Customer Reviews

Berthold Lubetkin

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This monograph has the clarity that characterized the long career of a legendary modernist who left the Soviet Union as a young man and settled in London in the early 1930s. There he designed the celebrated Penguin Pool and other enlightened zoo buildings (animals were more ready to embrace progressive ideas than humans), the controversial Highpoint apartment blocks, a model health center, and some exemplary social housing.

Idealistic and rational, Lubetkin was anything but dourÑthough he was often constrained by meager municipal budgets. Few architects matched his brilliance in turning staircases into spatial adventures, or have used ramps as well as he did for the penguins. And few would have had the wit to respond to public criticism of austerity in the first Highpoint as he did by placing Greek caryatids under the entry canopy of the second block, thus enraging his humorless peers. Lubetkin was one of many brilliant east European ˇmigrˇs who brought civilization to the backward West, and he is aptly celebrated here in a spirited text, a foreword by Richard Meier, and handsome new photographs.