Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist and architect known for his large-scale projects. Dealing with themes of metamorphosis and resistance towards the commodification of art, Matta-Clark produced interventions in architectural structures he called “anarchitecture.” The most famous of these was Splitting (1974), an intervention in which the artist sawed out a gaping vertical segment from the middle of a wood-frame house in suburban New Jersey. “By undoing a building [I] open a state of enclosure which has been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that proliferates suburban and urban boxes as a pretext for ensuring a passive, isolated consumer,” he once explained. Born on June 22, 1943...