When Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was published 50 years ago, Vincent Scully announced in the introduction that it was “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture” of 1923.
In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become a vibrant laboratory of high-density urbanism with places such as Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong packing more people into taller buildings on smaller parcels of land.
Frank Lloyd wright did not take criticism lightly. He was furious at the stinging denunciation of his revolutionary Larkin Building in Buffalo that was published in Architectural Record in April 1908. Its author, Russell Sturgis, an eminent architect and historian who had written for RECORD since its inception in 1891, called Wright’s office building for a mail-order soap company “ungainly” and “awkward.” Wright retaliated in an unpublished reply that it was “pathetic” to see a well-respected critic “picking over bit by bit his architectural ragbag for architectural finery wherewith to clothe the nakedness of the young giant.”