Paul Goldberger
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Paul Goldberger
“[Lesser is] too smart a writer to waste her time tilting against the windmill of celebrity architecture. Instead, she plays with the form of architectural biography to create a narrative that at once seems to accept the realities of our time and to transcend them. Lesser has accomplished something very important here. She has helped us feel the powerful emotional connection to space and form and light and materials that Kahn himself felt, and that is far more than most architects’ biographies manage to do.” (from Amazon)
by Wendy Lesser·You?
by Wendy Lesser·You?
WINNER OF THE MARFIELD PRIZE AND PEN AMERICA LOS ANGELES'S 2018 LITERARY AWARD IN RESEARCH NONFICTION. FINALIST FOR THE 2018 PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and one of Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2017 "Wendy Lesser's You Say to Brick is easily the most complete narrative of Kahn's life and career, magnificently researched and gracefully written." ―Inga Saffron, New York Times Book Review Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life. Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Rather than focusing on corporate commissions, he devoted himself to designing research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, and other structures that would serve the public good. But this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. Kahn himself, however, is not the only complex subject that comes vividly to life in these pages. His signature achievements―like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad―can at first seem as enigmatic and beguiling as the man who designed them. In attempts to describe these structures, we are often forced to speak in contradictions and paradoxes: structures that seem at once unmistakably modern and ancient; enormous built spaces that offer a sense of intimate containment; designs in which light itself seems tangible, a raw material as tactile as travertine or Kahn’s beloved concrete. This is where Lesser’s talents as one of our most original and gifted cultural critics come into play. Interspersed throughout her account of Kahn’s life and career are exhilarating “in situ” descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures. Drawing on extensive original research, lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students, and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive genius, revealing the mind behind some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architecture.
Recommended by Paul Goldberger
“More than a dozen years after his death Philip Johnson remains a perplexing, polarizing, magnetic and frustrating figure: although he was far from our greatest architect, no one did more to shape our architectural culture. In this compelling biography, Mark Lamster deconstructs Johnson's complex persona, evaluates his work and begins the complex process of establishing his place in history.” (from Amazon)
A "smoothly written and fair-minded" (Wall Street Journal) biography of architect Philip Johnson -- a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable and influential figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as one of America's leading architects with his famous Glass House in New Caanan, CT, and his controversial AT&T Building in NYC, among many others in nearly every city in the country -- but his most natural role was as a consummate power broker and shaper of public opinion. Johnson introduced European modernism -- the sleek, glass-and-steel architecture that now dominates our cities -- to America, and mentored generations of architects, designers, and artists to follow. He defined the era of "starchitecture" with its flamboyant buildings and celebrity designers who esteemed aesthetics and style above all other concerns. But Johnson was also a man of deep paradoxes: he was a Nazi sympathizer, a designer of synagogues, an enfant terrible into his old age, a populist, and a snob. His clients ranged from the Rockefellers to televangelists to Donald Trump. Award-winning architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson's controversial and endlessly contradictory life to tell the story of a charming yet deeply flawed man. A rollercoaster tale of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this book probes the dynamics of American culture that made him so powerful, and tells the story of the built environment in modern America.