Customer Reviews

Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New York Review Books)

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Martin Filler has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books for the last twenty years. During that time, he produced a series of remarkable essays on the "Giants" of Modern Architecture. "Makers of Modern Architecture" is a compilation of seventeen of those essays. Filler starts with the first Modernists (Sullivan, Wright, Mies, Corbusier) and then moves on to the second (Eames,Kahn, Johnson) and third generation (Gehry, Meier, Foster and Piano) of Modernist architects.

Martin Filler is one of the nation's best architectural critics and this book finds him at the top of his form. With great style, he praises the noteworthy and pillories the cynical. There is an erudition and honesty to his writing that is at times, thrilling. His chapters on Phillip Johnson's opportunism and the political wrangling over the Twin Tower re-construction are especially good. "Makers of Modern Architecture" is criticism at its finest. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed Filler's strong opinions and revelatory biographies of modern architecture's major figures. The book is not without flaw. The omission of a chapter on Walter Gropius surprised me. Two things distracted from the otherwise strong criticism. The first is Filler's choice of flowery language. This choice distracts the reader from the analysis (often because the eyes must roll back into place).

However, Filler's repeated attacks on Philip Johnson's architecture and character were most peculiar and interesting. Filler's bęte noire haunts every chapter of the book. I am not a fan of Johnson's architecture either, but as I read each chapter out of sequence I began to anticipate when Filler would compare some unfavorable characteristic of Architect X to Johnson. A common pattern is X lacked originality, but certainly possessed more than Johnson. This antagonism began to overshadow the criticism. I became more interested in what about Johnson led to Filler's obsessive attacks. Johnson's Nazi sympathies? Johnson's sexual orientation? Johnson's privileged roots? Some unmentioned personal slight?

The book is a nice survey of major architectural figures and their works. In doing so it provides more of a history than an analysis of modern architecture.