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Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin
An invaluable guide to lives and work of Frank Gehry, Atoni Gaudí, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Maya Lin, and other important figures of 20th and 21st century architecture.
Martin Filler's "contribution to both architecture criticism and general readers' understanding is invaluable," according to Publishers Weekly . This latest installment in his acclaimed Makers of Modern Architecture series again demonstrates his unparalleled skill in explaining the revolutionary changes that have reshaped the built environment over the past century and a half. These studies of more than two dozen master builders--women and men, celebrated and obscure, idealists and opportunists--range from the environmental pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted and the mystical eccentric Antoni Gaudí to the present-day visionaries Frank Gehry and Maya Lin.
Filler's broad knowledge embraces everything from the glittering Viennese luxury of Josef Hoffmann to the heavy-duty construction of the New Brutalists, from the low-cost postwar suburbs of the Levitt Brothers to today's super-tall condo towers on Manhattan's Billionaire's Row. Sometimes the interplay of social and political forces leads to dark results, as with Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, and interior designer, Gerdy Troost. More often, though, heroic figures including Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Lina Bo Bardi offer uplifting inspiration for the future of the one art form we all live with—and in—every day.
Martin Filler's "contribution to both architecture criticism and general readers' understanding is invaluable," according to Publishers Weekly . This latest installment in his acclaimed Makers of Modern Architecture series again demonstrates his unparalleled skill in explaining the revolutionary changes that have reshaped the built environment over the past century and a half. These studies of more than two dozen master builders--women and men, celebrated and obscure, idealists and opportunists--range from the environmental pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted and the mystical eccentric Antoni Gaudí to the present-day visionaries Frank Gehry and Maya Lin.
Filler's broad knowledge embraces everything from the glittering Viennese luxury of Josef Hoffmann to the heavy-duty construction of the New Brutalists, from the low-cost postwar suburbs of the Levitt Brothers to today's super-tall condo towers on Manhattan's Billionaire's Row. Sometimes the interplay of social and political forces leads to dark results, as with Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, and interior designer, Gerdy Troost. More often, though, heroic figures including Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Lina Bo Bardi offer uplifting inspiration for the future of the one art form we all live with—and in—every day.
408 pages, Hardcover
Published September 25, 2018
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November 3, 2022
More Architects.
Frederick Law Olmstead
Best remembered as the designer and planner of New York city’s Central Park, Olmstead, Filler surmises, ought be better -and more grandly- remembered as the founder of landscape architecture as a modern profession. Olmstead created parks, mostly in the East Coast - from Philadelphia to Boston and Fall River in Massachusetts to various towns in Connecticut. He planned the campuses of Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Chicago. Yosemite was put under federal jurisdiction on his instigation, and America’s entire planned park system, beginning with the Niagara Reservation, is thanks to him.
Antoni Gaudi
Though not a fan of maximalism in any discipline, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, with its elaborate ensembles depicting scenes from the Gospels, took my breath away when I first visited it in 2017. Walking around Barcelona, it feels like most of the city’s “touristy” things have something to do with Gaudi. Three of the city’s most frequented attractions are Gaudi built - The Sagrada Familia - which alone welcomes three million visitors yearly; Park Guell, a product of Gaudi’s naturalist phase, and Casa Mila (commonly referred to as La Pedrera - The Stone Quarry), a charming modernist building that wraps around a corner site, a building whose twisting wrought iron balconies were a source of controversy when it was built. The Sagrada Familia is still being built, 139 years after Gaudi first envisioned it. Perhaps it is true that, as Gaudi noted, his client is not in a hurry.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Filler’s essay on Wright here diverges from Taliesin and the murder of Mamah Borthwich Cheney, his focus in the second series of essays. Instead, starting from “Wright at 150”, a MoMA exhibition on the occasion of Wright’s sesquicentennial in 2017, Filler looks at many of the Master’s less publicly known works - less known because Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, had for a long time (before her death in 1985) made it virtually impossible to access his archives. The exhibition’s highlights included Wright’s hypothetical Mile-High Illinois Skyscraper, his unrealized Rosenwald School of 1928, and Wright’s work and influence in Japan.
Joseph Hoffman and the Wiener Werkstätte
Hoffman, a founder (with Klimt) of the Vienna Secession movement, became even more renowned for his work with the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), an offshoot of the secession. The works of these luminaries of the Austrian avant garde were marked with certain contradictions - the tight control of classicism (e.g. in Hoffman’s famous brass centerpiece) together with wild abandon; urban sophistication and peasant vitality - “as in in Vally Wieselthier’s ceramic sculptures of women who seem equal part jaded showgirl and feckless milkmaid” etc. Hoffman was a German speaker born in a small town in Moravia (hence ein Deutschmährer). Aside from his involvement with the Werkstätte, Hoffman also pursued a not unsuccessful independent architectural career, the major product of which is his Sanatorium Purkersdorf, a white, flat roofed, clean cut building that, in its simplicity and severity, conveyed the thought then in vogue that lack of ornamentation was sanitary. Hoffman’s architectural stature rose with Austria’s simultaneous attempt to assert a national culture through its architecture. As such, he was chosen to design the Austrian pavilion in four important exhibitions: The International Fine Arts Exhibition of 1911 in Rome, the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925 in Paris (from where the name Art Deco came) and the Venice Biennale of 1934. Hoffman also contributed to the design of social housing in Vienna in the early 1930s, at the time known as Rote Wien (Red Vienna) for its leftist sympathies.
Edwin Lutyens
A modern architect who famously rejected modernism, Lutyens was England's greatest architect since Christopher Wren. In the face of modernist inundation, he was hailed for his classical “Wrenaissance”. Luytens worked in four successive, frequently overlapping - and sometimes recurrent styles: Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Neo Georgian, and High Classical. Remarkable in his prolificness, Luytens completed some 700 commissions. Designing and planning the city of New Delhi -when George V, newly crowned, decided to move the capital of the Raj from Calcutta - was undoubtedly Lutyens’ greatest achievement. But other highlights, like his Page Street and Vincent Street Housing in Westminster’s Pimlico, his Thakeham Garden Seat, Munstead Wood in Godalming (his earliest mature work), and especially his Cenotaph (1911) in London, marked him as perhaps England’s greatest architect of any era since Wren.
Jan Duiker
Duiker died at 42 - a tragedy in a profession where for most, fame (and sometimes fortune), if it does end up coming at all, arrives when they are in their sixties. Nevertheless, Duiker, a member of the De 8 faction (setting themselves up in opposition to the De Stijl group) of Dutch architects left quite a mark. Duiker’s major influences were Hans Berlage -an influence to most Dutch architects of the period, Otto Wagner, Wright, and Russian Constructivism. Duiker’s Zonnestraal (“sunbeam”), a beautiful modernist sanatorium made of lightweight pavilions for TB afflicted diamond miners was rightly hailed internationally. Duiker’s greatest debt to Russian constructivism can be seen in his Handelsblad Cineac Cinema of 1934.
Albert Speer/ Gerdy Troost
The Man in the High Castle, one of the few tv shows I have managed to watch from beginning to end, depicted Nazi architecture as a form of visual propaganda. Like in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi architecture was depicted as expressing an all consuming power and grandness. Built to be physically imposing, this kind of architecture asserted the mental and moral (in other words, total) domination of the Reich. Yet even in today's conversation, it is only Speer who’s spoken of as the mind behind this architecture. But since Filler believes a feminist position includes articulating even the evil deeds of women equally to those of men: enter Gerdy Troost.
Troost, the wife of the German furniture architect Paul Troost (Paul was the more renown architect in their shared lifetime) was, if not Hitler’s favourite architect (for Speer was certainly a contender there), then the one who had his ear the most. A sign of her power: In one word to the Fuhrer’s ear, she ended the career of the anti modernist archconsenservative architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who had insulted her decoration of Hitler’s Munich lair by stating that he would not let a surgeon’s widow operate upon his appendix. Troost decorated Hitler’s alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria - later renamed Berghof (Mountain Court). She designed most of Hitler’s personal furniture and glassware. She was in charge of designing military medals from diamonds looted from local Jews. When put under house arrest after Nuremberg, Troost bristled about having to be guarded by “Negern” ("Niggers" i.e. African American soldiers). She died at the age of 98 in 2003, unrepentant to the end.
Speer, a grasping social climber born to an architect father in Mannheim in 1905 also studied architecture at what is now the Technical University of Berlin. Though an architectural third rater (according to Filler, at least) Speer’s ascent began when he joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His Lichtdom (a cathedral of light created from 152 aeroplane searchlights in 1933) and his Brobdingnagian stadium got Hitler to notice him. But it was with the German pavilion at Paris’ 1937 world fair that Speer broke out into the international stage. Soon after, Speer began constructing Germania - what Hitler wanted to rename Berlin, the “capital of the world” after he was done conquering. Made minister for Armaments and War Production, Speer was directly responsible for millions of Jewish deaths. Yet after Nuremberg, and after twenty years in jail, Speer came out of jail a rich man, thanks to hidden booty. He then took to writing to attempt to rehabilitate his image, and in the process also became an international celebrity. In his Erinnerungen (Memories), a runaway bestseller, he attempted to deploy the Eichman defense (just doing my job, bro). In Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau diaries), he cast himself as an overambitious architect who’d just wanted to build. He died in London in 1981, by all indications a happy old man. I hope hell exists.
The Levitt Brothers
William Jaird and Alfred Stuart, two brothers from Brooklyn, became two of America’s great builders of the 20th century, and were largely responsible for the suburbanization of the American city. They started with small groups of high end houses in Long Island during the great depression. They then, fuelled by the promise of the GI Bill, went on to pioneer a mass production technique to construct low-priced dwellings for returning WW2 servicemen (these were not prefabricated, as is often assumed, but rather merely standardized and interchangeable). Hempstead Town - later Levittown, a colony of mass produced Levitt houses 37 miles outside Manhattan became big starting 1947.
The New Brutalists
Brutalism, with its emphasis on raw concrete (beton brut in French) came up as a postwar counter to the commercialized international style. Imposing in scale, idiosyncratic in shape, rough in finish, and unabashedly depicting the inner workings of a building - structure, plumbing, electric wiring etc., brutalism set itself up as an economical means of fabrication. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles is the conspicuous manifestation of this style, but Kahn’s Richard Labs at Penn, Breuer’s and Smith’s Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, and Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theater in London (described by Prince Charles as a “nuclear power station in the middle of London") are fine examples too. Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 are later exemplums of the style. The Executive Wing of New Zealand’s Parliament in Wellington, and Rinaldo Olivieri’s La Pyramide in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, show just how internationally the style spread.
Louis Kahn
I recently finished Nathaniel Kahn’s film - “My Architect: A Son’s Journey”, and was glad that I was reading this essay so soon after. When he died in the men’s bathroom at Penn Station in 1974, Louis Kahn was at that time considered America’s greatest living architect. His most prominent works - sometimes referred to as the Kahn quintet, were The Salk Institute building in LaJolla, California, The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, The Library of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, Massachusetts, part of the campus of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India, and most notedly, the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Bangladesh’s National Assembly Building in Dhaka.
Paul Rudolph
Rudolph is remarkable as someone whose work, within his own lifetime, went from well regarded to critically panned. In the 1940s and 50s, Rudolph garnered acclaim for a series of houses he built in the West Coast of Florida. These lightweight houses were seen as dynamically manipulating space, making inventive use of new materials, and rejecting rote domestic conventions. Rudolph later came to adopt new brutalism (hence the Yale Art building). His most remarkable work was the Tuskegee University Chapel in Tuskegee, Alabama. Then, in a quest for publicity (and likely in response to Siegfried Giedion’s 1944 essay - “The Need for a New Monumentality”), he started equivocating size with significance, and began constructing massive, quite hideous structures - an example being The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York.
Rudolph stepped down as the dean of Yale’s school of architecture and moved to New York, hoping to construct skyscrapers. He envisioned buildings composed of gigantic, mixed- used “plug ins”, akin to children’s Lego bricks. Thankfully none of that shit was built. Rudolph’s own Manhattan penthouse was terribly done. It included a plexiglass bathtub that was fully visible to the tenants below, narrow plexiglass walkways that one risked falling through to the storeys below, among other atrocities.
Posthumously, a number of Rudolph’s buildings have been destroyed, reflecting his diminishing stature.
Minoru Yamasaki
Born in Seattle in 1912 to Japanese immigrants, Yamasaki began his career at the New York firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (architects of the Empire State Building). While there, he oversaw the construction of the firm’s huge naval station on Lake Seneca in up-state New York. He later moved to the Detroit firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. In 1949, together with two colleagues - Joseph Leinweber and George Hellmuth, he set up his own studio. Yamasaki faced major racism throughout most of his career, and it is interesting to note that one of his finest creations, widely lauded by both the inhabitants and the architectural public, was Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri- a racially segregated housing project for African Americans, who found it much better than the drudgery they’d been used to. Yamasaki gained increasingly prominent commissions in middle and early late career. These commissions included the Lambert St. Louis Airport Terminal, the United States Science Pavilion at the Seattle World Fair, the IBM building (1964), the Rainier Bank Tower (1977). Most notably, Yamasaki designed the World Trade Center buildings and, when 9/11 happened, Yamasaki was posthumously lauded for the innovative design and engineering which had ensured that the buildings took a long time to collapse (56 minutes for the South Tower and 102 minutes for the North), enabling thousands of lives to be saved.
Lina Bo Bardi.
Another forgotten (or, in truth, never actually paid her due) great woman architect. Though solidly in the modernist tradition, Bardi rejected the machine-like aesthetic favoured by contemporary male modernist architects, instead taking a more vernacular approach, characterized by buildings that were “structurally audacious yet uncommonly comfortable, unapologetically tidy yet conceptually rigorous… confidently dynamic yet suggestively hybrid”. In 2010, Kazuo Sejima, joint winner of the 2010 Pritzker Prize and director of the 2010 Venice Biennale organized a Bardi retrospective in Venice. This was the high point of Bardi’s belated popularity, and was seen as a reaction to a lack of social awareness in postmillennial architecture.
Outside her architecture, Bardi was a colourful personality. She was highly argumentative in her books and speeches; was an unabashed communist but unrepentant antifeminist, declaring, in a 1989 lecture: I am Stalinist and anti-feminist. It is ironically funny that Bardi herself was for a long time denied her rightful place among 20th century architecture greats, and that it was the feminism she resented which has largely won her posthumous recognition.
Born in Milan as Achillina Bo, Bardi did most of her work in Brazil, after marrying Pierro Bardi. Though Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer- the Brazilian greats of that era- didn’t think much of her, she quickly shut them up with her first completed work - the Casa de Vidro (Glass House), quite similar to Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was itself derivative of Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. Some of her other works include the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo (MASP), and the renovation of Brazil’s Servico Social de Comercio (SESC - The public outreach arm of Brazil’s trade organizations).
Frei Otto
Father of the modern tensile tent, Otto revolutionized roofing in a way no other architect of his or any other generation had - with the possible exception of Buckminster Füller’s Geodesic dome. Otto had noted that all architects were one of three things: Arrangeur (Arranger), Diebe (Thief) and Erfinder (Inventor). Though too modest to ever proclaim himself such, most contemporaries and successors firmly considered him an Erfinder. Otto’s earliest success was the gossamer-light dance pavilion, designed for the Federal Garden Exhibition in Cologne. In the 1960s, he received his most high profile commissions, designing the West German display at Montreal’s Expo 67 - the only structure that drew attention away from Safdie’s Habitat 67. In 1972, Otto designed a vast multi structure complex for the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Frank Gehry
An avant garde postmodernist, Gehry was, by the mid 2000s, the most renowned and celebrated living architect. His Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, finished in 1997 and designed with the CATIA computer design program that Gehry’s firm pioneered, led to the “Bilbao effect”, a push by cities to construct eye-catching structures that could attract revenue. In this way, many cities hoped to revitalize their downtowns through cultural tourism. The 2014 opening of Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris was another high point in a remarkable career marked by multiple high points. Gehry also built the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, renovated the Beaux Arts-Style Art Gallery in Toronto, and won the commission for the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim.
Renzo Piano
This essay on Piano, the greatest museum builder of his generation, explores work around the building of his Menil Collection (1986), the Cy Twombly Gallery (1995), the Nasher Sculpture Center (2003), and the renovation of Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, where the requirement was simple: Don’t fuck it up (Piano didn’t; his Renzo Piano pavilion is considered a wonderful addition to Kahn’s masterwork). Other Piano works considered are the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and, more extensively, his Fondation Jérôme Seydoux Pathé. Scant attention is paid to Piano as a master skyscraper builder (but Filler does do that in his Volume 2 essay on Piano).
David Childs/ Santiago Calatrava
David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is America’s most successful postmillennial commercial architect. His most renowned works are the World Trade Center (2006) and the terminal in Singapore’s Changi Airport. A major political player as well, Childs stole the World Trade Center commission from right under the nose of Daniel Liebeskind - “a clueless tyro”, according to Filler. The One World Trade Center ended up costing $3.9 billion, more than twice the price of Europe’s most expensive building, Renzo Piano’s Shard, which cost $1.9 billion. Fuck Childs.
Finished in Comment
Frederick Law Olmstead
Best remembered as the designer and planner of New York city’s Central Park, Olmstead, Filler surmises, ought be better -and more grandly- remembered as the founder of landscape architecture as a modern profession. Olmstead created parks, mostly in the East Coast - from Philadelphia to Boston and Fall River in Massachusetts to various towns in Connecticut. He planned the campuses of Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Chicago. Yosemite was put under federal jurisdiction on his instigation, and America’s entire planned park system, beginning with the Niagara Reservation, is thanks to him.
Antoni Gaudi
Though not a fan of maximalism in any discipline, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, with its elaborate ensembles depicting scenes from the Gospels, took my breath away when I first visited it in 2017. Walking around Barcelona, it feels like most of the city’s “touristy” things have something to do with Gaudi. Three of the city’s most frequented attractions are Gaudi built - The Sagrada Familia - which alone welcomes three million visitors yearly; Park Guell, a product of Gaudi’s naturalist phase, and Casa Mila (commonly referred to as La Pedrera - The Stone Quarry), a charming modernist building that wraps around a corner site, a building whose twisting wrought iron balconies were a source of controversy when it was built. The Sagrada Familia is still being built, 139 years after Gaudi first envisioned it. Perhaps it is true that, as Gaudi noted, his client is not in a hurry.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Filler’s essay on Wright here diverges from Taliesin and the murder of Mamah Borthwich Cheney, his focus in the second series of essays. Instead, starting from “Wright at 150”, a MoMA exhibition on the occasion of Wright’s sesquicentennial in 2017, Filler looks at many of the Master’s less publicly known works - less known because Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, had for a long time (before her death in 1985) made it virtually impossible to access his archives. The exhibition’s highlights included Wright’s hypothetical Mile-High Illinois Skyscraper, his unrealized Rosenwald School of 1928, and Wright’s work and influence in Japan.
Joseph Hoffman and the Wiener Werkstätte
Hoffman, a founder (with Klimt) of the Vienna Secession movement, became even more renowned for his work with the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), an offshoot of the secession. The works of these luminaries of the Austrian avant garde were marked with certain contradictions - the tight control of classicism (e.g. in Hoffman’s famous brass centerpiece) together with wild abandon; urban sophistication and peasant vitality - “as in in Vally Wieselthier’s ceramic sculptures of women who seem equal part jaded showgirl and feckless milkmaid” etc. Hoffman was a German speaker born in a small town in Moravia (hence ein Deutschmährer). Aside from his involvement with the Werkstätte, Hoffman also pursued a not unsuccessful independent architectural career, the major product of which is his Sanatorium Purkersdorf, a white, flat roofed, clean cut building that, in its simplicity and severity, conveyed the thought then in vogue that lack of ornamentation was sanitary. Hoffman’s architectural stature rose with Austria’s simultaneous attempt to assert a national culture through its architecture. As such, he was chosen to design the Austrian pavilion in four important exhibitions: The International Fine Arts Exhibition of 1911 in Rome, the Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 in Cologne, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925 in Paris (from where the name Art Deco came) and the Venice Biennale of 1934. Hoffman also contributed to the design of social housing in Vienna in the early 1930s, at the time known as Rote Wien (Red Vienna) for its leftist sympathies.
Edwin Lutyens
A modern architect who famously rejected modernism, Lutyens was England's greatest architect since Christopher Wren. In the face of modernist inundation, he was hailed for his classical “Wrenaissance”. Luytens worked in four successive, frequently overlapping - and sometimes recurrent styles: Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Neo Georgian, and High Classical. Remarkable in his prolificness, Luytens completed some 700 commissions. Designing and planning the city of New Delhi -when George V, newly crowned, decided to move the capital of the Raj from Calcutta - was undoubtedly Lutyens’ greatest achievement. But other highlights, like his Page Street and Vincent Street Housing in Westminster’s Pimlico, his Thakeham Garden Seat, Munstead Wood in Godalming (his earliest mature work), and especially his Cenotaph (1911) in London, marked him as perhaps England’s greatest architect of any era since Wren.
Jan Duiker
Duiker died at 42 - a tragedy in a profession where for most, fame (and sometimes fortune), if it does end up coming at all, arrives when they are in their sixties. Nevertheless, Duiker, a member of the De 8 faction (setting themselves up in opposition to the De Stijl group) of Dutch architects left quite a mark. Duiker’s major influences were Hans Berlage -an influence to most Dutch architects of the period, Otto Wagner, Wright, and Russian Constructivism. Duiker’s Zonnestraal (“sunbeam”), a beautiful modernist sanatorium made of lightweight pavilions for TB afflicted diamond miners was rightly hailed internationally. Duiker’s greatest debt to Russian constructivism can be seen in his Handelsblad Cineac Cinema of 1934.
Albert Speer/ Gerdy Troost
The Man in the High Castle, one of the few tv shows I have managed to watch from beginning to end, depicted Nazi architecture as a form of visual propaganda. Like in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi architecture was depicted as expressing an all consuming power and grandness. Built to be physically imposing, this kind of architecture asserted the mental and moral (in other words, total) domination of the Reich. Yet even in today's conversation, it is only Speer who’s spoken of as the mind behind this architecture. But since Filler believes a feminist position includes articulating even the evil deeds of women equally to those of men: enter Gerdy Troost.
Troost, the wife of the German furniture architect Paul Troost (Paul was the more renown architect in their shared lifetime) was, if not Hitler’s favourite architect (for Speer was certainly a contender there), then the one who had his ear the most. A sign of her power: In one word to the Fuhrer’s ear, she ended the career of the anti modernist archconsenservative architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who had insulted her decoration of Hitler’s Munich lair by stating that he would not let a surgeon’s widow operate upon his appendix. Troost decorated Hitler’s alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria - later renamed Berghof (Mountain Court). She designed most of Hitler’s personal furniture and glassware. She was in charge of designing military medals from diamonds looted from local Jews. When put under house arrest after Nuremberg, Troost bristled about having to be guarded by “Negern” ("Niggers" i.e. African American soldiers). She died at the age of 98 in 2003, unrepentant to the end.
Speer, a grasping social climber born to an architect father in Mannheim in 1905 also studied architecture at what is now the Technical University of Berlin. Though an architectural third rater (according to Filler, at least) Speer’s ascent began when he joined the Nazi Party in 1931. His Lichtdom (a cathedral of light created from 152 aeroplane searchlights in 1933) and his Brobdingnagian stadium got Hitler to notice him. But it was with the German pavilion at Paris’ 1937 world fair that Speer broke out into the international stage. Soon after, Speer began constructing Germania - what Hitler wanted to rename Berlin, the “capital of the world” after he was done conquering. Made minister for Armaments and War Production, Speer was directly responsible for millions of Jewish deaths. Yet after Nuremberg, and after twenty years in jail, Speer came out of jail a rich man, thanks to hidden booty. He then took to writing to attempt to rehabilitate his image, and in the process also became an international celebrity. In his Erinnerungen (Memories), a runaway bestseller, he attempted to deploy the Eichman defense (just doing my job, bro). In Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau diaries), he cast himself as an overambitious architect who’d just wanted to build. He died in London in 1981, by all indications a happy old man. I hope hell exists.
The Levitt Brothers
William Jaird and Alfred Stuart, two brothers from Brooklyn, became two of America’s great builders of the 20th century, and were largely responsible for the suburbanization of the American city. They started with small groups of high end houses in Long Island during the great depression. They then, fuelled by the promise of the GI Bill, went on to pioneer a mass production technique to construct low-priced dwellings for returning WW2 servicemen (these were not prefabricated, as is often assumed, but rather merely standardized and interchangeable). Hempstead Town - later Levittown, a colony of mass produced Levitt houses 37 miles outside Manhattan became big starting 1947.
The New Brutalists
Brutalism, with its emphasis on raw concrete (beton brut in French) came up as a postwar counter to the commercialized international style. Imposing in scale, idiosyncratic in shape, rough in finish, and unabashedly depicting the inner workings of a building - structure, plumbing, electric wiring etc., brutalism set itself up as an economical means of fabrication. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles is the conspicuous manifestation of this style, but Kahn’s Richard Labs at Penn, Breuer’s and Smith’s Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, and Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theater in London (described by Prince Charles as a “nuclear power station in the middle of London") are fine examples too. Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 are later exemplums of the style. The Executive Wing of New Zealand’s Parliament in Wellington, and Rinaldo Olivieri’s La Pyramide in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, show just how internationally the style spread.
Louis Kahn
I recently finished Nathaniel Kahn’s film - “My Architect: A Son’s Journey”, and was glad that I was reading this essay so soon after. When he died in the men’s bathroom at Penn Station in 1974, Louis Kahn was at that time considered America’s greatest living architect. His most prominent works - sometimes referred to as the Kahn quintet, were The Salk Institute building in LaJolla, California, The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, The Library of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, Massachusetts, part of the campus of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India, and most notedly, the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Bangladesh’s National Assembly Building in Dhaka.
Paul Rudolph
Rudolph is remarkable as someone whose work, within his own lifetime, went from well regarded to critically panned. In the 1940s and 50s, Rudolph garnered acclaim for a series of houses he built in the West Coast of Florida. These lightweight houses were seen as dynamically manipulating space, making inventive use of new materials, and rejecting rote domestic conventions. Rudolph later came to adopt new brutalism (hence the Yale Art building). His most remarkable work was the Tuskegee University Chapel in Tuskegee, Alabama. Then, in a quest for publicity (and likely in response to Siegfried Giedion’s 1944 essay - “The Need for a New Monumentality”), he started equivocating size with significance, and began constructing massive, quite hideous structures - an example being The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York.
Rudolph stepped down as the dean of Yale’s school of architecture and moved to New York, hoping to construct skyscrapers. He envisioned buildings composed of gigantic, mixed- used “plug ins”, akin to children’s Lego bricks. Thankfully none of that shit was built. Rudolph’s own Manhattan penthouse was terribly done. It included a plexiglass bathtub that was fully visible to the tenants below, narrow plexiglass walkways that one risked falling through to the storeys below, among other atrocities.
Posthumously, a number of Rudolph’s buildings have been destroyed, reflecting his diminishing stature.
Minoru Yamasaki
Born in Seattle in 1912 to Japanese immigrants, Yamasaki began his career at the New York firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (architects of the Empire State Building). While there, he oversaw the construction of the firm’s huge naval station on Lake Seneca in up-state New York. He later moved to the Detroit firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. In 1949, together with two colleagues - Joseph Leinweber and George Hellmuth, he set up his own studio. Yamasaki faced major racism throughout most of his career, and it is interesting to note that one of his finest creations, widely lauded by both the inhabitants and the architectural public, was Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri- a racially segregated housing project for African Americans, who found it much better than the drudgery they’d been used to. Yamasaki gained increasingly prominent commissions in middle and early late career. These commissions included the Lambert St. Louis Airport Terminal, the United States Science Pavilion at the Seattle World Fair, the IBM building (1964), the Rainier Bank Tower (1977). Most notably, Yamasaki designed the World Trade Center buildings and, when 9/11 happened, Yamasaki was posthumously lauded for the innovative design and engineering which had ensured that the buildings took a long time to collapse (56 minutes for the South Tower and 102 minutes for the North), enabling thousands of lives to be saved.
Lina Bo Bardi.
Another forgotten (or, in truth, never actually paid her due) great woman architect. Though solidly in the modernist tradition, Bardi rejected the machine-like aesthetic favoured by contemporary male modernist architects, instead taking a more vernacular approach, characterized by buildings that were “structurally audacious yet uncommonly comfortable, unapologetically tidy yet conceptually rigorous… confidently dynamic yet suggestively hybrid”. In 2010, Kazuo Sejima, joint winner of the 2010 Pritzker Prize and director of the 2010 Venice Biennale organized a Bardi retrospective in Venice. This was the high point of Bardi’s belated popularity, and was seen as a reaction to a lack of social awareness in postmillennial architecture.
Outside her architecture, Bardi was a colourful personality. She was highly argumentative in her books and speeches; was an unabashed communist but unrepentant antifeminist, declaring, in a 1989 lecture: I am Stalinist and anti-feminist. It is ironically funny that Bardi herself was for a long time denied her rightful place among 20th century architecture greats, and that it was the feminism she resented which has largely won her posthumous recognition.
Born in Milan as Achillina Bo, Bardi did most of her work in Brazil, after marrying Pierro Bardi. Though Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer- the Brazilian greats of that era- didn’t think much of her, she quickly shut them up with her first completed work - the Casa de Vidro (Glass House), quite similar to Phillip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was itself derivative of Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. Some of her other works include the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo (MASP), and the renovation of Brazil’s Servico Social de Comercio (SESC - The public outreach arm of Brazil’s trade organizations).
Frei Otto
Father of the modern tensile tent, Otto revolutionized roofing in a way no other architect of his or any other generation had - with the possible exception of Buckminster Füller’s Geodesic dome. Otto had noted that all architects were one of three things: Arrangeur (Arranger), Diebe (Thief) and Erfinder (Inventor). Though too modest to ever proclaim himself such, most contemporaries and successors firmly considered him an Erfinder. Otto’s earliest success was the gossamer-light dance pavilion, designed for the Federal Garden Exhibition in Cologne. In the 1960s, he received his most high profile commissions, designing the West German display at Montreal’s Expo 67 - the only structure that drew attention away from Safdie’s Habitat 67. In 1972, Otto designed a vast multi structure complex for the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Frank Gehry
An avant garde postmodernist, Gehry was, by the mid 2000s, the most renowned and celebrated living architect. His Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, finished in 1997 and designed with the CATIA computer design program that Gehry’s firm pioneered, led to the “Bilbao effect”, a push by cities to construct eye-catching structures that could attract revenue. In this way, many cities hoped to revitalize their downtowns through cultural tourism. The 2014 opening of Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris was another high point in a remarkable career marked by multiple high points. Gehry also built the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, renovated the Beaux Arts-Style Art Gallery in Toronto, and won the commission for the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim.
Renzo Piano
This essay on Piano, the greatest museum builder of his generation, explores work around the building of his Menil Collection (1986), the Cy Twombly Gallery (1995), the Nasher Sculpture Center (2003), and the renovation of Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, where the requirement was simple: Don’t fuck it up (Piano didn’t; his Renzo Piano pavilion is considered a wonderful addition to Kahn’s masterwork). Other Piano works considered are the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and, more extensively, his Fondation Jérôme Seydoux Pathé. Scant attention is paid to Piano as a master skyscraper builder (but Filler does do that in his Volume 2 essay on Piano).
David Childs/ Santiago Calatrava
David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is America’s most successful postmillennial commercial architect. His most renowned works are the World Trade Center (2006) and the terminal in Singapore’s Changi Airport. A major political player as well, Childs stole the World Trade Center commission from right under the nose of Daniel Liebeskind - “a clueless tyro”, according to Filler. The One World Trade Center ended up costing $3.9 billion, more than twice the price of Europe’s most expensive building, Renzo Piano’s Shard, which cost $1.9 billion. Fuck Childs.
Finished in Comment
July 17, 2020
Diminishing returns, a bit, as Filler writes about the same people here as in the first two volumes, for the most part. But still, he seems like someone I'd want to have dinner with, and he teaches me about architecture, so I can't complain.
March 29, 2019
I thoroughly enjoyed these pieces on a wide variety of modern architects, and will seek out the other volumes. Fuller writes engagingly, and the nice mixture of architectural history assessment and biography, as well as sufficient attitude, made these a pleasure. The only thing missing is enough pictures: it is hard to read about many of the buildings without pictures , and the publishers have been stingy, with one representative per headline piece. You need to be accessing images on a tablet alongside the book to make it even better.
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