Architectural Record, September 2002, p.87.
Structures
of Our Time:
31
Buildings that Changed
Modern Life
by Roger Shepherd.
New York: McGraw-Hill (an Architectural Record Book), 2002, 244 pages,
$45.
Building a book around the winners of a particular awards program is rarely a good idea. The result is almost always formulaic, repetitive: And the next winner is . . . Yawn.
oStructures of Our Time is a delightful exception. Ostensibly a collection of the 31 winners of the American Institute of Architects' annual 25 Year Award, the book is really a quirky, episodic look at Modern architecture from 1930 to 1970 (the period from which the featured buildings date). The person doing the looking is Roger Shepherd, who teaches at the Parsons School of Design in New York City and designed ARCHITECTURAL RECORD's Web site.
oAs Shepherd admits in his introduction, "The spaces between 31 buildings as disparate as these are vast indeed' " Shepherd fills these gaps with a fascinating array of sidebars on, for instance, Le Corbusier's famous book Vers Une Architecture, Lewis Mumford's writings, iconic films such as Metropolis and Things to Come, women at the Cranbrook Academy, and projects like the Pan Am Building that haven't won any awards lately. He shows us film stills, magazine covers, cartoons, sketches, and museum catalogues, in addition to the expected photographs of buildings.
oShepherd, who designed the book himself, presents several layers of information on nearly every page: a running text, a vertical sidebar, and photo captions. The feel of the book is packed, sometimes a bit crowded. But it's lots of fun to skip from the story of Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery to an aside on Bucky Fuller's use of geometry, or to detour from Eero Saarinen's Dulles Airport to Alvar Aalto's Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair. Occasionally, these side trips seem a little forced or arbitrary (gotta mention Adolph Loos and CIAM), but they show an impressive level of research (quotes from Wright on Mies facing ones from Mies on Wright, or a photo of Michelangelo's stair to the Medici Library in Florence above one of Kahn's stair at the Philips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire).
oThe cumulative effect of all this material is to wipe away any institutional flavor to the presentation of 31 award winners. Shepherd wisely steered clear of the awards program's structure (one year's winner followed by the next year's) and organized the buildings into eight themes: Rockefeller Center and Clarence Stein's Baldwin Hills Village, for example, fit into a chapter on "The Garden in the City;" and Belluschi's Equitable Savings and Loan, Mies's 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, Bunshaft's Lever House, and Mies's Seagram Building share a section called "A Sense of Proportion." What could have been simply a "greatest hits" collection of buildings has been cleverly shaped into one man's view of modern architecture and the culture that surrounds it.
Clifford A. Pearson
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