Our reviews of books by Jonathan Glancey, Gijs Van Hensbergen, Thomas Fisher, James Crawford, Justin Davidson, Denise Hoffman Brandt, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Leslie Earl Robertson, and Jason M. Barr.
RECORD Recommends: 2017 Summer Reading
Our annual guide for books to take to the beach or the mountains.
What’s So Great About the Eiffel Tower? 70 Questions That Will Change the Way You Think About Architecture, by Jonathan Glancey. Laurence King, 176 pages, $19.99.
Actually, the question Glancey poses about the Eiffel Tower is “Engineering masterpiece or aesthetic blunder?” He answers amusingly with the outcry against the new edifice in 1887 by Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod, and the painter Bouguereau, going on to discuss the structure’s later usefulness as a transmission tower—not only blocking German signals during WWI but becoming the vehicle for radio and TV broadcasts of the stories of de Maupassant himself. Glancey ends this section by quoting objections made the century before to the “gloomy” medieval cathedral of Notre Dame— in other words, both iconic symbols of the French capital raised outcries at different times. The ironic touch and wealth of information make reading this work by the former architecture critic for the Guardian a sparkling delight. The 70 topics range from Stonehenge (possibly made of wood before erected in stone) to “High Tech: Boy’s Own adventure or revolutionary style for our times?” Along the way, he discusses the extraordinary Chapel of the Holy Shroud, Turin (1688-94), by Camillo-Guarino Guarini, pointing out that its complexities would be an undertaking to work out “even with today’s computer programs.” Glancey’s behind-thescenes perspective greatly enhances one’s understanding of these buildings and makes you reconsider your own views.
The Sagrada Familia: The Astonishing Story of Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece, by Gijs Van Hensbergen. Bloomsbury, 224 pages, $27.
In the 70 Questions book, the question Glancey poses about this still-unfinished cathedral is “Genius or gimcrackery?” Hensbergen, the author of a biography of Antoni Gaudí, would not entertain such skepticism. The first half of his volume may be taken as something of a biographical reprise, as much devoted to the architect—currently in line to be canonized by the Catholic Church, and possibly by Hensbergen—as to the building, detailing Gaudí’s childhood love of nature and how that, along with local traditions, early Modernism, and increasing religiosity, informed his various works. The cathedral’s construction, from 1882, under the sponsorship of a sect devoted to the human father in the holy family, Joseph, was impeded not only by lack of funds (all donated) and Gaudí’s early death but by the political turmoil leading up to and including the Spanish Civil War, in which plans and models were destroyed. How the work was carried on makes up the remainder of this book. Unfortunately, the story is chaotically and myopically told, so that it’s hard to discern where the minute but not always apposite details fit. The author wishes to astonish, but clarity would have been more to the point.
Designing Our Way to a Better World, by Thomas Fisher. University of Minnesota Press, 231 pages, $29.95.
Fisher begins with the seductive premise that the methods of design—imagination that anticipates unintended consequences, and creative leaps of thought— could be brought not just to cities and landscapes but to economies, public health, and politics for the purposes of universal justice and a healed natural environment. (Why not world peace, while we’re at it?) In various chapters— on education, infrastructure, beliefs, and more—he invokes Freud, Einstein, American philosopher Charles Pierce, and events ranging from bridge collapses to the spread of flu. If there is a central point, it is the productivity of bringing together systems that do not normally intersect, citing, in his most startling example, the way the 9/11 attack joined architecture to air travel for spectacular, if dire, results. He’d like to see such creative juxtaposition used for spectacular good, pointing to the way Frederick Law Olmsted joined public health to landscape. Fisher sets the stage for Malcolm Gladwell–style logic and examples concerning how such ideas might be applied. The individual chapters, however, originated as independent articles or lectures; there is, as a result, a certain amount of repeating and little sense of going forward, leaving this text too often general and abstract.
Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings, by James Crawford. Picador, 640 pages, $49.
This is a book about buildings that is also about civilization itself, engendering a feeling of contact with its absolute roots, its springboards of power, its limits, costs, and fruits—a truly mind-expanding experience to read. Juxtapo- sitions that Fisher might dream of here yield, at the least, frissons. Here’s one relating to 9/11: the building likely to have inspired the story of the Tower of Babel is in sands under the feet of American soldiers in 2003, and they are in Iraq because their giant towers have been destroyed. In an equally fresh comparison, the story of the architect of those same Twin Towers, Minoru Yamasaki, collides with that of an architecture student advocating against skyscrapers—9/11 mastermind Mohammad Atta. The “biographies” of buildings surprise again and again: for instance, the 3rd-century-BC library at Alexandria did exactly as it was intended, generating knowledge that made Euclid’s Elements possible, not to mention amazing contemporaneous inventions, such as an early-Egyptian steam engine, that anticipate the industrial and even digital revolutions by more than a millenium. Now a rebuilt Alexandrian library (2001) by Snøhetta houses the Internet Archive, with a database equivalent to 10 billion books. Crawford does not neglect to mention Borges’s story of the world as an endless library or, elsewhere, to invoke Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” of which each great and lost monument is an exemplar. All that is missing from this magnificent trove is an index.
Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York, by Justin Davidson. Spiegel & Grau, 222 pages, $22.
It is good to be reminded that even the discrepancies between plutocratic palace-inthe- sky and slum are less grotesque than those between Akhenaten’s colossal domicile and his slaves’ mud huts, suggesting that democracy, however compromised, has at least a modest reflection in the structures of our roaring and blaring capital of finance. This volume by New York magazine’s architecture critic takes its reader, with maps and directions, from the Brooklyn waterfront and the scant remnants of the Dutch at Manhattan’s southern tip up to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, embracing edifices of business and private houses, in addition to apartment buildings of every stripe along the way, while the text conducts an insightful tour of social history. “The struggle between memory and amnesia,” he writes of this restless city, “is an urban-scale version of the ambivalence that so many of us feel about the passage of our lives . . . That’s why wandering around a metropolis that rearranges itself at every pass feels like a form of hopeful introspection.”
Waterproofing New York, edited by Denise Hoffman Brandt, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson. UR, 189 pages, $40.
This is a book for and by policy wonks, designers, and planners about a city with 520 miles of shore in an age of violent weather and rising seas. A series of essays begun in 2013, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s depredations, and full of charts and pictures, it is radically varied in tone. Lydia Kallipoliti, citing Slavoj Zizek along with the TV show Lost, advises us to “conceive an alternative material universe” while Nordenson idealistically advocates turning Manhattan roadways into linear forests, for “storm surge reduction from coastal vegetation canopy.” In a more grounded manner, Janette Sadik-Khan provides statistics showing how people actually commuted after Sandy, demonstrating their varied coping responses (e.g., carpooling) when the transit system was damaged. Byron Stigge’s “A Tale of Two Substations” is a graceful exposition of the virtues of redundancy; and Frank Ruchala Jr. shows how people in Los Angeles came together to deal with subsidence caused by oilfields, which doesn’t seem an obvious lesson for New York but proves beautifully relevant. An afterword by Terreform founder Michael Sorkin (a RECORD contributing editor) acts as a sensible (and witty) summation—we need giant engineering and eco restoration, hard solutions and soft but, above all, the stanching of climate change.
The Structure of Design: An Engineer’s Extraordinary Life in Architecture, by Leslie Earl Robertson. Monacelli Press, 335 pages, $60.
You’ve heard of him, if you’ve heard of him, because he was the lead structural engineer of Minoru Yamasaki’s Twin Towers. This volume is partly about the often unsung work that engineers do, detailing Robertson’s own contributions to the many ambitious projects around the world to which he has been key—his extraordinary innovations in structural steel framing and countering wind dynamics, among much else. It is far from being a professional autobiography only. Following a pictorial spread of his projects from 1956 to 2015, is an account of his early life, from a hard childhood through discovery of the profession he loves. It’s full, however, of weird lacunae: his mother disappears, and we’re told almost nothing more. Later, there’s a first wife of whom we learn less than of the car in which he left her. We read that he did badly in school but got into UC Berkeley, where he earned a B.S.—possibly in math and electrical engineering? Five years later, he has a license in civil engineering. He devotes a sliver of the book to a world-creation story satirizing the roles of architects and engineers, and a chunk to his pacifism, urging moral action on his readers; he clearly suffers guilt from his unintended involvement in 9/11 and the wars begun in its name. He says not much can be done about the potential impact of planes on tall buildings but, interestingly, doesn’t suggest we should stop building them.
Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers, by Jason M. Barr. Oxford University Press, 437 pages, $49.95.
Is it quite pertinent to Manhattan’s skyline to detail the land’s creation back to the Proterozoic age? Most relevant here are statistics lurking in later sections: building height has grown from 15 stories to over 100 since 1885 at an average of about 2 percent per year; income inequality increases the rate at which skyscrapers (buildings of more than 25 stories, for Barr’s purposes) are built, doubling when the top 1 percent earn more than 20 percent of U.S. income; the average skyscraper is around 34 floors; all the recent supertalls have been made possible by sales of air rights and developers’ promised provision of civic amenities (which can double an as-of-right height of 34 floors); 70 percent of the island’s buildings are five stories or lower and 90 percent are 10 or lower—highrises are only 1.7 percent of Manhattan. Barr, an economist, sees tall buildings as an engine of growth and believes that percentage should be greatly increased. His account conjures a real-estate economy like a squishy balloon, in which squeezing one part, through constraints such as zoning or price controls, causes distorting bulges in development (or lack thereof). Barr happens to have an M.A. in creative writing, but the text might not have had to be in quite such tiny print if the very frequent restatements had been weeded out.
