Everyone should keep someone else’s diary. —Oscar Wilde

Dennis Adams has been commissioned by Kunsthalle Bielefeld to create a permanent public artwork for its 50th anniversary. Sited near the front entrance of the museum on an existing city bus stop, Bus Shelter 12: Shattered Glass/The Confessions of Philip Johnson addresses the Kunsthalle’s controversial American architect—as a Zeitgeist of twentieth century aesthetic transformations, as they intersected with cultural, historical ,and political forces.

Functioning as both a shelter/seating pavilion for waiting bus passengers, and as a platform for a text-based video written by Adams from the first-person perspective of Philip Johnson, the structure is bisected by a shattered plate glass wall that divides its interior space into two waiting zones, each of which, houses a video monitor that loops through 496 text fragments, one at a time—at 12 seconds intervals. One video monitor is in German and the other in English. The exterior walls of the bus shelter display two identical back-illuminated photographic portraits of Johnson, taken by Satoshi Saikusa at Johnson’s Glass House in 1998.

Photograph: Philipp Aottendoerfer