Frank Lloyd Wrights War on the Fine Arts James Marston Fitch

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MERICAN Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It. By James Marston Fitch with William Bobenhausen. (Oxford, $40.) ''As completely as fish in water, people are submerged in their ain environs,'' James Marston Fitch writes. ''Merely, unlike fish, people act upon their surroundings also equally existence acted upon by it.'' How we practise that -- through our natural and artificial responses to light, rut, cold and sound, to say aught of space, time and gravity -- is the subject of this revised version of a classic work beginning published past Fitch in 1947 and now thoroughly updated (with the assist of the architect William Bobenhausen) to reflect the immense technological changes since then. Their masterly and surprisingly accessible investigation of the functional aspects of architecture addresses bug that few nonprofessionals consider, though the world would be greatly improved if they did.

From "Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process"

View of the living and dining rooms and library of Gehry's Schnabel house (1986-1989) in Brentwood, Calif.

The 90-year-old Fitch, doyen of the historic-preservation movement in America, is also an ardent champion of modernism, but he can be frank in his assessments of its physical shortcomings and failures. With a refreshing lack of ideological bias and awe-inspiring erudition, he and his co-author roam across a vast terrain, from the effects of lighting on worker productivity to global warming, from the thermal properties of the igloo to the ergonomics of bathroom fixtures. Their proposed solutions to many architectural and planning problems display so much common sense as to seem obvious, and withal the wisdom they bring to their encyclopedic topic is annihilation only commonplace. This volume ought to be mandatory reading for every architecture student, every bit well equally for any citizen concerned with raising the quality of the built environment.

POMPEII: Public and Private Life. By Paul Zanker. Translated past Deborah Lucas Schneider. (Harvard, $22.95.) The thousands of Pompeians smothered under the volcanic ash of Vesuvius on Aug. 24 in A.D. 79 survive in the modern imagination. Eerily preserved, their remains and those of their fashionable resort boondocks -- one of the Hamptons of aboriginal Rome -- provide our clearest picture of urban life 2,000 years ago, illuminated by the mundane details that give Pompeii an immediacy (and profound humanity) exceeding that of other archaeological sites.

Paul Zanker, the director of the German Archaeological Constitute in Rome and a professor of classical archaeology at the Academy of Munich, has written what is destined to become a classic study. Quietly authoritative, Zanker'southward cursory still incessantly suggestive overview of Pompeii and its buildings puts architecture, as it ought to be, squarely in the context of the social and spiritual attitudes that produce it.

As the austere values of the Roman democracy were superseded by the exotic Hellenistic tastes of the expanding empire, houses of the well-to-practise were transformed into sanctuaries for recreating the aureate age of Greece, as well equally private stages for Dionysiac pleasures once considered corruptly unpatriotic. Pompeii's in-turning retreats replicated Greek compages, wall paintings and sculptures, sometimes with gardens as miniature landscapes that gave the illusion of travel without the inconvenience.

As Zanker writes of ane such Pompeian dream house: ''Perspectives actually intended for wider views are cunningly inverted -- architectural elements borrowed from villas in the state or by the seaside are crammed together into a Walt Disney world. . . . The owner, eager to imitate the lavish world of villas he then clearly admired, preferred quantity over quality.'' Readers will observe several such parallels betwixt life today and the competitively materialistic, luxury-worshiping and nostalgia-fixated inhabitants of not-so-distant Pompeii.

German language CASTLES AND PALACES. Edited by Klaus Merten. Photography by Paolo Marton. (Vendome, $75.) Less familiar now than their counterparts in Great britain, France and Italia, the buildings of German princes and nobles were still every fleck as splendid as could have been wished during the centuries when impressive size and ornamental excess were outward signs of political might. Though there are several famous landmarks in this sumptuous collection -- including the Tiepolo-frescoed Bizarre residence of the prince-bishops of WŸrzburg, Frederick the Great of Prussia'due south Rococo bijou of Sanssouci, and Ludwig II of Bavaria'southward operatic, neomedieval castle of Neuschwanstein -- many of the 53 works chosen by Klaus Merten, the master curator of palaces and gardens for the state of Baden-WŸrttemberg, come as a revelation.

Amidst the most delightful is Favorite, the summer palace of the dukes of WŸrttemberg, in Ludwigsburg. Its vigorous, warmly colored stucco exterior, built around 1720, contrasts with the cool elegance of the neo-Classical interiors, redone at the turn of the 19th century. By the 1820'southward, when the greatest German architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, remodeled and busy the romantic hideaway of Charlottenhof on the grounds of Sanssouci for the Prussian crown prince and princess, the remarkable transition from authoritarian display to familial gemŸtlichkeit was complete.

JOHN SOANE: An Adventitious Romantic. Past Gillian Darley. (Yale Academy, $45.)
JOHN SOANE: Architect. Edited by Margaret Richardson and Mary Anne Stevens. (Purple University of Fine art/Yale University, $75.) Sir John Soane died the year Queen Victoria ascended the British throne, but more than historical happenstance fabricated him a pivotal figure betwixt ancient tradition and nascent modernism. Soane, the bright, ambitious son of a stonemason, immersed himself in the classical tradition, but was so sure of his talents that he played with the one thousand style in means none of his contemporaries dared. He slashed fearlessly through walls, floors and ceilings to create dynamic interiors that soar, plunge and fifty-fifty seem to hover in midair, none more so than those of his own London residence, which he worked on from 1792 to 1834. That intricate, obsessive remodeling of a plainly Georgian row business firm into a individual museum is a touchstone to architects mesmerized by Soane's powerful manipulations of space and calibration; they are intensified past the plethora of art objects and architectural fragments with which the compulsive collector fended off his horror vacui.

This compellingly readable biography past the British architectural historian Gillian Darley brings Soane, the working-class knight, to life as a mass of contradictions: a paranoid with existent enemies, a in one case-devoted begetter who became estranged from his sons and a roaring eccentric who rose to the height of his strait-laced profession. Probing deeply into the architect'southward now largely destroyed body of work, Darley revisits many long-forgotten structures, including the imaginative outbuildings of country houses that survived through benign bucolic neglect. In an intriguing postscript, the author notes her subject's enduring influence in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott'southward iconic ruby phone booths of 1924, the shallow pendentive dome of which was clearly inspired past Soane'due south family tomb.

''John Soane: Architect,'' the ravishingly illustrated catalog of the superb exhibition held at the Royal University of Art in London this fall, vividly conveys the elusive luminosity and spatial daring of his buildings. In their rule-breaking audacity they remain accurate reflections of his singular vision and angular personality.

East. W. GODWIN: Aesthetic Motion Builder and Designer. Edited by Susan Weber Soros. (Bard Graduate Heart/Yale University, $75.) Now known only to decorative arts specialists, the 19th-century British architect and critic Edward William Godwin is best remembered for his modernistic-looking, clean-lined ebonized furniture. But Godwin was renowned in his own time every bit a leader of the aesthetic movement, involving a group of well-heeled rebels who wanted to free the arts from Victorian moralizing and to foster a sensuous ''fine art for art's sake.'' Enraptured by the rich visual civilisation of Nippon, which only recently had been revealed to the West, he showed his beau aesthetes James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde (for whom he built and decorated houses in London) how to live the exquisitely rarefied life they philosophized nearly.

Inspired by styles from the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Gothic, Godwin designed everything from ceramics and wallpaper to costumes and theatrical scenery. He typified his period's fascination with the gesamtkunstwerk in his fully coordinated environments wherein no particular was left to take a chance.

Far from being a paragon of preciousness, Godwin was outrageous and contentious, carrying on an matter with the historic actress Ellen Terry (by whom he fathered two children, including the theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig) and sparring with collaborators. Reform-minded but self-indulgent, he never shared the philosophical interests and political activism of his protean design rival, William Morris, and soon after Godwin died at 53 in 1886 his work slipped into oblivion.

This superlative catalog, now the essential publication on the subject area, was edited by Susan Weber Soros, founder and director of New York's Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, where the Godwin exhibition she curated is on view through Feb. 27. In an fantabulous series of essays past Soros and nine other experts, a cumulative portrait of the multifaceted architect emerges that is strongly outlined and finely detailed.

SHINGLE STYLES: Innovation and Tradition in American Architecture, 1874 to 1982. Photography by Bret Morgan. Text by Leland Chiliad. Roth. (Norfleet/Abrams, $49.50.) One of the bright spots on the American scene after the Civil War was the rise of the shingle way, an architectural mode that drew on the aesthetic movement every bit well as American colonial traditions. In contrast to the vulgar showplaces of the era'southward new rich, the shingle style -- named for its favored cladding material by the architectural historian Vincent Scully -- demonstrated how yard houses could be gratis of ostentation only total of nobility, establishing a standard for plutocratic restraint that persists in former-coin circles to this day.

The multigabled, porch-wrapped mansions that were popular in resorts like Tuxedo Park, N.Y., Newport, R.I., and the East End of Long Island soon became the model for smaller domestic schemes throughout the country, a logical accommodation considering the shingle manner took many of its cues from small sources. This handsome survey, selected by Leland One thousand. Roth, an architectural historian at the University of Oregon, and illustrated with the moody colour photographs of Bret Morgan, is a worthy celebration of a distinctively American fashion of building.

Though information technology was a mistake for Roth to include lesser shingle mode revival work of recent decades (like an awkward postmodern pastiche by Robert A. M. Stern), in the book one can look back with unadulterated pleasure on many glorious examples of the real thing.

GAUDÍ: The Human and His Work. Text by Joan Bergós. Photographs by Marc Llimargas. (Bulfinch, $75.)
BARCELONA ART NOUVEAU. Text by Llu's Permanyer. Photography by Melba Levick. (Rizzoli, $55.) Fueled by a booming textile-manufacturing economy, plow-of-the-century Barcelona was further fortunate in having adventurous architecture patrons who prompted a torrent of creativity. Modernisme, the Catalan variant of Art Nouveau, was a farrago of Moorish, Gothic and Classical details so strongly seasoned with Arts and Crafts elements that an entirely new manner emerged, which its proudly nationalistic supporters saw as a plumbing fixtures expression of Catalonia's cultural independence.

Though the sensuously molded and bizarrely detailed structures of Antonio Gaudí are well known, the Catalan photographer Marc Llimargas'due south eye for revelatory detail is extraordinary. The vibrant colour images he took for ''Gaudí: The Human being and His Work'' (translated from a 1947 book by Joan Bergós, a younger collaborator of the master) get in seem as though one is seeing those buildings for the first time.

In ''Barcelona Art Nouveau,'' Lluís Permanyer, a native of the urban center, and the American photographer Melba Levick do equal justice to the work of Gaudí's less-acclaimed but gifted contemporaries, especially Llu's Domenech, Josep Puig and Josep Vilaseca. Domenech's Palau de la Mœsica Catalana of 1905-08 is the city's architectural masterpiece. No other concert hall approaches its over-the-tiptop opulence and decorative superabundance. The ceiling of the auditorium is aglitter with fan vaults of mosaic peacock feathers, studded with ceramic roses in full bloom and culminating in a spectacular stained-glass dome that recalls an immense, inverted Tiffany lampshade. As Permanyer writes, ''It is the virtually modernist building in the world.''

IRVING GILL AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM: A Study in Modernist Architectural Culture. Past Thomas Due south. Hines. (Monacelli, $75.) Trained in Chicago by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill found early 20th-century Southern California to be fertile ground for his rigorously unornamented architecture and progressive motion politics. Gill was captivated past the pared-downward forms of Indian adobes and Castilian colonial missions, as well every bit the white-walled, cubic North African Arabic buildings that also inspired his agreeing European contemporaries Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. Gill sought to sweep away retrograde historicism and replace it with a pure, energizing architecture he believed would promote everything from ameliorate hygiene to more than equitable social standards.

Gill, who was a Quaker, declared, ''We must cartel to be simple, and get back to the source of all architectural strength -- the direct line, the arch, the cube and the circle.'' That he did in a pathbreaking series of public buildings, private houses and multi-unit dwellings, culminating in his arcaded La Jolla Woman's Gild of 1912-14 and the minimalist Contrivance house of 1914-sixteen in West Hollywood. Favoring inventive new methods like slab-tilt construction -- in which concrete was poured into rectangular molds on the ground so hoisted 90 degrees to make walls -- Gill was as innovative in practice as he was in spirit. Most touching are the dozen depression-cost but highly dignified adobe-way concrete cottages he completed in 1933, 3 years before his death, for the Rancho Barona Indian Reservation in Lakeside, Calif., bringing total circumvolve his homage to the architecture of the inhabitants' ancestors.

Alas, two-thirds of Gill's 300 buildings take been torn downwardly, the majority of the residue altered across recognition, and his archives were put out with the trash, making this get-go-e'er monograph a heroic effort. Scrupulously researched and engagingly written by Thomas S. Hines, a professor of history and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, this long--to-be volume fills a shocking lapse in architectural literature.

CARLO SCARPA ARCHITECT: Intervening With History. By Nicholas Olsberg, George Ranalli, Jean-François Bédard, Sergio Polano, Alba di Lieto and Mildred Friedman. Photographs by Guido Guidi. (Canadian Middle for Architecture/Monacelli, paper, $45.) Although the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-78) is unknown to the general public, he has long been a cult figure among professionals. They revere Scarpa's fanatic attention to detail in his small but emotionally engaging structures, which display a rare ability to focus on the intimate and the cosmic with equal intensity. Though he congenital very little, and most of that consisted of remodelings of existing structures, his principled stance against rampant commercialism and internationalization have special pertinence today.

Scarpa fits neatly into no niche of the modern movement salve his own. Immersed in the architecture of his birthplace and the surrounding Veneto region, he knew better than to ape it. ''I have e'er had . . . an immense desire to belong to tradition,'' he said, ''but without having capitals or columns.'' Instead, he honored the past through contemporary forms made from local materials and constructed with age-sometime techniques. His regionally rooted only universally resonant designs -- above all three Italian museums and several memorable tombs -- feel so authentic because he cared non a whit about way and everything near the enduring verities of architecture.

From "Venturi, Scott Brownish & Assembly"

A project by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal in lower Manhattan, 1992.

This publication of the exemplary Scarpa exhibition held at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal earlier this year makes the architect's frequently cryptic schemes more than intelligible to a full general audience than e'er before. The thoughtful essays, peculiarly those by the bear witness'due south invitee curator, Mildred Friedman, and its designer, the American builder George Ranalli, explicate Scarpa's continuing hold on the architectural heed. Guido Guidi's subtle color photographs are amidst the most affecting architectural images in recent memory, capturing the spirit of place that was earth-shaking to the primary, also as evoking his poignant sense of the passage of time.

VENTURI, SCOTT BROWN & Assembly: Buildings and Projects, 1986-1998. By Stanislaus von Moos. (Monacelli, fabric, $65; paper, $45.) Like their contemporary, Andy Warhol, the self-described Pop architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownish have e'er been more appreciated in Europe than in America. It is easy to sympathize why. The deceptively superficial appearance of some work by this Philadelphia-based husband-and-wife team, equally well every bit their nonjudgmental comprehend of commercial imagery, has led certain critics to dismiss them equally capitulating to the venal impulses of a celebrity-mad, consumer-driven order. Their genius for taking the givens of popular culture and transforming them into high fine art is more apparent to those at a safe remove from a setting where such wry (merely also affectionate) appropriations hit a bit also close to home.

Amid Venturi's and Scott Brown's most perceptive commentators is the Swiss architectural historian Stanislaus von Moos, a professor at the Academy of Zurich. This 2nd volume in von Moos's survey of their complete works reconfirms him equally a level-headed and insightful appraiser of their wildly varied output. Their schemes tin can be past turns appropriately royal (like their Sainsbury Wing of 1986-91 at the National Gallery in London, which displays Renaissance paintings with immense nobility) or provocatively gaudy (the Hotel Mielparque Resort Complex of 1992-97 in Nikko, Japan, role ukiyo-e (floating-world) print, part comic book, part ''Madama Butterfly'' stage set). But these architects are auteurs of their medium, and every projection of theirs is worthy of serious consideration.

For all their stylistic swings, Venturi and Scott Brown accept developed a brisk business in campus architecture. At Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, among other schools, they accept taken the Victorian collegiate style and abstracted it into an adaptable vocabulary of lively patterned brick jolted with the odd, unexpected detail, all the while responding to traditional settings much more effectively, and subversively, than the big names of modernism ever did.

GEHRY TALKS: Architecture + Process. Edited by Mildred Friedman. (Rizzoli, $65.) Considering he almost never writes, Frank Gehry has been taken to task by his theory-oriented colleagues, who remember that hypothesizing about architecture is more than of import than making it. Since the completion of Gehry's universally praised Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Espana 2 years ago, the audition of those who want to know why he designs and how he builds such idiosyncratic structures has grown exponentially.

To answer the clamor for a commencement-person business relationship of his work, Gehry agreed to hash out his architecture with his former friend Mildred Friedman, the sometime pattern curator of the Walker Fine art Center in Minneapolis, who organized that museum'south landmark 1986 retrospective of his work. Friedman has taped and edited a long series of conversations with the architect most his output since her show. This is the best explication yet of his creative method; it is exceptional for its comprehensiveness, clarity and extreme candor.

Friedman covers the decisive shift in Gehry's career from pocket-sized projects designed by conventional means to larger schemes of amazing complication fabricated possible past his firm's use of Catia, a computer plan devised for plotting the irregular forms used in the aerospace industry. That software was the quantum that enabled him to retain the spontaneity of his initial sketches in the concluding blueprint at Bilbao. ''This is the get-go time I've gotten it,'' he says of that newfound liberty. ''And one time you sense of taste claret, you're not going to give up.''

Martin Filler is the compages critic of The New Republic and writes for The New York Review of Books and House Cute.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/05/reviews/architt.html

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