Customer Reviews

William L. Price, Arts and Crafts to Modern Design

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William Price is indeed an overlooked architect. While I'm hesistant to call him a genius, his work has a breadth seldom seen in the work of his contemporaries. He was one of the last of the Philadelphia architects to come from a background of manual training rather than an academic background, but clearly he was able to apply the lessons of contemporary practice learned from books, and stretch into new areas of the Arts and Crafts movement and advanced design in reinforced concrete.

The author spends an inordinate amount of time in the book describing how Philadelphia, with a strong heritage of innovative industrial design is left behind in the architectural world due to an academic bias of the press based in New York and Boston. While this is important to Price's reputation, it has little to do with his actual work. The prose in the book is repititious, reading as a series of loosely related lectures rather than a single thesis, and the book design does not help the reader.

The illustrations, largely drawn from the firm's archive now held by the author, are very well produced, but could have been supplemented by more new photography. A significant number of Price's buildings do survive, and color photography would bring out the great qualities of material, color, and texture that were so important to his work.

In summary, a book on Price was long overdue, but one would have hoped that it would focus more on the great qualities of his architecture.