Conversations with Architects: Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown

by John Wesley Cook, Heinrich Klotz, Vincent Scully (Foreword)

Architecture book

Genres: Architecture

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 197

Reviews

[Samir de Leon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As somebody with a casual interest in architecture but no real background in it, I struggle to find material appropriate for my level. Most architecture writing I've come across is either too introductory or too technical. What I've been looking for is "intelligent literary criticism, but architecture." The questions I'm interested in are: what is the political significance of architecture, how does architecture shape how we move through the world, what is the nature of the relationship between form and function, how does one design with the future in mind, not just environmentally but aesthetically? How does a building exist in concert with an environment the architect cannot predict?

The conversations in "Conversations With Architects" don't answer all these questions (the architects interviewed offer answers to some of them, to be sure), but they've given me more tools with which to reason about these questions more competently on my own. Although there are widely available interviews with well-known livings architects like Gehry, Renzo Piano, Koolhas, etc. but I've found that those conversations get too muddled by details that don't interest me much, like cost-induced material tradeoffs or biographical foci. This collection offers much more substantive, and at times adversarial discussions about design decisions, their political implications, whether political implications even matter, etc. The Philip Johnson interview was probably the most illuminating to me, because it was the most adversarial one, and it forced me to engage with ideas that are pretty antithetical to my own. But all of the interviews are worth reading, more than once even. Living in Chicago, I'm especially fond of Bertrand Goldberg's work, and his interview was a standout, as well.

If I were to measure the quality of a text in terms of how much I was able to learn from it -- a reasonably useful metric for nonfiction -- "Conversations With Architects" would be my number one nonfiction book of the year so far.

[Madison Santos]

excellent resource. the cover funnily enough ranks architects in my opinion from worst to best (top->bottom). morris lapidus is entirely underrated, i have loved him since i first swam at the kosciuszsko pool in bed-stuy. Venturi thinks he knows what the people wants (although I don’t think he really thinks that), Lapidus truly does. Venturi/Scott-Brown were rather stock, but they probably had more interviews in a year than all of the other architects had combined in a decade, so I get it. it’s great when the spoken manner of an architect matches his work perfectly— kahns unalienating loftiness (in stark contrast to the villain of it all, Philip Johnson), Lapidus’s humorous every-manness, Roche’s utilitarianism, etc. and some kudos to the editorial team for such precise referencing to all 100+ figures throughout.