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USA: Modern Architectures in History by Gwendolyn
Wright
Reaktion Books, 2007
Paperback, 272 pages
Tackling the history of modern architecture
in America -- over 140 years of it -- in under 300 pages
is no easy task. Yet it is one that architecture professor
and TV personality Gwendolyn
Wright pulls off extremely well in this thorough, concise
and often critical look at buildings and their architects
from the reconstruction to today.
Wright realizes that history is not
what it used to be, especially in terms of architecture.
It is not a collection of buildings cut off from their context,
only illustrated by dates and formal attributes; it is an
ongoing project that acknowledges the effects of external
factors, be it social and political issues, cultural trends
or modernity's impact on daily life. This stance is evident
in the way Wright structures the seven chronological, yet
thematic chapters: places of work, places of living and
public places. This separation holds up even to the chapter
on the present, where one might think that mixed-use buildings
would gray the boundaries. But Wright looks at how buildings
are used more than the typologies or monikers that
supposedly make them easier to understand and label. This
social view, if you will, is commendable for approaching
buildings' functions not only in terms of the ones given
by the clients and immediately addressed by the architects,
but also in terms of the urban context and how the various
buildings interact and function on this larger level. An
example of this is Wright's colorful description of a Portman
building (almost any one would seem to work, though she's
describing Detroit's Renaissance Center), where she contends
he "created two architectural and urban realms, one
inside and carefully package, the other outside and left
to decline."
This quote clearly illustrates Wright's
critical faculties, sharp yet also tempered by a 20/20 hindsight.
Like other views back in history, Wright is able to see
the faults in Modernism and its successors in more than
formal terms, but she does not get bogged down in the negative.
The opposite is found especially in the examples presented
throughout (a relatively small sampling, given the brevity
of the book). Alongside the obvious icons by the likes of
Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Louis I. Kahn
are lesser known gems, like Marquis & Stoller's St.
Francis Square in San Francisco (1960-61) and Roloff,
Bailey, Bozalis, Dickinson's State
Capitol Bank in Oklahoma City (1963). Perhaps the best
reads in this great book are at the beginnings of each chapter,
when Wright situates the forthcoming places of work, living
and play but also flexes her critical muscles, free from
building descriptions and the like. The three-pronged approach
conceptually allows one to read the book in three more parallel
ways (only housing, for example) but it is most rewarding
cover to cover.
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