Fifty years ago, in the 75th-anniversary issue of RECORD, editor in chief Emerson Goble addressed an issue he was constantly asked about—why the magazine wasn’t as critical as it had been in its early years.
Charles and Ray Eames may have been the most famous Midcentury Modern design pair in the Americas, but they were not the only professional couple who contributed to its development.
A longtime editor of RECORD, who was also an architect and teacher, embraced both the past and the future during the development of modernism in America.
A longtime editor of RECORD who was also an architect and teacher, embraced both the past and the future during the development of modernism in America.
Radical though it be, the work here illustrated is dedicated to a cause conservative in the best sense of the word. At no point does it involve denial of the elemental law and order inherent in all great architecture; rather it is a declaration of love for the spirit of that law and order and a reverential recognition of the elements that made its ancient letter in its time value and beautiful.
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 Wright retaliated in an unpublished reply that it was “pathetic” to see a well-respected critic “picking over bit by bit his architectural ragbag for architectural finery wherewith to clothe the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.”