Michael Webb

Book Review: A New Look at a 20th-Century Titan of Design

2013-01-10T20:38:15Z

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America. Edited by Donald Albrecht (Abrams, $65)

Most Americans lost their faith in the future in the 1960s and are unlikely to regain it any time soon. That makes this handsome survey of work by a great American designer a time capsule of a vanished era, for it chronicles the decades, from the 1920s through the 1950s, when the US was a beacon of hope and progress for the rest of the world. This is the companion book for an exhibition that will soon be on view at the Museum of the City of New York.Image courtesy of Abrams Books

Geddes (1893-1958) shaped the future, and the context of contemporary living. Albrecht describes him as a visionary and a pragmatist; a self-taught polymath of unfettered imagination, “who was equally comfortable in the realms of fact and fantasy.” All of his concerns—for architecture and urban planning, automobiles and new technologies—came together in his Futurama exhibit for the General Motors Pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Drawing on his experience of designing immersive theater productions, Geddes put spectators into moving sound cars that glided through a vast model of America and its cities as he imagined they might be in 1960. His vision has been realized in part; sadly it doesn’t provide the effortless mobility he anticipated.

Other expert essays and a plethora of imagery explore his designs for stage and screen, homes and offices, transportation and advertising. Like his contemporaries, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Geddes was a giant who deserves to be remembered, for his achievements and his dreams.

Book Review: Art and Nature

2012-12-05T02:21:32Z

As an architectural curator, Raymund Ryan has few rivals and he’s presented a succession of inventive exhibitions at the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsbugh. "White Cube, Green Maze: New Art Landscapes" accompanies the current show, which focuses on six projects from four continents. The Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Insel Hombroich in Germany, and the Benesse Art Site on the Japanese island of Naoshima have been widely covered.Less familiar is the Jardin Botanico de Culiacan in Mexico, the Instituto Inhotim in Brazil and the Grand Traino Art Complex in the Lazio province of Italy, which the LA firm of Johnston Marklee is building. Essays by Ryan, Brian O’Doherty, and Marc Treib explore the idea of taking the museum out of doors and weaving art into a natural or constructed landscape. Images by Iwan Baan are a big plus, but the book is compromised by the erratic captioning and the illegibility of text printed on saturated color.

Book Review: Residential Delights

2012-12-05T01:49:07Z

"The Iconic Interior: Private Spaces of Leading Artists, Architects, and Designers" is a gorgeous indulgence for the holidays and a source of inspiration for architects and designers, for it includes nearly all the luminaries of the past century, from Adolph Loos and Jean-Michel Frank to John Pawson and David Mlinaric. That quarter indicates the range of the selection, which veers from minimalism to decorative excess and includes many that are one-of-a-kind, notably Michael Boyd’s fusion of art and design in the house that Oscar Niemeyer designed in Santa Monica. Author Dominic Bradbury has made a thoughtful choice and his descriptions are a pleasure to read. Richard Powers’ images capture the spirit and detail of these varied interiors, as he did for architecture in "The Iconic House", a previous collaboration. Each house and apartment is well documented, and a gazetteer provides contact details for the 18 properties that are open to the public. All credit to Thames & Hudson for commissioning this book and its predecessor, which Abrams are distributing in the U.S.. One could wish American publishers showed as much imagination in this field. The only problem is the title. One can call architectural masterworks iconic, but interiors are far more ephemeral and shaped by passing fashion or an owner’s whims.

Book Review: The Best of Ando

2012-12-04T20:22:09Z

Taschen and its house author have been constantly updating their monograph on Tadao Ando, and the latest edition, "Ando: Complete Works 1975-2012", is four times as long as the one that appeared in 1999. It features 42 buildings plus 16 projects that were not realized or are now under construction, mostly in the Middle East and East Asia. The title is misleading: this is a selection of Ando’s best designs—even the checklist at the end is far from complete—but it represents the body of work for which the architect wants to be known. One could wish that other prolific practitioners were equally self-critical. Page for page, it’s a terrific bargain. Philip Jodidio provides a helpful introduction, keyed to specific buildings, along with a biographical note and a selective bibliography, though one wishes the type had been set at a readable size. Like most contemporary monographs, it’s designed not for reading, but browsing; flipping the pages from one beguiling photo spread to the next. The plans, expressive sketches and details draw one into Ando’s structures. A self-taught master of concrete and wood, of mass and void, and, above all, of light, this architect—who once built only in Japan—is now at home in every part of the world and in every type of building.

BOOK REVIEW: 20th Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas

2012-11-06T19:24:52Z

Phaidon, a London-based publisher of sumptuous books on architecture and art, was recently sold and one can only hope that the new owner will preserve its integrity at a time when other publishers are dumbing down. Phaidon’s latest atlas of 20th Century World Architecture ($200) — a blockbuster in the same format as two previous surveys of contemporary work—chronicles 750 exemplary modern buildings of the 20th century. Classics are juxtaposed with unfamiliar projects, and the committees that produced this mammoth tome have striven for a geographical balance. Each project gets a full page of images, drawings and a succinct factual description, which facilitates comparisons. It’s a great work of reference, but you may prefer to wait a couple of years to buy the compact and inexpensive travel edition. Meanwhile, you can browse the entries, country by country, and plan future voyages of discovery. And, as further stimulus, the travel edition of The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture has just appeared.

Recalling Saarinen's Mastery

2012-11-06T18:22:45Z

Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (Image by Ezra Stoller)The A+D Museum is flourishing as a hub of activity, raising public awareness of architecture and design. Its current exhibition, Eero Saarinen: a Reputation for Innovation, is on display through January 3rd, and it provides a good introduction to the varied work of this American master. Here are the classic achievements—the St Louis Arch, the TWA Terminal at JFK and Dulles Airport in Virginia—all completed after his premature death in 1961 at age 51. How many more masterpieces might there have been if he had lived as long as his father, the Finnish master Eliel Saarinen? Here, too, are examples of the furniture Eero created for Knoll: the Grasshopper and Womb chairs, and the Tulip chairs and tables that banished what he called “the slum of legs.” A revelation of the A+D show is the 1939 competition-winning design for the Smithsonian Gallery of Art, which was intended to complement, in its architecture and emphasis on contemporary work, John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art, then under construction on the north side of the Washington Mall. It’s an accomplished work for a 29-year-old, who was beginning to emerge from the long shadow of his father.

BOOK REVIEW: Color, Light, Time and If Cars Could Talk

2012-09-11T22:28:37Z

Different as their content is, these two books belong together as exquisite miniatures; exemplars of quality over quantity, and the intimacy of a book you can hold in one hand as easily as a smart phone. Lars Müller is based in Zurich and upholds the Swiss tradition of crisp, unpretentious modernism in all his publications. Balcony Press, the publisher of Form, has fewer resources but puts them to good use—notably in this delectable paperback with its searing yellow cover and geometrical spreads that herald each essay. Designer Sarah Carr merits an award—for her artistry and for demonstrating anew that no digital screen will ever match the aesthetic pleasure of a well-printed book.

Color, Light, Time contains essays by Jordi Safont-Tria and Sanford Kwinter on the themes Steven Holl explores in his recent buildings, and a series of brief notes by the architect. As in other books by and about this cerebral architect, it covers a broad range of perceptual and philosophical issues, and the text is woven together with sketches and photographs that bring these varied projects to life. Poetic and haptic, they offer—at every scale—a rich source of inspiration for practitioners and unalloyed delight for connoisseurs of the art of architecture.

Steven Holl: Color, Light, Time
Lars Müller, $45

If Cars Could Talk is a collection of short essays by an architect and urban designer who has been deeply committed to the livability of cities since he worked in Boston and New York under the last generation of idealistic mayors, and has spent the past three decades trying to redeem Los Angeles. It’s an unenviable task, for this sprawling metropolis lacks effective leadership, and its players and the institutions they represent are, in the main, parsimonious, philistine, and parochial. Happily, his bow-tied cheeriness has preserved his sanity, his projects have been widely realized (most recently in China), and he wages the fight for humane design with gusto. In these stimulating essays, he challenges the dominance of cars and plop developments while offering an alternative vision of a mobile city with abundant green space and an intelligent use of technology. In a better world, he’d be an ideal candidate for mayor of LA—but one doubts he would succumb to that delusion, having witnessed the fate of New York Mayor John Lindsay.

If Cars Could Talk: Essays on Urbanism
by William Fain
Balcony Press, $35

BOOK REVIEW: The London Square

2012-09-11T22:19:31Z

From street level, London can seem overpowering--a vast, crowded metropolis that crushes the human spirit--but from a viewing gallery it becomes a green city. Expansive parks, leafy squares, and lovingly cultivated back yards: a triumph of planting over building. The native love of gardening found full expression in residential squares that were planted and enclosed—in contrast to the paved civic squares of the continent. In Europe, plazas and piazzas began life as market places or as forecourts to the ruler’s palace; in London and a few provincial cities such as Bath and Edinburgh, it was a developer’s tool—a way of adding value to a new residential quarter. In The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a British landscape designer, traces in scholarly (sometimes tedious) detail the evolution of the London square, from the Italianate ensemble of Covent Garden (which soon acquired a market and lost its cachet) to the flowering of the form in the Georgian era, and the steady erosion of these oases over the past century.

MODERNISM REBORN: AIA TOURS

2012-09-05T03:42:20Z

The John Entenza House, renovated by Michael Folonis, FAIA
Too few potential clients have experienced the pleasure of living in a well-designed modern house—which is why so many cling to familiar historicist styles. The Case Study House Program was intended to create models for rational living and win over the uncommitted, but tract home builders offered the illusion of a customized product at a competitive price, easy financing and instant acceptance. Over the past 20 years, AIA/LA has showcased the latest work of its members in a succession of self-guided house tours and now it has added a new attraction: a monthly, architect-guided tour to an updated modern classic. These tours should demonstrate that good design is timeless, no matter how confined the space, and show how the frugality of the Great Depression and the post-war era can be subtly enriched to accommodate contemporary cravings.

BOOK REVIEW: African Metropolitan Architecture and David Adjaye: Authoring

2012-08-03T03:14:31Z

A massive portfolio of photos on African cities, and a collection of discussions at Princeton on the relationship of art and architecture show two sides of a provocative British architect who is beginning to make his mark in America. “Africa has always been a point of reference for me,” writes David Adjaye, who had a peripatetic childhood as the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, and has now reconnected with his roots. He traveled to all but one of the 53 African states (wisely omitting Somalia) studying the relationship of buildings to climate and landscape, and photographing the gritty reality of their capitals. This research fed into his competition-winning design for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC—a building of extraordinary originality amid the banalities that line the Mall—and a series of commissions in Africa.

The photos are grouped geographically—desert, forest, mountain etc—in six paper-bound volumes, plus a slim collection of essays. It’s a dramatic way of articulating the radical differences within a continent that most Westerners ignore except for the latest civil war or massacre. Adjaye wants to play up the diversity and vitality of his homeland, observing that “the colonial city existed primarily for purposes of trade and administration but, since independence, the same cities have become symbols of modernity…The identity of each modernity can supply incredible richness.” That sounds good and it may be true, but Adjaye’s photos don’t support his assertion. What we see is squalor bordering on the chaotic; shabby relics of colonialism swallowed up in a tide of gimcrack construction and unregulated signage. Even Asmara, which a veteran Ethiopian architect describes as a “modernist city of unparalleled beauty and serenity [that] has survived unscathed from years of war,” appears derelict in these images.

African Metropolitan Architecture
by David Adjaye
Rizzoli International, $100

Authoring is an edited transcript of discussions Adjaye had with three artists—Teresita Fernandez, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie--while teaching at the Princeton School of Architecture. It recalls a similar dialogue between Frank Gehry and Richard Serra that the Weisman Institute hosted 20 years ago. Adjaye studied art and has, to an even greater extent than Gehry, achieved a fusion of the two disciplines—in houses, galleries and installations. He is an outspoken critic of form for form’s sake. “Architecture is, at its essence, a way to think about civil society and translate the building requirements beyond the basic needs of the clients,” he declares. “Thinking, and the process of idea generation, is far more important than perfecting a technique.” It’s an ideal he practices (his Idea Stores in London’s East End have created a new model for branch libraries) and one hopes his students at Princeton take it to heart. Authoring challenges received ideas and much current practice in art and architecture, and, like all of Lars Müller’s books, it is elegantly produced. It’s a stimulating read that should get you thinking.

David Adjaye: Authoring; re-placing art and architecture
Lars Müller, $45