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Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II: From Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas (New York Review Collections
In this much-anticipated sequel to his critically acclaimed Makers of Modern Architecture (2007) longtime New York Review of Books contributor Martin Filler—“probably the best all-round architecture critic currently working in the United States,” according to the architectural journalist David Cohn—offers another penetrating series of concise but authoritative studies on leading exponents of the building art from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Exemplifying his belief that an architect’s personality and character have a direct and profound bearing on this most public and social of art forms, Filler’s lively melding of biographical and aesthetic perspectives gives these accessible yet scrupulously researched interpretations a rare human immediacy.
From profiles of such universally admired masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to emerging figures including Michael Arad, creator of New York City’s National September 11 Memorial, and the international design collaborative Snøhetta, Filler’s shifting focus remains consistently trained on the enduring values of great architecture. His panoramic vision encompasses the historically inspired Gilded Age urbanism of the celebrated New York bon vivant Stanford White as well as the expressive collages of ancient and modern elements orchestrated by the reclusive Venetian intellectual Carlo Scarpa. The increasing role of women in architecture is given special emphasis in this new collection, from the pioneering work in 1920s Germany of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, inventor of the standardized modern kitchen, to such innovative contemporary practitioners as Elizabeth Diller, Kazuyo Sejima, and Billie Tsien.
From profiles of such universally admired masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to emerging figures including Michael Arad, creator of New York City’s National September 11 Memorial, and the international design collaborative Snøhetta, Filler’s shifting focus remains consistently trained on the enduring values of great architecture. His panoramic vision encompasses the historically inspired Gilded Age urbanism of the celebrated New York bon vivant Stanford White as well as the expressive collages of ancient and modern elements orchestrated by the reclusive Venetian intellectual Carlo Scarpa. The increasing role of women in architecture is given special emphasis in this new collection, from the pioneering work in 1920s Germany of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, inventor of the standardized modern kitchen, to such innovative contemporary practitioners as Elizabeth Diller, Kazuyo Sejima, and Billie Tsien.
- GenresArchitectureHistoryArt
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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August 29, 2021
A series of beautifully written profiles of some of the most important architects of the last 100 years.
McKim, Mead & White
We begin with the McKim, Mead and White firm who made their mark on fin de siecle New York. Composed of two talents - Charles McKim and Sanford White (now best remembered for being gunned down by his lover’s husband) and one mediator - William Mead, now often (perhaps a bit unfairly) described as no more than a “glorified office manager”, the firm designed some of the most iconic buildings of 20th Century New York City. There’s the Penn Station building (built between 1906 and 1910, demolished in 1963 and replaced with what is now Madison Square Garden), Columbia University’s main campus , The New York Herald Building, The Morgan Library, just to name a few. Outside New York, the firm spearheaded the building of the Rhode Island Capitol building, the renovation of the East and West wings of the White House, the construction of the National Museum of American History, again, just to name a few.
The firm initially made its name with an astounding series of large, wood-frame vacation houses in fashionable resort communities in the East Coast; houses described by the architectural historian Vincent Scully as “shingle style”. But they later became even more well-known for their radical spatial reconceptions of interiors, making houses seem more roomy and expansive, contrary to the narrowness of the typically Victorian residences that had abounded till then. This was mostly the work of White, whose interest in the continuous flow of space had been influenced by classical Japanese Architecture.
But Filler insists that despite White’s renown with the layman, McKim was the real star of this show. Filler calls White the “John Nash of American urbanism” (John Nash here refers to the Brritish architect of the Georgian era, not the Nobel prize winning American Mathematician) and characterizes his works as a “facile and pleasure giving metteur en scene of enchanting set pieces that catch the eye but rarely provide much intellectual substance”.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Next there’s the most renowned American architect of his (and perhaps any) generation. In a career spanning 7 decades and more than 1000 structures, Wright made an indelible mark on architecture. Filler focuses on how the automobile influenced Wright’s architecture (despite Wrights tepid distaste for big cities - the natural home of the automobile), the murder of Wright’s lover - Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s praire houses, Fallingwater- a house near Pittsburg built partially on top of a waterfall, often considered Wright’s magnum opus, and finally, Taliesin, the house Wright designed for himself and Cheney, and where Cheney was murdered.
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier is one of the few architects who rivaled Wright in Publicity in their lifetimes (Buckminster Fuller is another contender). Corbusier’s posthumous influence, buoyed by his work in South America (mostly Brazil) and India (Chandigarh) has certainly surpassed that of Wright. The Wagner of architecture, Le Corbusier did not only design buildings but also copiously produced pamphlets, letters, books, lectures and articles, providing his thoughts on everything from residential skyscrapers, ocean liners, garden cities and interior design. Gesamtkunstwerk indeed. A size queen, Corbusier once complained that New York skyscrapers were not big enough. Filler gives him his due, and provides information on Corbusier’s various designs - from the Villa Savoye, the Pavillion Suisse, the Maisons Jaoul and so on. He also provides interesting information on Corbusier’s private life, from his almost certain solicitation of Nazi building projects in Vichy France to his wonderfully outre wife, Yvonne who, one evening, bored in a dinner with Walter Gropius, asked Gropius if he’d seen it, to which Gropius replied, “what”? - “Mon Cul!”.
Bauhaus
One of the shortest lived, most influential (and, according to Filler, most misunderstood) schools of architecture is the Bauhaus. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the school then moved to Dessau and flourished there between 1925 and 1932, before Hitler came to power and yeeted them out in 1933 for being Jewish. Composed of such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gunta Stolz (the only woman in this outfit, now mostly lost to history) and, most influentially, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhas revolutionized how the fine and applied arts were to be taught.
Ernst May and Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky
The masters of the defining architectural form of the early modern movement - publicly sponsored housing, May and Schuette-Lihotzky contributed perhaps more than any other architects in the large scale housing programs of the early twentieth century. May’s work moved from Germany’s Siedlungen settlements in Frankfurt, to the Soviet Union, to East Africa - where he built Kenwood House in Nairobi, my hometown. Schuette-Lihotky brought the much necessary “woman’s touch” in public housing design, constructing interiors that were to be used, not merely to be admired. She, for example, came up with several labour-saving designs, including positioning the gas range, industrial style metal sink, and fitted cabinets to coincide with the general order of tasks through which meals were made, and later, cleaning was done.
Oscar Niemeyer
Best known for designing Brasilia (much maligned later, as it has been), which alone would have secured Niemeyer’s place in architectural history, Niemeyer’s other works only served to cement his status. Inspired by Corbusier, Niemeyer nevertheless came to eclipse him in architectural achievement, and Corbusier’s unhidden jealousy (as well as appropriation of the younger man’s work - for example, the design of the United Nations building in New York) only confirm this. Niemeyer’s Marxism, as well as his long lived life (he died in 2012 at age 105), only further illustrate the man’s incredible life.
Edward Durell Stone
Prominent in his day but almost unknown today, Stone built some important buildings like the American embassy in Delhi, the Florida state capital, the Harvey Mudd campus in California and the campus of the State University of New York at Albany, and various skyscrapers and houses for several of the robber barons. Stone’s oeuvre displayed a (stupid) massive disregard for climactic conditions, which was demonstrated in his building massive plazas and porous peripheries in places with frigid winters.
Eero Saarinen
Architecture is not a profession for those who die young. Typically, a good architect works at another’s office until they’re in their forties, opens an office shop and fights for commissions for the next twenty or so years, if they’re lucky, wins a Pritzker in their sixties, and then rides the wave of prestigious commissions late into their eighties and nineties. Saarinen, however, died at 51. Even then, his body of work is incredible - even if maligned by contemporary critics, who variously referred to it as exhibitionist, structurally pretentious, and “self defeating urbanistic arrogance”.. A stylistic flaneur difficult to categorize in an era when high modernism so dominated, Saarinen built some of America’s biggest corporate skyscrapers, from the incredible TWA hotel at JFK (a personal favourite), to buildings for IBM, CBS, Deere & Company (his finest corporate headquarter, in which he wrapped 8 stories of a building in a scaffold like exoskeleton) and General Mortors. Saarinen’s other buildings include the David Ingallis rink, Morse College and Ezra Stiles college at Yale University - all a ten minute walk from where I live in New Haven.
Buckminster Fuller
In high school chemistry class in Kenya, it was hilarious to learn that the tiny naphthalene balls we pissed on to not stink up the urinals were made of Buckminsterfullerene, and that the compound was named after an actual human being. Fuller pioneered American architectural prefabrication - where industrially made structures were assembled at a building site. He was, however, more known for his geodesic dome, which carved his place in the American imagination as a futuristic guru of sorts. During the counterculture of the 1960s, Fuller, despite his previous work for the US government, castigated global inequality and the role of the US. government in it. In this, he became a willing hero to the various college students protesting everything. Yet Fuller, like Richard Nixon after him, engineered his own downfall by meticulously keeping diaries of the activities he lied about with impunity in public. Fuller’s most prominent building was the American Expo building at the Montreal World Fair.
Carlo Scarpa
Per Filler, Scarpa is the greatest architect of the 20th century still unknown to the general public. Because of the physical incapacity of building anything in Venice, Scarpa’s hometown, where he did most of his work, Scarpa’s principal works are mostly museum renovations and conversions (like in the Palazzo Querini Stampalia or his Olivetti showroom at St. Marks place, both in Venice), country villas and tombs. Scarpa’s work - heavily influenced by Wright, was grounded in resisting the Mussolini-zation of architecture, which had sullied Italy’s Classical tradition. Scarpa is also renown for his belief that a building’s past life lived on. Thus a building’s history was a palimpsest, to be added upon, but never to be erased.
James Stirling
Big Jim. Incredibly overweight, undoubtedly crass, yet indefatigibly a genius. Celebrated by the youthful public as Rem Koolhaas is today, and loved for his “worm’s eye view” which he popularised as a professor at Yale, Stirling is most remembered today for making the decisive shift from modernism to postmodernism in architecture. Influenced by architects of the English baroque ( Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh) and German neoclassism (Friedrich Weinbrenner and Karl Friedrich Schinkel), Stirling mixed the ideas of these architects with early modernist engineering concepts and vernacular industrial construction techniques, making his work impossible to characterize. His partnership with James Gowan brought forth the much lauded University of Leicester engineering building, but it was his later partnership with Michael Wilford that marked the most productive - and most lauded period of his career. The Neue Staatsgalerie is undoubtedly the highlight of this period. Stirling talents steadily declined as he aged, until his death in 1992 at the age of 68.
Renzo Piano
Piano is known mostly for his skyscrapers, many of which I’m a fan of - from the New York Times building in that no man’s land between Midtown and Hell’s Kitchen, to the Debis House in Berlin and to his most prominent work, the Shard in London (much opposed by a person Filler refers to as an architectural retardaire - Prince Charles). But Filler reckons that Piano’s real talents lie in his work as a Museum builder. The Menil Collection and the Cy Twombly Gallery - both in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and his more famous works- the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: all these and more showcase Piano’s talent as the greatest museum builder perhaps ever.
Rem Koolhaas
The enfant terrible of modern architecture, Koolhaas is widely considered the Corbusier of now; more known for his architectural vision than his actual built work. His conceptual audacity and original thinking about what architecture can be is unrivaled. From his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, Koolhaas has come up with some of the most daring architectural schemes of recent years, from the Euralille and De Rotterdam plans - massive undertakings involving entire cities and transportation systems, to smaller but nevertheless equally daring projects like the Casa da Musica in Porto and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. But Koolhaas is also known for being an edge-Lord; not giving two shits about tackling the social issues of the world. The world is at is is - fucked - and Koolhaas does not care whether he’s commissioned by the Central Chinese TV - the party’s mouthpiece, or whoever else. Give it to him; he’ll build it. Like Corbusier, Koolhaas’ literary output has also been prolific, from grand meditations on Manhattan (Delirious New York) to his meditation on literaly everything about modern life (S,M,L,XL). His architectural films display the same broad engagement.
Bernard Tschumi
Filler’s discussion of Tschumi focuses on Tschumi’s design of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, and on the incredibly Melina Mercouri, a former screen starlet who, as minister, spearheaded the campaign to return the Elgin marbles to Greece. In this, the weakest essay in the book, Filler, part of Kwame Appiah’s “Fuck Cultural Patrimony” brigade, writes a screed that’s basically an apologia for the British Museum. Return the damn things, mothefuckers.
Tod Williams & Billie Tsien
This was one of my favourite pieces in the book, for the reason that I adore Philadelphia, where I spent four wonderful years in College, and Williams’ and Tsien’s major work focused on here is the Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, one of the most enchanting collections out there. The exterior of the Barnes, made of pale beige Negev limestone, is enchanting. The fact that the nearly 100,000 square foot museum is surmounted on a gigantic superstructure (called the “Light Box”) adds to the daring of the design. Williams and Tsien are also the designers of the Obama presidential library in Chicago, the Phoenix Museum of Art, the Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania (where I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friend Pranav as he did important neuroscience work while I read shitty novels) among others.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
A rarity in architecture - a female-male partnership where the two partners are unmarried, and where the female partner is the senior partner, Sejima and Nishizawa were the first male-female duo to winner the Pritzker (like most things, the Pritzker had been remarkably sexist throughout its history, most notably in 1991 when Robert Venturi, who collaborated with his incredibile wife, Denise Scott Brown, on nearly everything was given the award but Brown was not). Sejima and Nishizawa, through their firm, SANAA, are best known in the US for the Glass Pavillion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and New York’s New museum of Contemporary Art in the Bowery.
Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro
Though around for a long time, the married duo of Diller and Scofidio only gained renown in 1999 when they were awarded a MacArthur, and, together with their associate, Renfro, who they then made a partner, only gained prominence in the public consciousness when the middle portion of the High Line, that charming urban park in the west side of Manhattan originating from around 14th street, extending through Chelsea and culminating around 34th Street near the Javits Center, was completed. Their transformation of Lincoln Center, most noted for the Illumination Lawn atop the Lincoln restaurant pavilion, was also a noted highlight.
Snohetta
Snohetta are a Norwegian collective whose work repudiate the Ayn Randian contention of architecture as the discipline of the lone genius (hey, hey, Howard Roark). Their ethos - non-hierarchical, wildly democratic, anti-celebrity has not hindered the outfit from designing some of the most remarkable buildings of the late 20th and early 21st century. Their winning design of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, is appreciated only second to the Oslo Opera House - not itself a masterpiece of architecture, with its mixed stylistic metaphors, but nonetheless a triumph in city planning. With its exterior which allows the public to ascend the broad ramps framing the lateral walls, the roof of the opera house becomes not only an extension of the plaza below, but also an observation deck, providing gorgeous views of the city - I looked them up, having never been to Oslo. Filler criticizes Snohetta for basically bending over backwards to win any projects, so much so that at times they change the fundamental nature of their designs. He contrasts this with Koolhaas’ “I’m a genius, take me or leave me” approach which, he notes, has won Koolhaas more projects than it has lost him.
Michael Arad
Finally, there’s Michael Arad, the Israeli-American architect who, at age 34, got to design the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero. Despite the contentious nature of the project, and the fact that so much politicizing went on - so much so that Arad had to change his initial design, Filler still thinks of Arad’s design as a masterpiece, as having an inevitability that is unique to extremely good architecture - he cannot imagine the memorial designed any other way.
McKim, Mead & White
We begin with the McKim, Mead and White firm who made their mark on fin de siecle New York. Composed of two talents - Charles McKim and Sanford White (now best remembered for being gunned down by his lover’s husband) and one mediator - William Mead, now often (perhaps a bit unfairly) described as no more than a “glorified office manager”, the firm designed some of the most iconic buildings of 20th Century New York City. There’s the Penn Station building (built between 1906 and 1910, demolished in 1963 and replaced with what is now Madison Square Garden), Columbia University’s main campus , The New York Herald Building, The Morgan Library, just to name a few. Outside New York, the firm spearheaded the building of the Rhode Island Capitol building, the renovation of the East and West wings of the White House, the construction of the National Museum of American History, again, just to name a few.
The firm initially made its name with an astounding series of large, wood-frame vacation houses in fashionable resort communities in the East Coast; houses described by the architectural historian Vincent Scully as “shingle style”. But they later became even more well-known for their radical spatial reconceptions of interiors, making houses seem more roomy and expansive, contrary to the narrowness of the typically Victorian residences that had abounded till then. This was mostly the work of White, whose interest in the continuous flow of space had been influenced by classical Japanese Architecture.
But Filler insists that despite White’s renown with the layman, McKim was the real star of this show. Filler calls White the “John Nash of American urbanism” (John Nash here refers to the Brritish architect of the Georgian era, not the Nobel prize winning American Mathematician) and characterizes his works as a “facile and pleasure giving metteur en scene of enchanting set pieces that catch the eye but rarely provide much intellectual substance”.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Next there’s the most renowned American architect of his (and perhaps any) generation. In a career spanning 7 decades and more than 1000 structures, Wright made an indelible mark on architecture. Filler focuses on how the automobile influenced Wright’s architecture (despite Wrights tepid distaste for big cities - the natural home of the automobile), the murder of Wright’s lover - Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright’s praire houses, Fallingwater- a house near Pittsburg built partially on top of a waterfall, often considered Wright’s magnum opus, and finally, Taliesin, the house Wright designed for himself and Cheney, and where Cheney was murdered.
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier is one of the few architects who rivaled Wright in Publicity in their lifetimes (Buckminster Fuller is another contender). Corbusier’s posthumous influence, buoyed by his work in South America (mostly Brazil) and India (Chandigarh) has certainly surpassed that of Wright. The Wagner of architecture, Le Corbusier did not only design buildings but also copiously produced pamphlets, letters, books, lectures and articles, providing his thoughts on everything from residential skyscrapers, ocean liners, garden cities and interior design. Gesamtkunstwerk indeed. A size queen, Corbusier once complained that New York skyscrapers were not big enough. Filler gives him his due, and provides information on Corbusier’s various designs - from the Villa Savoye, the Pavillion Suisse, the Maisons Jaoul and so on. He also provides interesting information on Corbusier’s private life, from his almost certain solicitation of Nazi building projects in Vichy France to his wonderfully outre wife, Yvonne who, one evening, bored in a dinner with Walter Gropius, asked Gropius if he’d seen it, to which Gropius replied, “what”? - “Mon Cul!”.
Bauhaus
One of the shortest lived, most influential (and, according to Filler, most misunderstood) schools of architecture is the Bauhaus. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the school then moved to Dessau and flourished there between 1925 and 1932, before Hitler came to power and yeeted them out in 1933 for being Jewish. Composed of such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gunta Stolz (the only woman in this outfit, now mostly lost to history) and, most influentially, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhas revolutionized how the fine and applied arts were to be taught.
Ernst May and Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky
The masters of the defining architectural form of the early modern movement - publicly sponsored housing, May and Schuette-Lihotzky contributed perhaps more than any other architects in the large scale housing programs of the early twentieth century. May’s work moved from Germany’s Siedlungen settlements in Frankfurt, to the Soviet Union, to East Africa - where he built Kenwood House in Nairobi, my hometown. Schuette-Lihotky brought the much necessary “woman’s touch” in public housing design, constructing interiors that were to be used, not merely to be admired. She, for example, came up with several labour-saving designs, including positioning the gas range, industrial style metal sink, and fitted cabinets to coincide with the general order of tasks through which meals were made, and later, cleaning was done.
Oscar Niemeyer
Best known for designing Brasilia (much maligned later, as it has been), which alone would have secured Niemeyer’s place in architectural history, Niemeyer’s other works only served to cement his status. Inspired by Corbusier, Niemeyer nevertheless came to eclipse him in architectural achievement, and Corbusier’s unhidden jealousy (as well as appropriation of the younger man’s work - for example, the design of the United Nations building in New York) only confirm this. Niemeyer’s Marxism, as well as his long lived life (he died in 2012 at age 105), only further illustrate the man’s incredible life.
Edward Durell Stone
Prominent in his day but almost unknown today, Stone built some important buildings like the American embassy in Delhi, the Florida state capital, the Harvey Mudd campus in California and the campus of the State University of New York at Albany, and various skyscrapers and houses for several of the robber barons. Stone’s oeuvre displayed a (stupid) massive disregard for climactic conditions, which was demonstrated in his building massive plazas and porous peripheries in places with frigid winters.
Eero Saarinen
Architecture is not a profession for those who die young. Typically, a good architect works at another’s office until they’re in their forties, opens an office shop and fights for commissions for the next twenty or so years, if they’re lucky, wins a Pritzker in their sixties, and then rides the wave of prestigious commissions late into their eighties and nineties. Saarinen, however, died at 51. Even then, his body of work is incredible - even if maligned by contemporary critics, who variously referred to it as exhibitionist, structurally pretentious, and “self defeating urbanistic arrogance”.. A stylistic flaneur difficult to categorize in an era when high modernism so dominated, Saarinen built some of America’s biggest corporate skyscrapers, from the incredible TWA hotel at JFK (a personal favourite), to buildings for IBM, CBS, Deere & Company (his finest corporate headquarter, in which he wrapped 8 stories of a building in a scaffold like exoskeleton) and General Mortors. Saarinen’s other buildings include the David Ingallis rink, Morse College and Ezra Stiles college at Yale University - all a ten minute walk from where I live in New Haven.
Buckminster Fuller
In high school chemistry class in Kenya, it was hilarious to learn that the tiny naphthalene balls we pissed on to not stink up the urinals were made of Buckminsterfullerene, and that the compound was named after an actual human being. Fuller pioneered American architectural prefabrication - where industrially made structures were assembled at a building site. He was, however, more known for his geodesic dome, which carved his place in the American imagination as a futuristic guru of sorts. During the counterculture of the 1960s, Fuller, despite his previous work for the US government, castigated global inequality and the role of the US. government in it. In this, he became a willing hero to the various college students protesting everything. Yet Fuller, like Richard Nixon after him, engineered his own downfall by meticulously keeping diaries of the activities he lied about with impunity in public. Fuller’s most prominent building was the American Expo building at the Montreal World Fair.
Carlo Scarpa
Per Filler, Scarpa is the greatest architect of the 20th century still unknown to the general public. Because of the physical incapacity of building anything in Venice, Scarpa’s hometown, where he did most of his work, Scarpa’s principal works are mostly museum renovations and conversions (like in the Palazzo Querini Stampalia or his Olivetti showroom at St. Marks place, both in Venice), country villas and tombs. Scarpa’s work - heavily influenced by Wright, was grounded in resisting the Mussolini-zation of architecture, which had sullied Italy’s Classical tradition. Scarpa is also renown for his belief that a building’s past life lived on. Thus a building’s history was a palimpsest, to be added upon, but never to be erased.
James Stirling
Big Jim. Incredibly overweight, undoubtedly crass, yet indefatigibly a genius. Celebrated by the youthful public as Rem Koolhaas is today, and loved for his “worm’s eye view” which he popularised as a professor at Yale, Stirling is most remembered today for making the decisive shift from modernism to postmodernism in architecture. Influenced by architects of the English baroque ( Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh) and German neoclassism (Friedrich Weinbrenner and Karl Friedrich Schinkel), Stirling mixed the ideas of these architects with early modernist engineering concepts and vernacular industrial construction techniques, making his work impossible to characterize. His partnership with James Gowan brought forth the much lauded University of Leicester engineering building, but it was his later partnership with Michael Wilford that marked the most productive - and most lauded period of his career. The Neue Staatsgalerie is undoubtedly the highlight of this period. Stirling talents steadily declined as he aged, until his death in 1992 at the age of 68.
Renzo Piano
Piano is known mostly for his skyscrapers, many of which I’m a fan of - from the New York Times building in that no man’s land between Midtown and Hell’s Kitchen, to the Debis House in Berlin and to his most prominent work, the Shard in London (much opposed by a person Filler refers to as an architectural retardaire - Prince Charles). But Filler reckons that Piano’s real talents lie in his work as a Museum builder. The Menil Collection and the Cy Twombly Gallery - both in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and his more famous works- the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: all these and more showcase Piano’s talent as the greatest museum builder perhaps ever.
Rem Koolhaas
The enfant terrible of modern architecture, Koolhaas is widely considered the Corbusier of now; more known for his architectural vision than his actual built work. His conceptual audacity and original thinking about what architecture can be is unrivaled. From his Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, Koolhaas has come up with some of the most daring architectural schemes of recent years, from the Euralille and De Rotterdam plans - massive undertakings involving entire cities and transportation systems, to smaller but nevertheless equally daring projects like the Casa da Musica in Porto and the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. But Koolhaas is also known for being an edge-Lord; not giving two shits about tackling the social issues of the world. The world is at is is - fucked - and Koolhaas does not care whether he’s commissioned by the Central Chinese TV - the party’s mouthpiece, or whoever else. Give it to him; he’ll build it. Like Corbusier, Koolhaas’ literary output has also been prolific, from grand meditations on Manhattan (Delirious New York) to his meditation on literaly everything about modern life (S,M,L,XL). His architectural films display the same broad engagement.
Bernard Tschumi
Filler’s discussion of Tschumi focuses on Tschumi’s design of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, and on the incredibly Melina Mercouri, a former screen starlet who, as minister, spearheaded the campaign to return the Elgin marbles to Greece. In this, the weakest essay in the book, Filler, part of Kwame Appiah’s “Fuck Cultural Patrimony” brigade, writes a screed that’s basically an apologia for the British Museum. Return the damn things, mothefuckers.
Tod Williams & Billie Tsien
This was one of my favourite pieces in the book, for the reason that I adore Philadelphia, where I spent four wonderful years in College, and Williams’ and Tsien’s major work focused on here is the Barnes Foundation Museum in Philadelphia, one of the most enchanting collections out there. The exterior of the Barnes, made of pale beige Negev limestone, is enchanting. The fact that the nearly 100,000 square foot museum is surmounted on a gigantic superstructure (called the “Light Box”) adds to the daring of the design. Williams and Tsien are also the designers of the Obama presidential library in Chicago, the Phoenix Museum of Art, the Skirkanich Hall at the University of Pennsylvania (where I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friend Pranav as he did important neuroscience work while I read shitty novels) among others.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
A rarity in architecture - a female-male partnership where the two partners are unmarried, and where the female partner is the senior partner, Sejima and Nishizawa were the first male-female duo to winner the Pritzker (like most things, the Pritzker had been remarkably sexist throughout its history, most notably in 1991 when Robert Venturi, who collaborated with his incredibile wife, Denise Scott Brown, on nearly everything was given the award but Brown was not). Sejima and Nishizawa, through their firm, SANAA, are best known in the US for the Glass Pavillion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and New York’s New museum of Contemporary Art in the Bowery.
Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro
Though around for a long time, the married duo of Diller and Scofidio only gained renown in 1999 when they were awarded a MacArthur, and, together with their associate, Renfro, who they then made a partner, only gained prominence in the public consciousness when the middle portion of the High Line, that charming urban park in the west side of Manhattan originating from around 14th street, extending through Chelsea and culminating around 34th Street near the Javits Center, was completed. Their transformation of Lincoln Center, most noted for the Illumination Lawn atop the Lincoln restaurant pavilion, was also a noted highlight.
Snohetta
Snohetta are a Norwegian collective whose work repudiate the Ayn Randian contention of architecture as the discipline of the lone genius (hey, hey, Howard Roark). Their ethos - non-hierarchical, wildly democratic, anti-celebrity has not hindered the outfit from designing some of the most remarkable buildings of the late 20th and early 21st century. Their winning design of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, is appreciated only second to the Oslo Opera House - not itself a masterpiece of architecture, with its mixed stylistic metaphors, but nonetheless a triumph in city planning. With its exterior which allows the public to ascend the broad ramps framing the lateral walls, the roof of the opera house becomes not only an extension of the plaza below, but also an observation deck, providing gorgeous views of the city - I looked them up, having never been to Oslo. Filler criticizes Snohetta for basically bending over backwards to win any projects, so much so that at times they change the fundamental nature of their designs. He contrasts this with Koolhaas’ “I’m a genius, take me or leave me” approach which, he notes, has won Koolhaas more projects than it has lost him.
Michael Arad
Finally, there’s Michael Arad, the Israeli-American architect who, at age 34, got to design the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero. Despite the contentious nature of the project, and the fact that so much politicizing went on - so much so that Arad had to change his initial design, Filler still thinks of Arad’s design as a masterpiece, as having an inevitability that is unique to extremely good architecture - he cannot imagine the memorial designed any other way.
April 1, 2025
I love unique buildings, especially the more often than not bizarre design of cultural institutions—museums, concert halls, education buildings, and more. For that reason, I was drawn to Makers of Modern Architecture, the second of a three-part book series about the lives and works of architects who have created significant buildings in this category. I would have enjoyed the book far more had it not been for the caustic comments by the author Martin Filler, a journalist who writes about modern architecture. Filler's biting comments were usually directed towards the buildings of architects or the architects themselves but often were directed towards others, such as artists. In one instance, I had to re-read a sentence Filler had written about Pierre August Renoir three times!
Barne’s Renoirs—the one instance when his [Albert Coombs Barnes, the art collector from Philadelphia] superlative eye failed him—are his collection’s weakest link“. His taste tended toward the artist’s excruciating late female nudes, grotesque creatures with puny craniums and colossal bottoms—wobbly orange-tinted images of flesh so bloated that they seem eerily prophetic of our country’s current pandemic of morbid obesity). Pg 214
This comment is not the only one of its ilk. Despite the frequency of Filler’s snark, I enjoyed learning about architects I hadn’t heard of before, including Eero Saarinen, who designed corporate offices, the famous tulip chair, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and Carlo Scarpa, whom I fell in love with because of his dedication to his craft and his artistic choices of materials. Scarpa's use of glass, for instance, was artful and skilled. Hence, today Scarpa is recognized as a leading Italian glass designer of the twentieth century.
Other architects covered in Makers of Modern Architecture II are Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus, and Renzo Piano. Piano works I am familiar with. He designed the Shard in London, as well as the museum addition, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (BCAM), which I’ve visited on numerous occasions. I think Piano’s addition is well done, and striking. Not surprisingly, Filler didn’t like Piano's design one bit:
The screaming fire engine red he picked for the BCAM’s exterior metalwork looks awful against the pale masonry… Piano’s unconvincing chromatic contrasts come across as no more than a mixed metaphor… The stairway is housed within the scaffold-like, re-painted steel structure Piano has dubbed “the spider,” but which more closely resembles an outsize jungle gym (pp. 169–170).
Filler doesn't say anything positive with regards to Piano or his works. In fact, it’s quite obvious which architects Filler admires and those he doesn’t. Despite Filler’s opinions and emotional comments, the book is a worthy read for anyone interested in architecture. It provides readers with good insight and can act as a springboard for further research.
Barne’s Renoirs—the one instance when his [Albert Coombs Barnes, the art collector from Philadelphia] superlative eye failed him—are his collection’s weakest link“. His taste tended toward the artist’s excruciating late female nudes, grotesque creatures with puny craniums and colossal bottoms—wobbly orange-tinted images of flesh so bloated that they seem eerily prophetic of our country’s current pandemic of morbid obesity). Pg 214
This comment is not the only one of its ilk. Despite the frequency of Filler’s snark, I enjoyed learning about architects I hadn’t heard of before, including Eero Saarinen, who designed corporate offices, the famous tulip chair, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and Carlo Scarpa, whom I fell in love with because of his dedication to his craft and his artistic choices of materials. Scarpa's use of glass, for instance, was artful and skilled. Hence, today Scarpa is recognized as a leading Italian glass designer of the twentieth century.
Other architects covered in Makers of Modern Architecture II are Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus, and Renzo Piano. Piano works I am familiar with. He designed the Shard in London, as well as the museum addition, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (BCAM), which I’ve visited on numerous occasions. I think Piano’s addition is well done, and striking. Not surprisingly, Filler didn’t like Piano's design one bit:
The screaming fire engine red he picked for the BCAM’s exterior metalwork looks awful against the pale masonry… Piano’s unconvincing chromatic contrasts come across as no more than a mixed metaphor… The stairway is housed within the scaffold-like, re-painted steel structure Piano has dubbed “the spider,” but which more closely resembles an outsize jungle gym (pp. 169–170).
Filler doesn't say anything positive with regards to Piano or his works. In fact, it’s quite obvious which architects Filler admires and those he doesn’t. Despite Filler’s opinions and emotional comments, the book is a worthy read for anyone interested in architecture. It provides readers with good insight and can act as a springboard for further research.
July 17, 2020
Out of the three volumes, I think this one is probably the best--I learned more than from the first volume, and by the third volume, things start to get a bit predictable.
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