The Brooklyn Rail

On one half of a chasm you have a “design plateau.” In a week of reportage no new form feels meaningful…
The other half of the chasm is a group of charged intellectuals burying their speculations in dense aesthetic terms.

Encountering ‘T’ Space tucked in between the tall trees surrounding it is, on its own, an extraordinary architectural experience.

The tree is the perfect architectural metaphor, stripped to its parts; it resembles the fundamental analogy of a building’s elements: roof, structure, footings: canopy, trunk, roots. The tree feels the same pressures as a building. To create shade, to create enclosure, to find the sun, to stand in the wind and stay dry in a flood. The lessons from trees are as present today as ever, they are living fossils of the past and insights into our future.

Visual beauty is a given, if not a prerequisite for any summer Costume Institute exhibition, each edition of which is unofficially guaranteed to be a blockbuster. But Andrew Bolton’s curatorial aim for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion lies beyond merely catering to the eye—that’s too easy.