Josef Albers

Anni Albers

Nicholas Fox Weber

Martin Filler

The most comprehensive book on the furniture, textiles and other works of two of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century. Featuring the many innovative objects that the couple designed while teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany and after their move to the United States in 1933, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century design.

Designs for Living

Josef + Anni Albers

In the first volume of "Makers of Modern Architecture" (2007), Martin Filler examined the emergence of that revolutionary new form of building and explored its aesthetic, social, and spiritual aspirations through illuminating studies of some of its most important practitioners, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to, in our own time, Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava. Now, in "Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II," Filler continues his investigations into the building art, beginning with the historical eclecticism of McKim, Mead, and White, best remembered today for New York City's demolished Pennsylvania Station. He surveys the seemingly inexhaustible flow of new books about Wright and Le Corbusier, and continues his commentaries on Piano's museum buildings with an essay focused on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles. There are less well known subjects here too, from the Frankfurt urban planner Ernst May to Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. Filler judges Edward Durell Stone--the architect of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York City, and the Kennedy Center in Washington--to have been "a middling product of his times," however personally interesting he may have been. And he looks back at James Stirling, who in the 1970s and 1980s was "a veritable rock star of the profession," responsible for what Filler considers some of the very few worthwhile postmodernist buildings.

From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry

Makers of Modern Architecture

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 Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas

Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II

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.

From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin

Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III

Axel Hütte

After midnight, as America's cities gradually fall asleep, Axel Hutte comes alive. From the window of his hotel room on the upper floors of high-rises, he surveys the nighttime cityscapes of Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston: the black silhouettes of buildings in front of a dark sky, rows of street lights, dots of color from neon signs, here and there a bright window. Big cities never sleep, there is no such thing as utter darkness, and stars only rarely have a chance to gain the upper hand against neon and nightlife."

After Midnight

In the first volume of Makers of Modern Architecture (2007), Martin Filler examined the emergence of that revolutionary new form of building and explored its aesthetic, social, and spiritual aspirations through illuminating studies of some of its most important practitioners, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to, in our own time, Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava. Now, in Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II, Filler continues his investigations into the building art, beginning with the historical eclecticism of McKim, Mead, and White, best remembered today for New York City’s demolished Pennsylvania Station. He surveys the seemingly inexhaustible flow of new books about Wright and Le Corbusier, and continues his commentaries on Piano’s museum buildings with an essay focused on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles. There are less well known subjects here too, from the Frankfurt urban planner Ernst May to Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. Filler judges Edward Durell Stone—the architect of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York City, and the Kennedy Center in Washington—to have been “a middling product of his times,” however personally interesting he may have been. And he looks back at James Stirling, who in the 1970s and 1980s was “a veritable rock star of the profession,” responsible for what Filler considers some of the very few worthwhile postmodernist buildings. The essays collected here are not entirely historical, however. Filler also focuses on some of the most recent projects to have attracted critical and popular attention both in the United States and abroad, including Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building in Beijing and Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum in Athens. He argues that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s New Museum in New York City is “one of those rare, clarifying works of architecture that makes most recent buildings of the same sort look suddenly ridiculous.” He calls Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s brilliant reimagining of the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia “a latter-day miracle...a virtually unimprovable setting” for its art. He finds Michael Arad’s September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero “a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.” And he argues that Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and their work revitalizing the High Line and Lincoln Center in New York make them today’s “shrewdest yet most sympathetic enhancers of the American metropolis.” Filler remains, in these nineteen essays, a shrewd observer of the pressures on architects and their projects—money, politics, social expectations, even the weight of their own reputations. But his focus is always on the buildings themselves, on their sincerity and directness, on their form and their function, on their capacity to bring delight to the human landscape.

Martin Filler

About

Books

Join the club