RECORD reviews four books that examine the importance of traditions as cities and buildings evolve.
Book Review Roundup: Architecture's Evolution and the Importance of Traditions
The Language of Cities, by Deyan Sudjic. Allen Lane/Penguin, 230 pages, $39.95.
In the creation of cities, is Corbusian purity better than hodgepodge development? Does the unrestrained market produce the best results for its denizens? What about restrictions on building sizes or types, limits on cars or human population? Sudjic, head of the Design Museum in London and acclaimed author of The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, asks the questions but, for the most part, offers random examples and diffuse meanderings by way of response. Exceptions include, as an instance, the history of Docklands. If only he had stuck to one topic—the role of streets and roads, which he touches on—and dug in.
Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings, edited by Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly. University of Virginia Press, 228 pages, $39.50.
That architectural oxymoron, the medieval style of early skyscrapers, seems like a great idea for a book. But the flair of these eight scholarly essays by academics and consultants (including the editors) does not come close to that of their subject in their sober docketing of the structural similarities between European cathedrals and steel-frame design. They also take on the role that attitudes played— both toward the “moral” aspect of Medieval architecture and toward corporate branding—and how these changed in the journey from Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in 1913 to Raymond Hood’s Radiator Building in 1924.
Rome: Urban Formation and Transformation, by Jon Michael Schwarting. Applied Research + Design Publishing, 211 pages, $45.
In this oversize volume of painstaking reconstruction and deconstruction—through visual analysis, measuring, and, primarily, architectural drawing—architect, urban designer, and Prix de Rome–recipient Schwarting invokes this magnificent (and confusing) city as an exemplar of planning. The drawings show the ways that particular locations, such as the Piazza Navona and the Campidoglio, incarnate ideal forms while integrating with and enhancing preexisting structures. Piazzas of this kind also act as organizing voids for the larger network of roads. Throughout, the way Roman architecture takes its forms from conceptual paragons while making a virtue of practical realities is visually and verbally demonstrated.
The American Idea of Home: Conversations About Architecture and Design, by Bernard Friedman; foreword by Meghan Daum. University of Texas Press, 227 pages, $27.95.
The author, who made a documentary along these lines in 2012 after restoring and adding to his Midcentury Modern L.A. house, presents Q&A’s with 30 distinguished architects on designing houses so that they feel like homes. Some articulate specific principles (Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeremiah Eck, and Sarah Susanka, among others), and most rail against houses scaled to impress, sited indifferently, or ecologically insensitive, but the conversations tend toward wide abstractions. The foreword, by novelist and literary nonfiction writer Daum, on the other hand, beautifully grapples with the idea of homes as “not just showplaces but hiding places.”
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