By Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove. Monacelli Press, 2013, 1,072 pages, $95. Utopia by Design When Paradise Planned arrived at my home—all 1,072 extra-thick high-gloss pages—my first instinct was to set the volume down on its own half-acre lot, give it a peaked roof, and simply move in. Instead, I rushed to the gym and spent a few days building up the biceps needed to lift the thing. Then, awed by the sheer cumulative industry of writing triumvirate Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove, I lowered their exhaustive survey of the garden suburb onto my
By Rowan Moore. Harper Design, August 2013, 400 pages, $30. The View From Across the Pond As he indicates in the title of his new book, British architecture critic Rowan Moore sets out to joust with Big Questions. What is the relationship between political and economic power and architectural patronage? How does active human desire translate into the latent desires embedded in architectural space? What is the relationship between the longing for home and the urge to wander? In addressing these concerns, Moore revels in ambiguities, selecting examples to support widely differing interpretations. Drawing mostly from the 20th century, he
By Ben Katchor, Pantheon, 2013, 160 pages, $30. Out of Whack: A Cartoonist's Vision Picture a bizzaro realm where building, construction, architecture, and just plain city living are slightly off-kilter—the stuff that dreams are made of. Welcome to graphic novelist Ben Katchor's world. If you're willing to immerse yourself in it, you may find yourself lying awake at night, worrying about your cellar and bearing walls. The characters in Katchor’s new book inhabit a built environment that’s familiar but distorted by their own personality quirks and hang-ups. If you haven't crossed paths with Katchor before, Hand-Drying in America: And Other
By Gregory L. Heller. Foreword by Alexander Garvin. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 290 pages, $36. Power Broker Ed Bacon was born, raised, and—except for a brief stint in Flint, Michigan—spent his long career in Philadelphia. Gregory L. Heller notes in fascinating detail every post and position Bacon held, every colleague, boss, opponent, mayor, and governor who crossed paths with him. More than a biography, this book is the story of mid-20th-century planning, complete with the passions and dogma that attended it, as told through one man in one city. In doing this, Heller answers the question still posed about
by Tracy Campbell. Yale University Press, 2013, 232 pages, $26. The Price of Monumentality This small, minimally illustrated black-and-white book is a curious tribute to Eero Saarinen's soaring monument in St. Louis. It is part of a series called Icons of America, joining the Statue of Liberty, Joe DiMaggio, Wall Street, Alger Hiss, The Hamburger, and others. The Gateway Arch has been back in the news since Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates won a competition in 2010 to redesign the area around it. That firm's scheme, intended to rejuvenate both the park and the adjacent downtown, will submerge and plant over
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
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