How Annabelle Selldorf Became the Architect of Our Moment (2024)

Annabelle Selldorf, the architect of the Frick Collection’s renovation and expansion, is leading me on a hard-hat tour of the site on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a few months ahead of the reopening. We are standing inside the beloved Beaux Arts building, on scaffolding inside a large, curving oval space that will be the new auditorium—something the old Frick never had. For some reason, I have a sense of enveloping pleasure and purity, as though I’m inside an egg. “I wanted this space to be the color of nothing,” Selldorf tells me. “I think it’s always fascinating how an overcast sky can be active and yet have no color.” When the workers were skimming and sanding and painting many undercoats of the same whitish primer on the ceiling, she realized that the “nothing” effect was integral to the space, and that no other color was necessary to produce it. “That’s when I thought, Okay, let’s stop. Let’s not do any more, because the less we do, the better.”

The nothing effect is a key to Selldorf’s architecture, which has placed her at the top of her profession. “I think Annabelle Selldorf’s goal is to create a space that you can feel but don’t have to focus on,” Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, says. “There’s a rigor and a Miesian order and attention to materials, but also a humanity in her work. She is one of today’s most thoughtful architects of spaces for art.”

Born in Cologne in 1960, Selldorf came to architecture through her parents. Her father was an architect and her mother worked with him as an interior designer. They also designed furniture for the German studio Vica, which was founded by her grandmother Ludovica in the 1950s, and which has been reinvented as “Vica by Annabelle Selldorf,” a line of furniture, lighting, and accessories run out of a Selldorf-designed gallery space in downtown New York. Annabelle has lived in the city since 1980. In 1988, she opened her firm here, and not too long afterward, the German art dealer Michael Werner asked her to design his New York gallery. It was the beginning of her collaboration with the art world, designing spaces for artists (Jeff Koons, Eric Fischl, and April Gornik) and galleries (David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth). Her budding architectural practice got what she calls a “damn lucky break” in 1997, when Ronald Lauder asked her to turn a Beaux Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue into a private museum for his collection of Austrian and German Expressionist art. The result was the Neue Galerie, which launched her career. Originally built by Carrère and Hastings in 1914, it was the perfect calling card for the job at the Frick, another Carrère and Hastings mansion built the same year (for the industrialist and collector Henry Clay Frick).

In addition to the Frick—“by a long shot my favorite museum in New York,” Selldorf says—she has recently finished or is working on major renovations at the National Gallery in London, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, as well as new residential towers for the Two Trees Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment in Brooklyn and private homes in Manhattan, Long Island, Mexico, Mustique, and other points around the globe. One of the many reasons her clients love her is that she’s such a great listener. But she doesn’t hesitate to disagree when necessary. When the French perfume expert Frédéric Malle asked her to build him a modern version of a group of saltbox houses on beachfront property in Southampton, Long Island, he remembers her saying, “Absolutely not! Not when you have the view, and that type of light. You are not building a house with tiny windows!”

Selldorf is also building a new winery for the preeminent Château Haut-Brion, near Bordeaux, and just before COVID struck, she finished adapting a “very, very simple” 1840s house for herself and her partner, Tom Outerbridge, on the southernmost tip of a tiny, remote island in Penobscot Bay, where his family has summered for generations. “Tom loves the island,” Selldorf says. “When we met, it took him a while to invite me to Maine because it was clear that if I didn’t like it, our relationship would not have lasted.”

She and Tom, who runs a private recycling company, and Jussi, their 12-year-old corgi-Lab mix, lived on the island for 18 months during the pandemic. The nothing (and everything) effect that she wanted for the ceiling of her Frick auditorium is all around you on the island, a never-ending moving picture of sky and sea. Although there is no ferry and there are no roads, shops, or markets of any kind, and only a handful of houses, the island somehow got high-speed internet in 2019 “just in time,” and, like the rest of the world, Annabelle and Tom found that they could carry on their careers from their island home. “I think I worked harder on the island than ever in my life, but the things that are fundamental about architecture—drawing, proportion, scale—I couldn’t do on a computer screen,” she says. “I work with a pencil.” (A yellow 0.9 mm Pentel.) “I can’t draw on the computer, and it was so hard for me not to be with my team in the office.” That team ranges from 65 to 70 highly talented and fiercely dedicated people, some of whom have been with her for more than 20 years.

While Selldorf was on the island, the firm won competitions for the work at the National Gallery in London and the Hirshhorn. The first phase of the National Gallery job involved a redesign of the Sainsbury Wing’s entrance, inside and out, and Selldorf’s changes had to weather a public critique by Denise Scott Brown (wife and partner of Robert Venturi, a founder of postmodernist architecture), whose firm—Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates—had designed and completed the building in 1991. “She’s making our building look like a circus clown…wearing a tutu,” Scott Brown told a reporter for The Guardian in 2022. This wasn’t the first time Selldorf encountered criticism from Scott Brown. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego had also been redesigned by Venturi, Scott Brown in 1996, and when the museum chose Selldorf to do a renovation and 40,000-square-foot expansion, Scott Brown joined 70 architects, critics, and preservationists in signing a protest to stop this “tremendous mistake.” (The museum opened in 2022.)

When Annabelle got the National Gallery commission, she visited Scott Brown. “I made peace with her and I thought we had a nice relationship,” Selldorf tells me. “But she had an unreasonable expectation that I wasn’t going to change the building. The project was there to begin with because the Sainsbury Wing wasn’t perfect. It didn’t function as a main entrance.”  The revolving doors and complex fenestration made entering the museum crowded and confusing. Selldorf’s design clears and simplifies the space, and adds a public square for gathering outside to make the experience more coherent and more welcoming. After considering all of the criticism and complaints in the press, the Westminster City Council gave the Selldorf design a green light and the new wing is scheduled to open next May. “Many years down the road, this will be remembered as a Venturi, Scott Brown building and not as a Selldorf building,” Selldorf says. “And I think that’s right.”

It’s been 10 years since I first wrote about Selldorf for Vogue, and her reputation has continued to rise. She’s been tapped to serve on many boards—World Monuments Fund, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters—and she takes these very seriously. She still gets around town on Citi Bikes, buys her groceries at Union Square Market, and prefers quiet evenings at home, cooking simple things (rarely fish), and chatting with Tom—and Jussi—about their day. They all enjoy watching Scandinavian police procedurals on TV. Although she has no signature style, and is never referred to as a starchitect, there is no one as adept as she is at making the subtle and intensely sensitive interventions that add up to great architecture. The closest she has come to a grand gesture may be her minimalist auditorium for the Frick. She beat about 70 architects in the international competition for the Frick job. “Annabelle has a track record of working really respectfully and astutely with historic buildings, being true to herself as a modern architect, but merging what she does with what came before,” Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, says. “I wanted her to create a beautiful space that would harmonize with what was there before. We genuinely hope that you need to pause and ask yourself what’s new and what’s old.” The museum’s beloved round Music Room had to be eliminated to make space for a much-needed special exhibitions gallery that connected with the permanent collection, and a lot of people complained about that. But as Wardropper explains, “Sometimes progress requires taking down what was there before, and the Music Room has always been too small for its purpose and the acoustics were always subpar.” Concerts and lectures and performances will now be in Selldorf’s sculptural 220-seat auditorium. It will be called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, in recognition of a gift from Schwarzman’s foundation.

One of Selldorf’s most unusual projects is the Château Haut-​Brion winery, in the Bordeaux town of Pessac. Prince Robert of Luxembourg, the chairman and CEO of the centuries-old wine estate, happens to be a childhood friend of Annabelle’s partner, Tom Outerbridge—they became friends over summers in Maine—and Prince Robert and Annabelle hit it off. They began talking about the winery in 2014. He wanted to bring the complex machinery of winemaking up to date in a totally carbon-neutral structure. He also wanted to introduce a visitor center with a museum that tells Haut-​Brion’s storied history, of a winemaking tradition that goes back some 2,000 years. “What’s exciting about Annabelle is that she could build a recycling facility in Sunset Park and then do the National Gallery in London,” Prince Robert says. (That’s how she met Outerbridge—he was the general manager of the municipal recycling plant that hired her.) “For me, that made it clear that she could understand great winemaking. Also, there’s something that corresponds between Annabelle’s character and talents and the type of wines that we make at Haut-Brion.”