There is no hiding place for an architect’s work, which by its very nature is public. If eyesore be committed, Frank Lloyd Wright suggested, an architect’s best recourse is to “advise his client to plant vines.” But as Charlotte Van den Broeck’s Bold Ventures demonstrates, not all architects are of such a sound disposition. Indeed, some grow so tormented by their perceived failures that they decide to end their lives.
For Bold Ventures, Van den Broeck spent three years visiting 13 different “sites of failure”—many of which are now perceived in a much more positive light. “My goal was to rehabilitate those architects,” writes Van den Broeck, “to pick up their lost faces and stick them back in place, to do something to counter the pointlessness of their despair, the finality of their suicide.” It is an ambitious undertaking that pays off in surprising ways.
