Quotes by Aaron Betsky

Aaron Betsky (born 1958) is an architect, critic, curator, educator, lecturer, and writer on architecture and design, who since August 2006 has been the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. From 2001 to 2006 Betsky served as director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Although Betsky was born in Missoula, Montana, USA, he grew up in The Netherlands. He graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in History, the Arts and Letters (1979) and a M.Arch. (1983). He then taught at the University of Cincinnati from 1983 to 1985 and worked as a designer for Frank Gehry and Hodgetts & Fung. From 1995-2001 Betsky was Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before moving back to The Netherlands.

He has written numerous monographs on the work of late 20th century architects, including I.M. Pei, UN Studio, Koning Eizenberg, Zaha Hadid and MVRDV, as well as treatises on aesthetics, psychology and human sexuality as they pertain to aspects of architecture, and is one of the main contributors to a spatial interpretation of Queer theory.

He was named as the director of the 11th Exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2008.

Aaron Betsky

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.