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Buffalo Architecture: A Guide
Buffalo's rich architectural and planning heritage has attracted the attention of several prominent historians, whose work here is accompanied by over 250 illustrations and photographs. For its size, the city of Buffalo, New York, possesses a remarkable number and variety of architectural masterpieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth Adler and Sullivan's Prudential building, H. H. Richardson's massive Buffalo State Hospital, Richard Upjohn's Sr. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, five prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, and building by Daniel Burnham, Albert Kahn, and the firms of McKim, Mead, and White, and Lockwood, Green and Company, among others. These structures by prominent "outsiders" served to spur the efforts of local architects, builders, and craftsmen, and all of them built within the context of the city-wide park and parkway system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In addition, the city and its environs exhibit representative works by more recent architects, among them Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Walther Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudloph, Minoru Yamasaki, and the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Buffalo's rich architectural and planning heritage has attracted the attention of several prominent historians, capable of the challenge of evaluating its significance. Reyner Banham is one of the world's leading authorities on the theory and practice of architecture, and he has written extensively on design in the industrial age (and Buffalo's innovative manufacturing plants and grain elevators are important exemplars of such design). Charles Beveridge, whose essay covers the park and parkway system, is editor of the Olmsted papers at The American University. And Henry Russell Hitchcock is the dean of American architectural historians, and the organizer of a 1940 exhibition on Buffalo's built environment. Their essays are followed by seven sections that delineate the city's neighborhoods, each provided with a map, neighborhood history, and a full complement of photographs with descriptive building captions. An eighth section, "Lost Buffalo," describes demolished buildings, chief among them Wright's great Larkin administration building, while the remaining sections venture out of town, exploring Erie and Niagara Counties, other parts of Western New York, and southern Ontario.
336 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 1981
31 people want to read
About the author
Reyner Banham
41 books48 followersPeter Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" in which he categorized the Angelean experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology.
He was based in London, moving to the USA from 1976. He studied under Anthony Blunt, then Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner invited him to study the history of modern architecture, giving up his work Pioneers of the Modern Movement. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to built structures where the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. He wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).
He had connections with the Independent Group, the This is Tomorrow show of 1956 (the birth of pop art) and the thinking of the Smithsons, and of James Stirling, on the new brutalism (which he documented in The New Brutalism, 1955). He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies (electricity, air conditioning) even ahead of the classic account of structures. This was the area found absorbing in the 1960s by Cedric Price, Peter Cook and the Archigram group.
Green thinking (Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The 'postmodern' was for him unease, and he evolved as the conscience of post-war British architecture. He broke with the utopian and technical formality. Scenes in America Deserta (1982) and A Concrete Atlantis (1986) talk of open spaces and his anticipation of a 'modern' future.
As a Professor, Banham taught at the University of London, the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also was the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He also starred in the short documentary Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles.
Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read Los Angeles in the original.
He was based in London, moving to the USA from 1976. He studied under Anthony Blunt, then Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner invited him to study the history of modern architecture, giving up his work Pioneers of the Modern Movement. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to built structures where the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. He wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).
He had connections with the Independent Group, the This is Tomorrow show of 1956 (the birth of pop art) and the thinking of the Smithsons, and of James Stirling, on the new brutalism (which he documented in The New Brutalism, 1955). He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies (electricity, air conditioning) even ahead of the classic account of structures. This was the area found absorbing in the 1960s by Cedric Price, Peter Cook and the Archigram group.
Green thinking (Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The 'postmodern' was for him unease, and he evolved as the conscience of post-war British architecture. He broke with the utopian and technical formality. Scenes in America Deserta (1982) and A Concrete Atlantis (1986) talk of open spaces and his anticipation of a 'modern' future.
As a Professor, Banham taught at the University of London, the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also was the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He also starred in the short documentary Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles.
Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read Los Angeles in the original.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 12, 2009
This is the must-have book for Buffalo's must-see architecture. It's not flashy, it doesn't have glossy pictures, but it does have a lot of good, accurate information. To keep in your car, if possible.
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August 25, 2008I'm very very interested in visiting Buffalo, wish they had a more up to date architecture guide than this 1981 one, however...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews