Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts belongs to the second wave
of modernists who arrived in the United States from abroad, a group
that includes Kevin Roche and Cesar Pelli among others. Educated at
the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Birkerts worked first with
Eero Saarinen in his now-legendary office in Bloomfield Hills,
Michigan, and later was chief designer for Minoru Yamasaki. At that
time both Saarinen and Yamasaki were developing their distinctive
architectural signatures and building their international renown.
Subsequently Birkerts established his own practice, evolving a
design process and a philosophy with its own original profile. His
approach does not seek a "right style for the job" in the manner of
Saarinen. From the first, Birkerts' work was tied to a program as
well as a particular context -- a place -- to the extent that it
became expressive of the surrounding landscape and accommodating to
the existing vernacular. Birkerts' designs, from the Federal
Reserve Bank in Minneapolis to the Corning Museum of Glass to the
Houston Arts Museum and recently the Latvian National Library,
shows him exploring with ever greater resource and inventiveness
the expressive possibilities of symbol and metaphor. Form, he
believes, expresses function, and does so with its own rich,
meaningful vocabulary. Birkerts uses visual metaphors to link
program, client, and landscape in a resonant solution. His
methodology of using metaphor -- meaning -- as a first principle,
as a generator of design concept, is unusual in the profession, but
it is vitally connected to his Latvian heritage and his family
background as the son of a folklorist and writer. This heritage is
given a new turn here, for the biographical text of the book has
been written by his son, Sven Birkerts, who is a noted literary
critic and author of the influential book The Gutenberg Elegies:
The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. He has also written a
memoir, My Sky Blue Trades which describes at some length his
coming of age struggles with his architect father. Now, years
later, Sven brings his cultural perspectives as well as his family
insights to bear, offering a unique portrait of a life and career.
History and description are enlivened throughout by observations
and reflections on the career -- the destiny -- of this master of
the expressive concept. The book is richly illustrated and
complemented by descriptive assessments of the projects by Martin
Schwartz, who is an architect and writer and who teaches at
Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan.
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