By Martin Filler. New York Review Books, 2013, 336 pages, $30. A Voice for Here and Now Martin Filler's new collection of essays appears in the wake of a significant shift in the tenor of architectural criticism. Gone are such provocative, if “unstable” (Filler's word), figures as Herbert Muschamp, and such cheerleaders for the star system as Nicolai Ouroussoff. Instead, we have their more measured successor at The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, as well as the similarly thoughtful Christopher Hawthorne at the Los Angeles Times and Blair Kamin at the Chicago Tribune. But Filler can claim to have launched
By Raymund Ryan with contributions by Brian O’Doherty and Marc Treib and photographs by Iwan Baan. University of California Press, 2012, 120 pages, $40. In recent decades, hundreds of new museums have sprung up in emerging art markets across the globe. In most of them, art remains confined to sterile, “white cube” galleries, while architecture and nature remain, quite literally, outside. A very different model, though, was pioneered more than 50 years ago by projects such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, which showed how art, architecture, and landscape could be brought together. In White Cube, Green
By Vishaan Chakrabarti. Metropolis Books, 2013, 252 pages, $30. Bright Lights, Big Cities Architect, planner, and one-time developer Vishaan Chakrabarti asks us to imagine a United States in which government invests in high-speed trains linking high-density cities and does not subsidize suburban sprawl. He admits this sounds a bit naive in an era of political paralysis and at a time when the middle class and wealthy—no matter their political affiliation—enjoy perks like the mortgage-interest deduction that help perpetuate the status quo. But he builds his argument with straightforward prose and lots of easy-to-read charts and graphs. Hyper-dense cities are more
By Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. This is a book on the model of Marilyn and John Neuhart’s The Story of Eames Furniture (Gestalten, 2010). It shares with that two-volume set an agenda—an emphasis on process and manufacturing—and a large size (14.2 by 11.8 inches) that does neither the reader nor the illustrations great service. Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman, by Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. First, the agenda. Lutz, a former Knoll associate, argues in his introduction that Saarinen’s furniture has never attracted the same scholarly interest as his
EcoArchitecture: The Work of Ken Yeang, by Sara Hart. John Wiley & Sons, 2011, 272 pages, $75. WOHA: Selected Projects, Volume 1, by Patrick Bingham-Hall. Pesaro Publishing, 2011, 280 pages, $65. In the present environment of instant communications and global architectural practices, the swirl of influences between East and West is as dynamic and complex as the trade winds that blow between continents. This pair of publications, EcoArchitecture, The Work of Ken Yeang, by Sara Hart, and WOHA: Selected Projects Volume 1, by Patrick Bingham-Hall, captures the complexity and promise of this moment. WOHA: Selected Projects, Volume 1, by Patrick
Never Built: Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum revives a century of ambitious schemes that might have been. B+UDowney Office Building, 2009 A history of what didn’t happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitious designs, some right on the brink of realization—that never broke ground in the city. Alongside visionaries who have vanished into obscurity, the thwarted include such famous names as Neutra, Lautner,
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
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