Paulo Mendes da Rocha: Fifty Years
Edited by Rosa Artigas, text by Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Rizzoli, 368 pages, $85
A master of subtle design seduction and winner of the 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Sao Paulo-based architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha can make steel and concrete dance with the grace of prima ballerinas. Geared primarily to a professional and scholarly audience, this collection presents an intelligent overview of his work from 1957 to 2007, including a dazzling plaza canopy in Sao Paulo and an exquisitely renovated chapel in the Brazilian coastal city of Recife. It also explores the architect’s ideas through interviews and commentaries, and they fairly crackle with common sense. Sample: “[A]rchitecture is aimed at doing rather than seeing, fulfilling rather than simply shocking.” If you want to see how Mendes da Rocha masterfully unites the technical and the humanistic but can’t afford a plane ticket to Brazil, this book will be the next best thing.
Julius Shulman: Modernism Rediscovered
By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Owen Edwards, Philip Ethington and Peter Loughrey
Taschen, three volumes, 1,008 pages, $300
Any collection that costs this much and weighs in at roughly 30 pounds would seem to be an exercise in megalomania, but that’s not the case with this tribute to celebrated photographer Julius Shulman, which spans the years 1939 to 1981. His pictures brilliantly convey the design essence of mid-century Southern California Modernism, not only capturing the relationship of these buildings to the landscape but also suggesting how people lived in them. Publisher Benedikt Taschen has painstakingly culled the images, which portray buildings by Richard Neutra, the famous Case Study houses published in Arts & Architecture magazine, Palm Springs getaways and houses on Malibu Beach. Shulman’s ability to transform three-dimensional space to the two dimensions of the printed page is so captivating that the three-volume behemoth somehow manages to be a page turner.
Auditorium
By Edward R. Garczynski
The Prairie Avenue Bookshop, 222 pages, $85
Wilbert Hasbrouck, longtime co-proprietor of Chicago’s Prairie Avenue Bookshop, has faithfully reproduced this exhaustive, insightful study of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building, the Chicago wonder that combined a hotel, office building and opera house within its single, stately envelope. First published in 1890 after the building’s completion, the book examines everything from foundations to furnishings in minute detail. Yet it has broader appeal, offering line drawings, for example, that portray the horse-drawn carriages that once cruised South Michigan Avenue. Edward Garczynski can be faulted for failing to note architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s influence on the Auditorium, but he still reminds us why this building put Chicago on the map: a stunning synthesis of Roman grandeur on the outside and American iron framing within that prefigured the glories of the skyscraper.
Ross Barney Architects: Process +Projects
Introduction by Martha Thorne
Images Publishing, 128 pages, $65
This handsome monograph devoted to the work of Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney spans 25 projects, nearly all of which, including the Oklahoma City Federal Building that replaced the one destroyed by terrorists, were sponsored by public agencies. That makes Barney’s catalog unique among today’s architectural highfliers, who tend to work more for private clients than public ones. But what truly distinguishes these projects, which range from the flaglike Glendale Heights Post Office of 1989 to the soon-to-open Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation synagogue in Evanston, is the architect’s attention to site, user needs and, despite the often-meager budgets she confronts, enduring quality. The color photographs effectively chart Barney’s evolution from graphic Postmodernism to a simpler, sophisticated Modernism, and help demonstrate her broader significance in uplifting the public realm.
Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959
By Jane King Hession and Debra Pickrel, foreword by Mike Wallace
Gibbs Smith, 159 pages, $29.95
Knowing a gold mine when it sees one, the publishing industry keeps churning out Frank Lloyd Wright books. This one makes no major revelations but is still a well-told tale, exploring Wright’s interaction with the city he professed to hate but actually seemed to love. The authors (Jane King Hession is president of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy board, and Debra Pickrel is a former board member) take us into Wright’s custom-designed, gold-walled suite at the Plaza Hotel, chronicle his unsuccessful stab at mass-market home furnishings, recount his appearances on the then-young medium of television and chronicle his encounters with celebrities like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, for whom he designed an unbuilt house. The book puts Wright’s New York years into perspective, portraying him and the spiraling Guggenheim Museum that brought him to New York as predecessors of today’s architectural stars and their knock-your-eyes-out creations.
Toward an Architecture
By Le Corbusier, introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen, translated by John Goodman
Getty Research Institute, 360 pages, $50, $24.95 (paper)
The Getty Research Institute has brought out this new translation of this hugely influential 1923 text, which provocatively argued for junking historical styles and embracing the realities of modern life. The author, the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, found those realities compellingly expressed in the industrialized, engineer-designed forms of planes, ocean liners, automobiles and, believe it or not, Midwestern grain silos. Bursting with passion, wit and aphorisms — “The house is a machine for living in” — this seminal polemic is well worth reading (or rereading) for Le Corbusier’s incisive analysis of early 20th Century architecture and his equally wrong-headed prescriptions for city planning, which helped give us sterile, anti-urban towers sitting alone in parks. The new translation corrects the title of earlier English editions, which wrongly called the book “Towards a New Architecture.” And Jean-Louis Cohen’s scholarly introduction sheds fresh light on what exactly Le Corbuiser was up to when he juxtaposed pictures of the Parthenon and modern roadsters on the book’s lively pages.
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature
By Douglas Farr, foreword by Andres Duany
Wiley, 304 pages, $75
Chicago architect Douglas Farr is no Le Corbusier — Who is? — yet his thoughtful new book is propelled by the same sort of visionary energy and desire to integrate architecture, city planning and nature for a better way of life. Here’s the twist: Whereas Le Corbusier celebrated the car, Farr fingers it as a prime factor in creating today’s sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs and all the lifestyle woes, like rising levels of obesity, they’ve supposedly wrought. While that’s a familiar rant from the New Urbanist architects who call for compact, walkable communities, Farr wisely goes beyond them, urging a grand integration of the New Urbanism and the fledgling green building movement. Such a synthesis, he says, will help rid us of the contradictions of the green Wal-Mart to which people drive 30 miles, wasting as much energy as the building saves. The book offers numerous case studies and gets credit for practicing what it preaches: It’s printed on 100 percent recycled paper.
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bkamin@tribune.com
