Reese Lewis

Reese Lewis is an architect and theorist based in NYC.
 

September 2025Architecture

Art Fair as Architectural Type, Art Basel 2025: A Case Study

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Art Basel and its satellite fairs, Liste and the Basel Social Club (BSC), operate as sites of spectacle that occupy a fragmentary urban temporality. The art fair does not construct space but rather manages flows, where circulation and infrastructure replace form.

Matthew Marks booth, Art Basel, Messe Basel, 2025. Photo: Reese Lewis.

March 2025Architecture

The Museum and Architecture’s Current State

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In his latest book, Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space, the architectural critic and historian Julian Rose frames the design of museums today within the historical framework of architecture’s declining participation in broader social and political projects.

Gehry Partners, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 1997, in Building Culture. Courtesy Chronicle Books.

November 2024ArtSeen

Cameron Rowland: Properties

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Composed of found objects, written documents, and a landscape intervention in and out of the gallery space of Dia’s Beacon location, Cameron Rowland’s (b. 1988) new show Properties reveals how the material conditions of slavery and capitalism in the US adapt to historical change as a method of self-preservation.

Cameron Rowland, Commissary, 2024. Scythes. 59.5 x 52 x 16 inches. Rental Sharecropping was debt peonage. It was instituted to replace slave labor. It operated in explicit violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s stated ban on involuntary servitude. Sharecropping contracts were designed to keep black people bound to the land, which their labor made valuable. Violations of the contract included leaving the plantation without permission; being loud, disorderly, drunk, or disobedient; having an “offensive weapon”; and misusing the tools. Violations were grounds for dismissal, eviction, and forfeiture of the share. In addition to cultivating the land, these contracts could include obligations to do the washing “and all other necessary house work” for the landlord’s family. Sharecroppers were forced to buy food, clothes, tools, and other necessities on credit from the landlord’s general store, also called the commissary. The commissary charged up to seventy percent interest. Debts were deducted from the cropper’s share. The contract and the commissary kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt. W. E. B. Du Bois describes the terms of this labor as “a wage approximating as nearly as possible slavery conditions, in order to restore capital lost in the war.”1 Many sharecroppers were former slaves. Many sharecroppers were the children of former slaves. Slaves used scythes as tools of rebellion in Henrico County, Virginia, in 1800; in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831; and in Coffeeville, Mississippi, in 1858. In violation of their contracts, croppers armed themselves as well. The tools of perpetual debt were also the tools of black riot. 1.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 586.

September 2024Architecture

270 Park Ave and the Condition of Total Contradiction

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A new 2.5 million-square-foot headquarters for JPMorgan Chase, designed by Foster + Partners, is being built at 270 Park Avenue. The previously existing structure on the site—a 1.5 million-square-foot tower built for the Union Carbide Corporation in 1960, designed by Natalie Griffin de Blois at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—has had to be dismantled in place.

270 Park Ave under construction looking North on Vanderbilt Ave and E 43rd St., January 21, 2024. Photo: Reese Lewis.

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