This book explores how artists of the 1960s and 1970s drew inspiration from and critiqued the built environment—which encompasses everything from vernacular architecture and urban planning to significant engineering feats—in their sculptural and conceptual artwork. Bieber sets the narrative in mid-to-late 20th-century America, where optimism about progress meets disillusionment. The artists that the author investigates straddle these two outlooks; some, like Donald Judd and Robert Grosvenor were energized by new materials and big construction, while others like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Gordon Matta-Clark were pointedly critical. The goal of Bieber’s study in American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960–1979 is to recontextualize these artists’ specific projects and artworks, enabling us to understand them in relation to their cultural, political, and urban contexts. 

Following the two introductory chapters, we reach the core of the book. The third chapter pairs the canonized Judd with the lesser-known Grosvenor, as both drew inspiration from mid-century large-scale engineering productions for their sculptures or, in Judd’s case, his “specific objects.” Here, Bieber spends time highlighting the scarcely discussed 1964 Twentieth Century Engineering exhibition at MoMA, which both artists saw. The exhibition included images of massive industrial projects that were glorified under modern notions of progress and presented aesthetically, for example, by displaying models of dams on pedestals. Bieber argues that the exhibition was the impetus for Judd to create structures from industrial materials—previously, he had used painted wood—such as plexiglass, stainless steel, and steel cables. For Grosvenor, the connection to the exhibition was through form, specifically how he translated (relatively) small engineering projects, like the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, into giant room-filled sculptures, such as Untitled (Yellow) from 1966, shown at the Dawn Gallery in Los Angeles. 

While Bieber acknowledges that industrial projects—such as the Hoover Dam (1931) or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (1959–64)—had enormous social and environmental costs that are now much more obvious, this is not addressed in her reading of Judd or Grosvenor’s work, as these artists seem to have bought into the blind march towards innovation. Near the end of the chapter, the author hints at shifts in artistic practice in the 1970s for both Judd and Grosvenor, but this raises the question: How fair is it to evaluate these artists’ artworks through the value systems of today? Do we know if they were aware of the consequences of such colossal governmental projects?

Artistic critique of modernity’s grandiose optimism emerges in the next chapter, as Bieber examines the projects of Oldenburg and Smithson, who turned their attention to earlier edifices of modernity that had started to lose their luster, revealing the cracks in the brilliant façade of modernity’s ever-greater sense of progress. Specifically, Bieber focuses on monuments, such as Oldenberg’s “Obstacle Monuments,” a term coined by modern architects and planners to describe commemorative structures that are urban hurdles. Oldenburg humorously proposed enormous, oversized everyday objects that would take over the built environment, which, if realized, were meant to be utterly disruptive and a little ridiculous, such as a giant frankfurter for Ellis Island. Attending to Smithson, Bieber covers his photo documentary essay, The Monuments of Passaic (1967), The Sandbox Monument (1967), and his concept of “Ruins in Reverse,” which critiqued modernity’s worship of bigger is better. At the same time, Bieber discusses the preservationist movement in New York City, as the question of which buildings and infrastructures were to be saved and for whom was becoming a contentious issue, given that modern buildings were quickly aging or their industrial purpose was becoming obsolete. This chapter is the most engaging and successful due to its alignment with broader sociocultural debates and concurrent artistic practices. It still leaves the question open, however, of what role, if any, Smithson played in SoHo debates about the preservation of industrial buildings.

The final deep dive of the book explores the work of Weiner and Matta-Clark, where artistic creation dematerializes and the critique of mid-century modernity intensifies. Bieber cleverly creates parallels between these artists’ practices and shifting New York zoning laws that guaranteed the viability and livability of social spaces, as both are structured by language. The author asserts that Weiner’s statements borrowed a conceptual framework from New York building codes that had recently loosened to incorporate open-ended solutions to regulations. For Matta-Clark, Bieber argues that Splitting (1974) and Window Blow-Out (1976) highlighted urban renewal projects and neighborhoods that had been characterized by developers as “blighted” zones at the time. While Bieber briefly discusses the politics of redlining, a social analysis of the implications of such inhumane and unjust urban policies could have added critical layers to the discussion of Matta-Clark’s interventions, especially for the town of Englewood, New Jersey, where Splitting was situated. More generally, Bieber could have explicated the politics of conceptual art in general and, specifically for Weiner and Matta-Clark, its implications for the built environment.

Amidst Bieber’s resurrection of forgotten histories, a question emerges about why she did not include more women artists in her account. Miss has the floor at the beginning of the narrative, but then disappears without further analysis, serving, then, simply as a foil to male-dominated interventions. There is undoubtedly much work to be done to uplift the realized and unrealized projects of women artists working in these same decades, including Alice Aycock, Beverly Buchanan, Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, among others. That said, the female critic that Bieber does return to periodically throughout her account is Lucy Lippard, whose astute early writing saw the connections between Judd and Grosvenor’s interest in large-scale engineering and coined the incisive term “dematerialization.”  

Moreover, when discussing the main male protagonists—Judd, Grosvenor, Oldenburg, Smithson, Weiner, and Matta-Clark—Bieber periodically and thoughtfully reminds us of their positionality. They are all white, Western men of privilege. However, the author neither elucidates how this positionality informed their practice nor offers us a counter perspective. While she positions them as being critical of mid-century modernism to varying degrees, she does not explain why, exactly, they are critical given or despite their privilege, and on behalf of whom? For instance, when analyzing Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, Bieber could have talked about the artist-activism associated with the urban renewal project and included the work of Julie Finch, then wife of Judd and cofounder of Artists Against the Expressway, a group of activist-artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella, among others.

Despite these unanswered questions, Bieber’s book provides an example of how expansive social art history can be, drawing on not only architectural history but also urban studies and legal history. And there is always a need to dig deeper and go further in chronicling social movements, activism, and cultural clashes during the contentious decades of the 1960s and 1970s.