Archinect - News

Win a copy of Sandfuture, Justin Beal's revealing biography of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki

2022-06-23T17:43:00-04:00

Admirers of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki in search of a hot beach read this summer look no further! We’re giving away a copy of Justin Beal’s engrossing title Sandfuture, recently published by The MIT Press, wherein the prolific career and perplexing obscurity of the late Japanese designer is threaded across 256 pages to an eventual conclusion that asks several essential questions about architectural history, the art market, and changing face of the city in a technically precise novelistic tone.

By avoiding a simple shot-for-shot retelling of the different formative events and pivotal moments comprising the arc of Yamasaki’s still-debated five-decade-long career, Sandfuture builds from the scrapheap of a bygone era into an accurate reflection on contemporary life in post-9/11 New York City, beginning with the author’s own retelling of the infrastructure damage that occurred during Hurricane Sandy.

Image: The Century City Plaza in Los Angeles (courtesy of Walter P. ...

The Man in the Glass House: new Philip Johnson biography traces the architect's Fascist past

2018-12-17T18:37:00-05:00

In “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s brisk, clear-eyed new biography of Johnson, we are asked to contemplate why the impresario of twentieth-century architecture descended into such a morass of far-right politics—and how, given the depths to which he fell, he managed to clamber his way not just out of it, but to the top. [...] Johnson managed to abjure his past and, on the march toward an exceptionally successful career, leave it behind.

The New Yorker reviews the new Philip Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House by architecture critic and professor Mark Lamster, and examines how Johnson eagerly embraced Fascism before WWII and still rose to great fame as America's iconic 20th-century architect.

"Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American as successful as Johnson who indulged a love for Fascism as ardently and as openly," writes Nikil Saval in his The New Yorker piece. "His design for Father Coughlin’s rally had been inspired by his tours of Italian Fascist architecture—though the white stage was drywall, it was meant to look like marble—and, critically, by the 'febrile excitement' that attended his visit to a National Socialist youth event in Potsdam, in 1932."

Untangling Louis Kahn's life and work

2017-04-24T12:38:00-04:00

It is one of history’s cruelties that Louis Kahn is almost better known for his unconventional domestic arrangements than for his architecture. Kahn gave us a remarkable string of masterpieces that includes the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum, and yet he was one of those shambling geniuses whose life was a mess of contradictions. While his commissions took him around the world, he managed to maintain three separate families at home in Philadelphia.

"He had a reputation for blowing deadlines and budgets, testing the patience of clients. No one was surprised to learn after his death in 1974 that his firm was deep in debt. The turmoil of his life came to overshadow his accomplishments."

The author, Inga Saffron, reviews You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser, a new biography/monograph on the renowned architect. "Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick is easily the most complete narrative of Kahn’s life and career, magnificently researched and gracefully written," she writes.

Win two memoirs from Adolf Loos' family

2014-06-27T18:56:00-04:00

Time for another book giveaway! We've got two great titles from DoppelHouse Press. The first is the first English edition of Adolf Loos, A Private Portrait by Claire Beck Loos, who was the last wife of Austrian modern architect Adolf Loos. The 140-page biography was originally published in German in 1936 to help pay for Loos' tombstone.

The second title is Escape Home, Rebuilding a Life After the Anschluss, a memoir about Vienna-born architectural designer and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Charles Paterson, who was the nephew of Claire Loos. Charles co-wrote the family memoir with his daughter Carrie Paterson.

For a chance to win both titles, fill out this survey by Wednesday, July 2nd. Two winners will be selected at random. Good luck!

Read on for more about each book:

Adolf Loos, A Private Portrait

"Lively and often humorous vignettes provide 'Snapshots' of the last years of Loos’ life (1929-1933), and reveal the personality and philosophy that helped shape Modern architecture in Vienn...