A History of Architecture/American Architecture Now II
Highwater, Jamake
The book has been lovingly edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, who acknowledges help from many of her friends9 He wonders why she didn't collect and publish some of the pieces in...
...and excludes all mention of the landmark stone architecture of Sardinia...
...Marking time & place A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE SETTINGS AND RITUALS Spiro Kostof O~ord University, $45, $29.95 paper, 788 pp...
...I am also surprised to discover that Kostof's bibliography for his chapter on Neolithic Europe does not include the essential work of Colin Renfrew (Before Civilization, etc...
...But these interviews do tell us "far more about what architecture means at this instant in our history than many books that tackle such an issue head on...
...Rather than looking at art history with the vision of those who live it, they tend ethnocentricly to make their own paradigms the measure of all experience, past and present...
...Clearly they did not create Teotihuacan...
...This new man would not remember the history of architecture...
...I share many of Paul Goldberger's views of Diamonstein's exceptional book...
...At present many architects are interested in a recovery of those lessons...
...It is a look -- to use Kostof's phrase -- "at buildings as palpable images of the values and aspirations of the societies that produced them...
...We are entering an unbelievably glorious age of mtlange, eclecticism, random choices, and leadership...
...Then, about A.D...
...The reality of our day is essentially different from what people meant by reality before Einstein, Freud, and Marx...
...516) 423-0499 In 14 March 1986:155...
...But I hope not...
...EARN A MASTERS IN THEOLOGY DURING SUMMER VACATION, INTERNATIONALLY RESPECTED FACULTY AND GUEST SPEAKERS An excellent resident faculty is complemented by outstanding guest lecturers...
...Handsomely produced, expansive and authoritative, containing more than 950 excellent illustrations, A History of Architecture may, indeed, become the standard textbook for college survey courses on architecture...
...They urgently need intellectual experience that challenges their vision and imagination rather than further surrounding them with an arsenal of transient facts that encourages them to ignore conceptual issues...
...For instance, on page 435, Mr...
...Architectural students are often inclined to seek information at the expense of ideas...
...11743 Tel...
...And thus, as mythologist Joseph Campbell has pointed out, they mistake the metaphor for the message9 They mistake the menu for the meal...
...Kostof's highly praised 755-page text I felt that it was a promise largely unfulfilled...
...If only for its best parts, it was worth printing...
...It is just as Emerson said: "The whole of na-, ture is a metaphor of the human mind...
...During the forty or fifty years that the modern movement lasted, in the hope of arriving at that magnificent promised land, we neglected all the lessons of history...
...They also speak of "the necessity for buildings to communicate on a sensual as well as a cerebral level, and of the need to design buildings not as isolated objects but as elements of a larger urban whole...
...Jeumake Hlghwater T HE WORLD changes constantly because our vision of it changes...
...But, unfortunately, When I reached the last page of Mr...
...It was looted and burned, its people were driven off or massacred, and its immense cultural influence ceased...
...Kostof tells us that Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was the "great center of a people called the Toltecs . . . the noblest creation of Middle America until about 600...
...AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE NOW II Barbaralee Diamonstein Rlzzon, $25, 300 pp...
...Though the skyscraper remains the foremost American architectural form and symbol (Helmut Jahn attributes the vitality of U.S...
...particularly when he states in his "Foreword" that "what this book reveals is that architects understand a lot more about their time, their culture, and even about their own designs than they usually let on...
...Yet there is clearly a community of expression among these designers...
...FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES The School offers: Fall, Spring, and Summer-only study options, three and six week summer courses, four day weeks, and day and evening classes...
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...I could praise Spiro Kostof for many accomplishments in A History of Architecture, but my classroom experience indicates that his kind of informative book -- like Janson's art history -- can do more harm than good, by convincing students that they have been given a grasp of the humanities while all they really get is some random information that reinforces their remoteness from the actual experience of art...
...The architects whose words fill the pages of this book constitute an eclectic group, because this is a time without orthodoxy despite a passionate interest in architecture...
...9 300 and 700...
...It is possible, however, that such people have not truly demonstrated a real distinction between fact and metaphor...
...architecture to the skyscraper), the major thrust of the current American architectural scene is marked by a dialogue between the future and the past, the new and the old...
...As Emilio Ambasz says: "Many architects.., are engaged in an operation of recovering the memory of architecture...
...And given its impressive range and inclusiveness and its devotion to facts, there are also a few unfortunate errors which may or may not reflect upon the general accuracy of the book...
...They have simply insisted that their own metaphors are' 'factual...
...Unfortunately, there is a good deal of cardboard in Spiro Kostof's 788-page book...
...Rather than producing a work concerned with concepts and values, Kostof has given us a remarkably complete and intricate -- if somewhat flatfooted -compilation of historical facts, described by his publisher as "a work which will become for architectural history what Janson has been and continues to be for art history...
...Such revolutionary awakenings into new worlds of meaning -- new paradigms -- are simply the most obvious twists and turns of Western philosophical history...
...So more often than not they end up munching on cardboard...
...Therefore, none of the interviews reflects the conviction prevalent in the early days of modernism: the sense that architecture has an absolute and defined social and moral stance...
...We see here a profession deeply aware of the social and historical context in which it works, determined to practice in neither a cultural nor an aesthetic vacuum...
...Such people insist that humanistic thinking is soft and illogical, confusing metaphors with facts...
...But it is not a chatty book about trends...
...Minimum tuition...
...American Architecture Now H makes it clear that today's architects have distinguished themselves from their immediate predecessors by the respect they insist upon giving the same works the modernists of the era of 1900.50 rejected...
...At its best, an exploration of architectural history should tell us something about the marks people make on the ground...
...John Mitchell in The Earth Spirit perfectly focuses upon this intricate relationship between humankind and buildings: "The marks people make on the ground reflect the philosophy of the time 9 . . the groves and temples of Arcadia, the radiating avenues of the imperial center, the neatly ordered municipal garden, and the spoils and effluents of industrial rapacity, are each the product of a certain cosmology, a certain view of the nature of the universe and its relationship to men...
...Emerson summarized this epistemological situation when he said that "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind...
...And the whole is a whole, probably the last we shall see of a much-loved and muchhonored poet...
...The history of architecture," he writes, "should try, before it is done, to look at buildings as palpable images of the values and aspirations of the societies that produced them...
...For further information, call or write: Dr...
...What an exciting promise and what a fascinating sub-title...
...They all speak out of an international context -- insisting upon the importance of history to them...
...It's impossible to pin it down, but it should be the greatest period architecture has ever seen...
...As you know, the modern movement started with the assumption that the evolution of a new man was possible...
...The book has been lovingly edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, who acknowledges help from many of her friends9 He wonders why she didn't collect and publish some of the pieces in her lifetime, but then remembers Robert Lowell's "For Elizabeth Bishop 4": Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase -- unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect...
...Commonweal: 154In fact, most authorities speculate that it was the militant Toltecs who probably destroyed the city...
...In the most critical sense, we do not exist in the same cosmos that people existed in before the era of Copernicus and Galileo, and we do not live in the same world that people lived in before Columbus and the Age of Exploration...
...His prophecy fully captures the essence of our time as it is made visible in our buildings...
...And such combining of innovation and tradition exists, increasingly, not only between different buildings but also within the design of single structures...
...nor a monument of carefully compiled facts...
...In his articulate interview, Philip Johnson surveys the whole of twentieth-century architecture, grasping instantly the relationship between what we build and who we are and what we are becoming...
...Like all elements of culture, architecture makes visible the reality in which we live...
...I also concur with Goldberger's notion that the twentyseven interviews in American Architecture Now H do not tell us in so many words what the present state of architecture is or where the profession is going...
...American Architecture Now H by Barbaralee Diamonstein is a brilliant compilation of interviews with some of the most important architects on the American scene today...
...Just such a purpose seems to impel A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals by Spiro Kostof...
...700, with the invasion of the Chichimec tribes, the great city suddenly declined...
...Teotihuacan flourished between A.D...
...The marks people make on the ground reflect the philosophy of the time...
...The Toltec didn't arrive in the Valley of Mexico until perhaps A.D...
...The Toltecs were one of the Chichimec peoples...
...William Vendley, Associate Dean, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, Long Island, N.Y...
...COSTS THAT AREN'T UNGODLY Rock-bottom room and board on a beautiful campus located a short walk from beaches and fifty minutes from Manhattan...
...There are people who assume that any emphasis upon the experiential nature of art automatically neglects its historical nature...
...It is, we must always remember, a history that the West writes for itself...
...In truth, it is an uneven collection, sometimes sentimental, sometimes raggedly written...
...If Kostof's A History of Architecture delivers less than it promises, another recent book on architecture provides fat more intellectual excitement and artistic insight than its title suggests...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
