NEXT : The list of pre-selected candidates will be announced on October 31st
INTERVIEW: THE GUGGENHEIM’S TROY CONRAD THERRIEN ON UFOS AND TRANSCENDENT ARCHITECTURE
By Caroline Gaimari
Troy Conrad Therrien. Photography by Benjamin Erik Ackermann for PIN–UP.
Troy Conrad Therrien, curator of architecture and digital initiatives at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, says he was “red-pilled” by Trump’s election. But this wasn’t the first time he’d had to recalibrate. Working in Silicon Valley when the dot-com bubble burst, he was sent into a tailspin; then he found himself in free fall again after the 2008 financial crash hit right as he was completing his studies at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture. But with Trump, “the farce of consensus reality was ripped away from me and I couldn’t put blinders back on.” Now, in his teaching and curating, Therrien is obsessed with examining what we can learn from the flip side of “consensus reality” — phenomena such as the rising number of UFO sightings, the hallucinogenic effects of DMT, or mushrooms falling from outer space.
