The Houston Chronicle has a review of Martin Filler’s recent book Makers of Modern Architecture — a fun, occasionally wicked, survey of some the major architects of the 20th Century.
The book is a collection of the Filler’s essays from the New York Review of Books and they are characteristic of the NYRB: intelligent, witty, opinionated and potentially infuriating. As the reviewer put it:
But for those seeking a brilliant if potted guide to modern architecture, Filler fills the bill. His book bristles with bracing insights, incisive judgments and wicked lines. Filler may not have a sustained analysis, but he has a thesis, one that speaks to the incoherence at the heart of Modern and Postmodern architecture.
For all of its good qualities (and they are legion), it is a collection of articles; essentially profiles of 17 architects, beginning with Louis Sullivan and ending with Santiago Calatrava. The profiles of individual architects largely stand alone, there is no attempt to tie their collective careers into an arc, or to follow a theme through successive decades. As Filler writes in the introduction: “this book is not a history of Modern architecture, but rather a sequence of cultural and aesthitic studies of some leading figures in the building art active during the leate-nineteenth through the early-twenty-first centuries”.
Of course, if you’ve ever wondered, “who the hell is this Ray Eames guy, and why is he a she?”, then this might be the book for you.
If you are interested in reading Filler’s current criticism, his review of SANAA’s new Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan can be read on NYRB’s website.