In a personal tour of modern architecture and the colorful,
eccentric, clannish men (all men) - mostly displaced Europeans -
responsible for it, Blake (Curator for Architecture and Industrial
Design/Museum of Modern Art; Form Follows Fiasco, 1977, etc. - not
reviewed) recovers the energy, vision, and dedication that he says
characterized the profession in the decades following WW II. Born
in Germany, educated in England, Blake acquired his credentials in
the conservative tradition of the University of Pennsylvania, under
the tutelage of the puckish Louis Kahn. Sent on tour by
Architectural Forum after WW II, he met the century's moat
influential architectural and design talents: Frank Lloyd Wright,
Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Buckminster
Fuller, Philip Johnson, et al. Living in Manhattan, Blake also met
artists and photographers, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Pier Mondrian, and Alexey Brodovitch, art
director for Harper's Bazaar. The author conveys the creative heat,
high temperament, and inevitable politics that prevailed at
luncheons with these artists and in their experimental houses on
Long Island and in Connecticut, where the best and brightest argued
that architects could offer social solutions to poverty,
overpopulation, and fascism, and that architecture was responsible
for the quality of the environment, even the future of mankind. But
in 1963, laments Blake, idealism turned to careerism when, in order
to satisfy a client, the redesigned Pan Am building was allowed to
deface the Manhattan skyline. Gradually, says the author, more and
more good people began to do bad work for the people who would pay
the bills, and - in place of the silent, unassuming purity of the
past - there arose a generation of"postmodern poseurs" and "massive
outpourings of gobbledygook." Blake's writing, like the
architecture he admires, is simple, functional, humane, and
profound, restoring with clarity and conviction the "First
Principles" of modernism - which he celebrates in the conclusion of
this powerful and outspoken book. (Kirkus Reviews)
For more than half a century, Peter Blake has lived in the
mainstream of contemporary architecture and art. As writer,
magazine editor, critic, and practicing architect, he has numbered
among his friends and acquaintances (and occasionally enemies)
virtually all of the major figures of modern architecture, and a
good many famous artists as well. In this crisp and lively memoir,
he brings them and the time he shared with them vividly and
memorably to life. The anecdotes are memorable."
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