The Brooklyn Rail

“Architecture is saved from obsolescence and appears contemporary as it is framed and reframed by preservation as culturally significant.”

– Jorge Otero-Pailos

Cutting up a building is not a new idea. Gordon Matta-Clark, an American artist trained in architecture and a New York native, famously took up a chainsaw to violently cut into buildings bare-chested. His guerrilla-style, labor-intensive works across the 1970s left a lasting legacy of “building cuts” and “anarchitecture.” He executed seven significant but transient building sculptures, cutting geometrically complex voids in existing buildings in Manhattan, Chicago, and across Europe. All of them, seemingly valueless sites, were eventually destroyed or repurposed.

In 1975, New York’s Hudson River Piers were in visible decay. Matta-Clark saw potential in mutilating one of the existing derelict pier sheds—the transfer station at Pier 52. He began by carving two openings, or "windows," through the shed’s exterior walls, allowing dramatic light to pour into the structure. He altered that building both physically and conceptually. For a short period, Matta-Clark’s precise surgical incision transformed a disposable object into a well-documented and now well-recognized piece of art.

This work, titled Day’s End, and his other iconoclastic “cuts” like Conical Intersect 4 (1975), embraced erasure and forced cities into an urban reckoning with their past and present. For Frances Richard, Senior Editor of Places Journal, Matta-Clark’s art of architectural surgery critiqued “the propensity of cities to gobble up and pave over their histories.” In a sense, his spatial appropriations were new, radical acts of building preservation. Matta-Clark deliberately chose old, seemingly worthless structures to test their capacity to become new, redefined objects, just through simple cuts.

Matta-Clark’s “architectural surgery” soon evolved beyond his critical art practice. Designers and architects carried his legacy into a more functional spatial language of splits and cuts in recent practices of adaptive reuse. Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) saw-cut into the existing structure of the MIT Metropolitan Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with cubes rather than planes. DS+R employed a distinct set of cutting strategies to preserve and repurpose the old brick structure to remain a functional, habitable building. More, the project visibly tipped its hat towards Matta-Clark through its mismatched window treatment, bringing out a similarly stark contrast of the old and new, first created by the artist almost fifty years ago.

Beyond critical experimentation, what ties Matta-Clark’s work and DS+R’s MIT Metropolitan Warehouse together is the fact that their respective objects of manipulation—or sites of architectural surgery—are authentic. Although their perceived historical values as heritage differed, both Matta-Clark and DS+R’s incisions reframed already existing structures for a new cultural significance, while revealing their original anatomy. Yet only DS+R’s sharp, scalpel-like cuts brought an old skeleton of a building back to life. In Matta-Clark’s work, revitalization was never the goal.

Recently, two other more ironic and radical Matta-Clark-esque architecture projects appeared in staunchly conservative London and vigorously innovative New York. They find themselves in direct opposition to the MIT Metropolitan Warehouse. Unlike DS+R’s work, which can be considered as pure adaptive reuse, Williamsburg’s new Hermès store and Islington’s 168 Upper Street both raise questions about heritage, authenticity, and contextuality in contemporary architectural preservation.

Amin Taha’s residential and retail building, 168 Upper Street, situated on the northern corner of a severely damaged Victorian terrace site from World War II, was unveiled in 2017. Londoners were shocked to see a terracotta-concrete façade in Islington that mimics its neighboring brick buildings. The building’s peculiar, punched-out windows juxtapose the cast neoclassical elements of its neighbors. The newly erected, yet historically approximate, façade was recreated from historic photographs and point-cloud survey models of an identical, intact twin southern site. Later, it was then visually “misremembered” with Matta-Clark-like window cuts. This symbolic gesture by Groupwork, led by Amin Taha, created an imperfect, interpreted monument by successfully weaving preservation tactics with a commentary on memory and aesthetics. Taha’s deliberate and playful recreation and misappropriation of a digital “original” structure was, so to speak, cutting-edge.

Across the pond, similar misaligned and bricked-over windows were revealed on a new façade in New York’s Williamsburg in early 2025. This is Brooklyn’s new Hermès flagship store by Building Studio Architects, a firm known for its adaptive reuse and contextual designs. The project demolished a shorter, two-story brick building on site to replace it with an entirely new, yet traditional-building-stock–inspired brickwork structure. What appears to be local heritage and historical detail is, in fact, all new—or rather, “fake old.” The store’s oversized window incisions defeat their own purpose, misappropriating Matta Clark’s building cut language. Its inauthenticity is ironic, since the old-new brickwork does not reflect or replicate a pre-existing building. The store conceals itself for adaptive reuse but is a representative ghost of every similar brick structure in the area. That new-historic building has a physical and metaphorical façade—a deceptive outward appearance that hides its true face.

The idea of cutting up an entirely new building seems even more radical than Gordon Matta-Clark’s own practice. Whether it’s an old, obsolete site, a new, deliberately imperfect monument, or a new, falsely generic placeholder for a contextual façade, scalpel-like architectural appropriations have become a tool for experimental preservation. These cuts can pierce through and revive both the flesh and the spirit of architecture—a real, decaying structure or an artificial feeling of historicity.