture Exhibition.

In 2002, Aaron curated the 8th International Architecture Exhibition. He is currently Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (since 2006), one of the most important and oldest (125 years) in the United States. He has also held the Eero Saarinen chair in architecture at the University of Michigan and has been a Visiting Professor at some leading US universities: at Columbia University in New York, at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, at the School of Architecture in Houston, and at the Southern California Institute of Santa Monica.

From August 2006 to January 2014, Aaron was the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Betsky was named as the director of the 11th Exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2008. In January 2015, Betsky was appointed dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, formerly the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

Achievements

• Betsky is a prolific writer and journalist and the author of a dozen books and numerous articles with leading international specialized periodicals. He has written for the “Los Angeles Times” (1991-1994), and amongst the many other newspapers and periodicals he has contributed to, the “New York Times”, “The Village Voice”, “Domus”, “Elle” and “Metropolitan Home”.
  
  Aaron Betsky was commended for such publications as James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism, a conventional examination of a very conservative architect of the early twentieth century, as well as Zaha Hadid: The Complete Buildings and Projects, a study of a more radical designer working at the end of the century. In 2001, Betsky won an award from the American Institute of Architects.
  
  

Works

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• book

  • Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire

    (Examines the architectural innovations of gay men and wom...)

    1996
  • Architecture and Medicine: I.M. Pei Designs the Kirklin Clinic

    (The Kirklin Clinic, in Birmingham, Alabama, is the first ...)

    1992
  • Zaha Hadid: The Complete Buildings and Projects

    (With her most recent commission, Cincinnati's Contemporar...)

    1998
  • Drager House

    (The Drager House is a single-family house built into a ti...)

    1996
  • Icons: Magnets of Meaning

    (This striking volume accompanies the groundbreaking exhib...)

    1996
  • James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism

    (Only recently has the period between the two World Wars e...)

    1994
  • Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and the Construction of Sexuality

    (Buildings have always been an expression of human sexuali...)

    1995
  • Violated Perfection 1990
  • Experimental Architecture In Los Angeles 1991
  • Rob Wellington Quigley 1996
  • Fabrications 1998

Views

Betsky suggests that not only did modernism become the dominant architectural theory of the twentieth century, but it persists as what Architectural Record critic Scott Gutterman called “an abiding riddle whose meanings continue to unfold.” Within this notion, so-called successors such as postmodernism and deconstructionism seem to be fragments of the modernist “whole” that enable practitioners to focus on discrete elements of a movement that has grown unwieldy and complex. Gutterman’s examples of such elements include the concepts of “truth in building, the integration of technology and modem life, and accommodation of a rapidly expanding world.” Gutterman found some of Betsky’s commentary obscure or overpowering, but overall he expressed fascination with the author’s thesis.

The premise of the book Building Sex: Men, Women, and the Construction of Sexuality is that exterior architecture often suggests a male gender orientation, while interior “architecture” or design is often perceived as a female domain. He points to the rather domineering, obviously phallic nature of skyscrapers like the Empire State Building or monuments such as the Eiffel Tower as examples of the male-oriented structural design. Betsky contrasts these images with the concept of interior design, which shapes an internal, comfortable if confining environment that, for him, recalls the safety of the womb.

In his 1997 book, Betsky extended his hypothesis even further. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire focuses on what Abercrombie called in an Interior Design review “a type of space that is esoteric, ambiguous, ephemeral, sometimes only implied and one that arises from a sense of estrangement experienced by homosexual men in the West in this century.” He does not direct his scholarly attention solely to the work of male, homosexual architects, but to the “type of space” such designers might create, a space that he characterizes as liberating and therefore desirable.

Quotations: "Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence."

"The floating world is the realm of the graphic designer."

"What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure."

Membership

In 2004, Betsky became an honorary member of the British Institute of Architects.

Personality

The critics of architect and author Aaron Betsky acknowledge his credentials, his intellect, and his originality.

Betsky is homosexual.

Connections

On June 26, 2004, Betsky married Peter Christian Haberkorn, an artist.

Partner:

Peter Christian Haberkorn