Henry Urbach

I was shocked to learn that Henry Urbach had died. I knew him when he arrived here to become the architecture and design curator at SFMOMA. He had owned a gallery in New York City that looked at architecture through the lens of contemporary art. This was something that Max Protech had pioneered there in his own gallery, and Urbach brought that perspective to the museum. His first show - I think it was called "The Cut" - considered the section, comparing it to Matta-Clark's cut-down-the-middle houses. The shows grew in their ambition and complexity. He didn't like to provide much explanation, and I was often baffled. Some years after a show he did on Las Vegas came and went, the designer Martin Venesky, who collaborated with him on it, explained it to me. I was amazed how layered it was, a work of art in itself. But it took this conversation for me to understand it. Those who knew Urbach well seemed to get it in full. I got it in bits, but they were interesting. And that was a point about Urbach - that he was interesting. His department at SFMOMA had gone through three curators, each with a different take on what architecture and design might mean in the context of a contemporary art museum. Of the four, Urbach had the surest sense of this. He took no end of risks to put his vision of it across. Eventually, he left, but his collaborators are still there and they've done better at navigating the ambivalence with which architecture and design sit in museums whose main focus is elsewhere. I think of them as his survivors, so I sent them a condolence letter, not knowing who else to write. That he was plagued by an illness that stunted his career and led him to kill himself I didn't know. I kept waiting for him to unveil something new. His death led me to remember Urbach in fast-forward and then recall him in fragments, what Walter Benjamin called reception. It would be interesting to do a show that looked at the fragments as sparks for something new. I had expected Urbach to surface because it seemed ripe for it. Fragments will have to do.