Martin Filler, the architecture critic who has appeared in The New York Review of Books since 1985, now gives us his third anthology of these essays on modern architects. Most are devoted to historical figures of the last century, some revered (Frederick Law Olmsted), some notorious (Albert Speer), and some inexcusably forgotten (Jan Duiker, designer of Holland’s brilliant Zonnestraal sanatorium, 1931). Although Filler’s essays are usually prompted by a new publication or even exhibition about the subject, they are considerably more than book reviews. His concern is to show why these subjects remain of perennial interest to us—or, in some cases, do not. There is a great deal of pleasantly opinionated revisionism.
Filler is baffled by the ongoing rehabilitation of Paul Rudolph, America’s furiously imaginative Brutalist. His Yale Art & Architecture building was a “preposterous overelaboration of space,” and his bewildering New York apartment, with its odd array of suspended catwalks and floating platforms, forced visitors to huddle nervously, like Eliza “on the ice floes.” Rudolph’s weakness was not his chilly Brutalism but his own aggressively introverted personality, with none of the larger sense of humanity that Filler finds in Louis Kahn, one of his heroes.
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