Blair Kamin

They are the Rolling Stones of architecture, aging bad boys who once shocked with their jagged forms, snappy slogans and outrageous provocations. In 1980, they ignited a winglike piece of exposed steel suspended above a university courtyard in Graz, Austria, and proclaimed: ‘Architecture Must Burn!’ So it was predictable that the expansion of the Akron Art Museum, the first public building in the U.S. by Wolf Prix and Vienna-based Coop Himmelb(l)au, would enrage some people in the small American city of Akron, Ohio. Indeed, the expansion, which opened last July, has been compared to a piece of space junk that fell out of orbit and crash-landed on the museum’s ruddy old Renaissance Revival building... [+]