Image courtesy Leon Krier In all his writings I only encountered one instance when James S. Russell lost his natural cool, notably when reviewing my book on the architecture of Albert Speer. “Gushing, swooning, sputtering ,“ his words for qualifying my writing, apply perfectly to his own uncharacteristic outbursts. Related Links: James S. Russell Reviews Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 The problematic and censorious reception of the book by modernist critics has, with very rare exceptions, been uniform around the world and unchanging for 27 years [editor’s note: when it was first published]. It was Robert Lister’s dissertation about this
By Leon Krier. Monacelli Press, 2013, 272 pages, $75. Designing the First Axis of Evil Leon Krier would like us to look at the Nazi architecture of Albert Speer in a detached manner. But he starts painting himself into a corner on the very first page. He decries the widespread opinion that Nazi architecture is “worthless, however well-designed.” Click the image above to see more photographs from the book. Let's stipulate that Speer, Hitler's architect and also the Third Reich's minister of armaments and war production, manipulated scale, proportion, columns, and entablatures with great facility—not to mention prodigiousness—and that the
By Phyllis Lambert. Yale University Press, 2013, 320 pages, $65. Aiming High The era in which it seemed possible to regard the work of Mies van der Rohe as a product of pure geometry untouched by mortal concerns on its journey from his brain to physical reality has happily passed. Never, though, has a single work been examined in such intricate and fascinating human detail as is his iconic New York tower in Phyllis Lambert's Building Seagram, a comprehensive account of the building's inspiration, design, construction, and preservation. Photo courtesy Yale University Press Phyllis Lambert oversaw the work of Philip
Edited by Stefan Al. Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 216 pages, $25. Where All Your Stuff Comes From Open this book and you cannot help but think of Great Leap Forward, the 2001 tome generated by Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues at the Harvard Design School Project on the City. Both books are university-based, research-driven, essay-enhanced, muddy-photography-filled studies of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), the manufacturing center of China. The dozen years between Great Leap's “initial overview” and this “critical evaluation” have been filled with enormous progress (or, some say, regress). In Factory Towns of South China, editor
By William H. Fain. Glendale, California: Balcony Press, 2012, 160 pages, $35. In this thoughtful and concise new book, William Fain answers the question in his title by anticipating that his car, given the opportunity, would ask, “Why do you make such a fuss over me? Why do people spend so much of their resources on me? Why do architects and city planners give such high priority to me in their designs for neighborhoods and downtowns?” Using his home city Los Angeles as an example in a series of linked essays, Fain describes how the car—having dominated past urban development
By Edwin Heathcote. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012, 160 pages, $20. This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard. The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has
Edited by Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, and David Fixler. Yale University Press, 2012, 323 pages, $75. Alvar Aalto considered moving to the United States after World War II. The dapper, charming Finn loved America and, despite his mythic status in Finland now, felt unappreciated in his homeland (his boat, which he had designed and built, was named Nemo Propheta in Patria). He did, however, do two stints as a visiting professor at MIT in the 1940s. It was for that Cambridge campus that he created Baker House, one of his most important works and the protagonist of this handsome book.
By Christopher Bascom Rawlins. Foreword by Alastair Gordon. Metropolis Books/Gordon de Vries Studio, 2013, 202 pages, $60. Consider this book a handy time machine set to take you to a sun-soaked place in a hedonistic era. Bring your Speedo and Ray-Bans and let go of your hang-ups. Both a cultural history and an architectural meditation, Fire Island Modernist captures the look, feel, and sensation of gay society in the 1960s and '70s that flourished on the sandy shores and shifting dunes of the 31-mile-long barrier island of its title. Separated from the Hamptons by Great South Bay, Fire Island developed
By Caroline Rob Zaleski. W.W. Norton, 2012, 336 pages, $80. This fascinating book is as much a social history as a documentation of architects working on Long Island during the period of “high Modernism,” when ideology was considered as important as space and form. Organized in chapters devoted to individual architects, rather than in a coherent thematic order, the book includes a surprising number of well-known architects who built on Long Island, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Antonin Raymond, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Paul Rudolph, and Marcel Breuer. Disappointing, although not entirely unexpected, is the almost total
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