Maxwell, an architect, author, critic, and educator, died on January 2. In this tribute, George Baird remembers him as postmodernism's "most insightful theorist."
In A Genealogy of Modern Architecture, the prolific historian, critic, and theorist Kenneth Frampton presents a documentation of a course he used to teach, which involved comparative critical analyses of 14 pairs of more or less canonical modern buildings completed between 1924 and 2007.
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