The Brooklyn Rail

Thomas Phifer has delivered many memorable works of architecture, imbued with compositions of structure, tone, and shape. His office designed the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, opened in 2024 (a new performance wing, the TR Warszawa Theatre, will open in 2026). The red Wagner Park Pavilion just opened in Battery Park. Additionally, the Corning Museum of Glass, the North Carolina Museum of Art, a student center pavilion at Rice and an impressive group of novel houses across New York State.

A day after interviewing Thomas Phifer, the New York City architect, I went to the Glenstone Museum’s Pavilions outside of Washington, DC which he designed and which opened in 2018. The fascinating impact of that trip was not about my experience visiting, but my memory the days and weeks afterwards. How do you remember a building? In recall it conjures a machined aluminum block, an Ellsworth Kelly shaped canvas, and a lacquerware box. It reminded me that experience is immediate and corporeal, while memories are part of a constellation.

The heart of the museum is the Pavilions, an assembly of precisely designed rooms arranged around a geometric pond. The concrete block rooms are galleries, often holding permanent artworks by artists like On Kawara, Roni Horn, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden and designed in direct dialogue with Thomas Phifer. Architecture can be developed by thinking deeply about images, using them like borrowed memories; its effect is reinforced with high caliber construction, and it starts by inviting other people into the conversation.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): It’s January 8, 2026. We are at your offices in New York on Varick Street. How long have you been in this office?

Thomas Phifer: I started the practice in 1997 and for a year worked out of my living room. I had very little work but took a big risk and signed a lease on space in an old printing building in lower Manhattan. The practice was much smaller when I started. I remember it was a winter like this one, and I sat in the very back of the space by the radiators. The heat on my back matched my anxiety about being there all alone and not having a lot to do. I must say that it’s very hard for me to move—there is a lot of history and nostalgia here.

Rail: On anxiety: you were my studio professor nearly ten years ago. It was revelatory. Architecture school is known for its tough environment, but I’d never seen people struggle so hard. The assignment was to design a wood meditation chapel in Fort Tryon Park with no envelope and no complexity. It could technically be designed in a day. It became an existential assignment, amplified by the simplicity of the assignment. I always reflect on this studio. Is there suffering to design?

Phifer: Well, you certainly have to hope so. I had a lot of anxiety, particularly when I started my own practice, because I had never designed much of anything on my own. When we started, usually the first real idea was the idea that we began to develop. We just launched right into it. The more years that went by, the more patient I became. Now, our process explores idea after idea after idea. It takes much longer to settle in on a direction, on a material, on an experience, and an experience with light, and on a site response. I really have learnt to have infinite patience, always grounded in curiosity.

When I was at the American Academy in Rome, I had a studio right next door to Chuck Close. Almost every day I would go to his studio and just watch him paint. He would organize a small square grid with string. He would look at each square in the photograph and then paint it on canvas, square by square. I finally asked him, “How do you know when you’re finished that it’s going to be a holistic work?” And he said, “It’s a matter of trusting the process.” Believe it or not, that was an important moment for me. I lacked that trust. But over the years I have discovered patience, and through this patience I have learned to trust my own unfolding process. In the end, it was all about confidence and trust.

I’m a little bit of a hermit. I like being behind the curtain. We’ve been very fortunate to win some competitions, but I think some of the richest work we’ve done is when we are able to work directly with the people who are going to experience and inhabit the work.

Rail: This transition from the first idea toward an iterative process of possibilities is an expression of the contemporary. What do you see in that process of doubt in juxtaposition to what you’re describing as faith? What are you trying to accomplish when you’re going through those multiples?

Phifer: Looking back, if there has been one thing that has guided the practice, I think it’s been the phenomenological experience of light that grounds our practice. Light is our first and foundational material. It’s about connecting people with nature and their circadian rhythms through the ever changing light and imagining how to move through space woven together with light, shade, shadow, deep shadow, and darkness. As the years passed the experience of light and space became foundational. It offered us a richer understanding of an architecture that can be the catalyst for elevating the experience. We have gotten more grounded in an understanding of how the body moves and how the body experiences light, touch, smell, all of the senses. I love the book The Eyes of the Skin where the dancer’s ear is in his toe.

Rail: But your work has something that is not just light. It has form and tone and color and geometry. I went to the Rice University Brochstein Pavilion this fall, and I was really impressed. The shadows of the tree on the canopy turned the world upside down. A surreal experience. If your process of making multiples is on the way to one idea, how do you describe that cloud of potential?

Phifer: There is a geometric, pure form in the work. We look to be reductive with form and cloak them with a particular material and then let this pure form and material live in the passage of light. Light is the experience, coupled with the material, that amplifies and honors the movement of light and honors our connection with the natural world.

What is surprising to me as I look around this room is that every project is different. Every time we sit down at a table and begin to think about a project, it becomes our way of pursuing curiosity. What are we particularly curious about: light, materials, experience, site response? What is the true essence and soul embedded in this work? Somehow, different building types have come our way: the United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City, the Glenstone Museum, private residences, and a petite tower that is now coming out of the ground in Bogotá. There’s never a lot of repetition, so we look, with infinite curiosity, at every project as a completely clean slate.

Rail: All your work has an extremely high caliber of construction. Without that, this work would be very different. Few have been able to accomplish this level of precision in America, let alone the fact that now you’re working much more globally. How do construction and materials play into your work?

Phifer: When I started my practice, I was forty-four years old. I had already completed a lot of buildings. I had a wealth of experience. I knew the value of precision, how to integrate structure and services, means and methods of construction. I have kept my office small so we can pay attention to every detail, every aspect of the work, every shop drawing, everything that goes into the making of a work of architecture. It all develops before our eyes.

I’ve looked at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for most of my adult life. He conceives very simple forms; every element is beautifully proportioned and every detail is conceived with great care. I love that picture of Mies van der Rohe sitting in his office with a cigar, looking at a drawing and a model. He’d sit there for hours, just looking at the proportions of every element. The Farnsworth House has such simplicity. It’s a building that is reductive to the point that you just can’t take anything away. I also still marvel at how Louis Kahn worked for so many years until he turned fifty-four years old and seemingly all of a sudden began to poetically weave light, structure, materials, monumentally, weight, permanence and experience together into a truly holistic work. The conception of those buildings is so rich.

Rail: These are examples of what you seem to find a way to accomplish, despite the state of the contemporary construction industry. What is it like building a building right now?

Phifer: We begin with an understanding of the limits of a particular material. There have been many of our works where the planning grid is born through the limitations of a material, both vertically or horizontally. We begin with an understanding of how it’s made.

Rail: Are you a very good builder, or are you collaborating with construction companies who are extremely good? Are you teaching the people who are building your building?

Phifer: There’s certainly a fair amount of education. With the Glenstone Museum, we knew we could reach high, higher than any building they’d built in the Washington area since I.M. Pei’s National Gallery of Art. We also have a lot of friends in the subcontracting business, especially for glass, metal, concrete, wood, and stone. We go to them in the heart of the schematic design phase to begin to talk about these materials and their limits and means and methods.

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw rests at the base of Joseph Stalin’s Palace of Culture. The museum has white concrete both inside and out that is constructed within an inch of its life. It is spectacular. In our experience, in every project, there’s usually one person from the construction team who is responsible for instilling a culture of precision and craft. In Warsaw, that was Rafał Rusek, who directed all of the white concrete. One day early in the construction process, he and I were inside this tent they made, watching the forms being built to the level of a piece of cabinet work. The workers were older men who had all been through the end of WWII and had experienced the Russian occupation. As we left the tent, he slowly put his arm around me, which he had never done before, and he said “This building is a matter of pride for us.” That was a teary eyed moment for me.

Craft is the epitome of pride. We’ve been pretty fortunate to find people who take great pride in their sense of craft. We’ve also been fortunate to continue these relationships as we explore means and methods particular to our ongoing work, as we seek to engender a sense of beauty, craft and materiality. As we work with craftsmen we have not worked with before, we slowly gain their trust that we are going to take them to a place they’ve never been before. In Warsaw, we built most everything in Poland: concrete, the stainless steel doors and glazing units, the wood rooms, the terrazzo floors—it was a matter of pride for them.

The experience that thrills me the most is getting on the 1 Train up from the Upper West Side and coming down here and working with this amazing staff. I stand on their shoulders. With them, it’s a matter of concentration, patience, perseverance, and pride.

Rail: When I look at your work, you seem young and searching, always for an experiment, always for something new. You work with a collection of images as part of the design process, which is how young people do it today. The process involves the collection and production of images. How do you think this is related to seeking new ideas?

Phifer: The moment we receive a commission, my mind begins to imagine. I’m thinking of endless images. When we think of how to start, it’s with five or ten of these images swimming around. The experience unfolds within the image. This has to do with patience again. With the first few projects, we had an image in the first month, and then we just built that image. Since then, we’ve developed an openness to what might come later too.

I appreciate it when a client says that a particular idea is not to their taste, because it allows us to continue to explore. The new work is often richer with reinvigorated curiosity. When a building opens, it’s just daunting because I can’t help but think, “Oh what should I have done differently?” Then finally, the building settles and washes over you. There is a certain beauty in having that feeling. After each and every experience, you begin to work on new projects applying even more intensity into every single detail.

Rail: I want to talk about architectural authorship. I think we need to be more clear about how important it is that buildings are authored and there is a group of people, pieces of culture and history, that bring detail into a project. Perhaps we need some redefinition of Gesamtkunstwerk or Baukunst. You present a good case for the possibility of this controlled form of authorship, which ultimately releases when the building gets released. What are you trying to do when you’re in control?

Phifer: Ultimately, I just want to be happy with the work. I don’t read many reviews about our work, because I believe if we are pleased with the work, that’s enough for us. We started our work on the Rice Pavilion with the thought of employing light, transparency, and “lightness of being” to land softly in the remarkable landscape of the Rice University campus. Then, around 2010, we began work on the Glenstone Museum, exploring weight and a sense of permanence in our work. We constantly learn and adjust, always for us moving in unexpected directions.

Rail: You just finished a concrete building in Manhattan, the Wagner Park Pavilion. There are very few concrete buildings in New York, and this one has a smoothness or softness to it. What was that experience?

Phifer: When we received that commission, the first thing I did was take a boat trip around Manhattan. It dawned on me that whatever we built would be as much a part of the harbor as the island itself. In some ways, the weight of the building is meant to accentuate the tipping point that grounds the southern edge of the island. It wanted to be heavy, feel permanent, while belonging to the family of structures in and around New York Harbor: Castle Williams and Castle Clinton and other fortifications and infrastructure. I wanted it to have a presence on the harbor, as much as it occupies the southern tip of the island of Manhattan. The deep reddish tone was inspired by the color of Castle Williams, Castle Clinton, and the brick in Battery Park City. I also wanted it to have a certain formal softness, as if carved by the wind.

In our experience, on every project there is always one person on the construction team who establishes a culture of craftsmanship. In the case of the Wagner Park Pavilion, it was the person who was responsible for the concrete pigment. We probably had some forty samples of the color and tone of the concrete. He knew concrete, from how to guide the concrete pouring process, to which specific admixtures to use, to what the appropriate curing procedures might be, and specifically how to vibrate it. He knew concrete. We all learned how to construct this building together, and it gave us all great joy.

Rail: What is your relationship with art, with artists?

Phifer: I became engaged in that question with the Glenstone Museum, simply because nine of the pavilions contain the work of a single artist. We met with each of the living artists and worked with them on the proportion of their room, the character of the light, and the materials. Our metaphorical and physical name for Glenstone was the “House of Rooms.” That idea carried over to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, where the director did not want flexible art spaces, only rooms with four defined corners. She wanted the architecture to curate the art, which was a historic European sensibility. That museum became the “House of Rooms” as well. I really began to set the proportions of these rooms with Polish artists. The experience of the light is woven into the experience of the art. It is the ever-changing light of Warsaw and the unfolding movement through light—from light, to shade, to shadow, to deep shadow. It connects the voice of these works to the light of this place. This experience is the poetry of the work.

About six months before Cy Twombly died, I went with my clients for the Glenstone Museum, Emily and Mitch Rales, to this small storefront in Lexington, Virginia. Twombly immediately asked us to share an image of the architecture. We had brought the black-and-white charcoal-like drawing of the principal elevation. He looked in silence at the drawing on the wall for a pretty long time. Finally he said, “I want you to trust the abstraction.” I now had a real sense from him of trusting the work to sit there in the land with its own weight and presence.

Rail: Architecture by nature is a process of synthesizing and negotiating a lot of points of view between design and construction. Yet your work does have a visual, formal relationship to art. It’s not derived from pure assembly. There’s real artistry to it. When did you first start seeing like that?

Phifer: You have to make the art room reductive, enough so that it has very limited distractions, but you also want the room to have a bit of character. I find that the character of a room is defined by the poetry of light—and the specific architecture that is employed to harvest the light.

I love the proportions of the art rooms at the Fondation Beyeler, which is twenty-three feet wide with a sixteen-foot ceiling. I also love experiencing museums like the Kimbell Art Museum. When you enter through the front door and into the galleries, you feel this wonderfully intimate experience with those extraordinary pictures. Ah, those vaults, they just embrace you. At one time in my life, I spent a lot of time in The Hague. There are some beautiful villas in that city, beautifully proportioned rooms bathed in a soft daylight—the pictures in these rooms are honored by these carefully crafted spaces.

Rail: What’s an example at the Glenstone Museum?

Phifer: There’s this wonderful On Kawara room with three of his “Today” series paintings. Working closely with him, we agreed to do a forty-five-foot-tall room with another twelve feet to the skylight at the top of the oculus. He wanted the light to fall a great distance down to his work. The light in his room is soft and even and so beautiful. The room is twenty-two square feet. He arrived at one of the first meetings with quite a lengthy piece of writing. It explained his idea of an experience. He called for petrified pieces of charcoal, hard as a rock, and black to be placed under the wood floor. He also wanted white marble behind the plaster walls. He had an idea that the charcoal and white marble elements in this art room could activate an awareness of the arrival into a sacred space. This was the artist that woke up every morning and began a painting of that particular date. If he didn’t finish the painting by the end of the day, the painting would be destroyed. Now that I know that, and now that you know that, I want you to arrive through that passage and into that room and let me know if you feel it. I do!

Rail: Does that mean you see your work in a theoretical way?

Phifer: Only as it relates to phenomenological experience.

Rail: The way you’re describing artists as knowing what they’re doing, that is theory.

Phifer: The important lesson you learn from these artists, by the way, is to be brave.

I often see the world through their eyes. I often think of Chuck Close and the repetitive nature of his work. He comes to each work with rigor and perseverance, and knowing with every new work, every time, it’s going to enrich his journey by doing it again and again.

Rail: You seem to have a deep faith in what you’re doing. Do you think so?

Phifer: I suppose I have the gift of faith. I just love being an architect, I love working with people, shepherding them through the process, making a work together. It gives me great joy. I so love what Frank Stella said, “I don’t like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say my art has given me life.” Architecture for me has been such a gift.