(An article)

As many of you will have by now heard, the artist Robert Irwin, my dear longtime friend (coming on almost fifty years now) and in many ways my originary subject (the principal, for starters, of my very first book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, from back in 1980, with a second edition in 2007) died peacefully last Wednesday, at age 95, his wife Adele at his side, following a short illness. I’d visited with him myself the week before at his hospital bedside in La Jolla, where he drifted in and out of copresence, though at moments he grew piercingly, almost achingly himself.

The building is formally divided in half, with one side dark, the other light. Inside, transparent scrim walls are stretched taut from floor to ceiling in black or white respectively, bisecting each long wing and capturing the always-changing natural light. The connecting corridor has a progression of scrim walls that sequentially cross and fill the space, with an enfilade of doors for passage.