Louis Kahn and staff at work on a site model of the capitol building of Bangladesh, the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar of 1962–1983 in Dhaka, in his Philadelphia office, May 10, 1964. The most revered architectural educator of his time, he often used students to help develop his designs. Makers of Modern Architecture Volume III Martin Filler NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York Publication of this book was made possible in part by a generous grant from Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown. THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014 www.nyrb.com MAKERS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE VOLUME III Copyright © 2018 by Martin Filler Copyright © 2018 by NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Cover design: Louise Fili Ltd Cover photo: Maya Lin, courtesy of Knoll, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Filler, Martin, 1948– Makers of modern architecture / By Martin Filler.    p. cm.   ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-227-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-59017-227-2 (alk. paper) 1. Architecture, Modern — 20th century. I. Title.  NA680.F46 2007  724'.6—dc22        2007004176 ISBN 978-1-68137-303-4 v1.0 For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 For Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty and for John Richardson Scholars, exemplars, and friends Governor Nelson Rockefeller looking at a model of the World Trade Center with its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, at the New York Hilton Hotel, Manhattan, January 19, 1964; photograph by John Campbell (New York Daily News/Getty Images) Contents Title Page Copyright and More Information ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. Frederick Law Olmsted 2. Antoni Gaudí 3. Frank Lloyd Wright 4. Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte 5. Edwin Lutyens 6. Jan Duiker 7. Albert Speer / Gerdy Troost 8. The Levitt Brothers 9. The New Brutalists 10.  Louis Kahn 11.  Paul Rudolph 12.  Minoru Yamasaki 13.  Lina Bo Bardi 14.  Frei Otto 15.  Frank Gehry 16.  Renzo Piano 17.  David Childs / Santiago Calatrava 18.  Christian de Portzamparc Rafael Viñoly Alexander Gorlin 19.  Maya Lin ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATION CREDITS INDEX Acknowledgments THE DEATH OF Robert Silvers on March 20, 2017, at the age of eighty-seven, brought to an end the career of the greatest literary editor of modern times, and deprived me of the most important figure in my development as a writer. This third collection of my pieces for Bob—fourteen of its nineteen chapters began as articles he commissioned and edited—continues an idea he had in the 1980s when he suggested that I embark on a series of reassessments of major modern architects, both historical masters and contemporary practitioners, which could eventually be assembled into a book. Thus my Makers of Modern Architecture (2007) and Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II (2013) came into being, and our thirty-two-year collaboration culminates with this collection. Bob’s work ethic was the stuff of literary legend. As many of my fellow New York Review contributors attested in the outpouring of tributes prompted by his death, Bob’s fearsome mental acuity stayed astonishingly intact until the very end. Well into old age he could exhaust successive teams of young assistants during his prodigious weekend marathons, edit copy with flabbergasting speed and laser-like incisiveness, and come back to the office after a dinner party or a night at the opera and resume his labors until the small hours of the morning. But it was in the concluding weeks of his life that Bob’s superhuman dedication to one all-consuming task—putting out the next issue (a total of 1,127 in his fifty- four years as editor)—assumed heroic proportions. Early in 2017 he edited my last two pieces for him, on the redevelopment of New York’s World Trade Center site (chapter 17) and, finally, Louis Kahn (chapter 10), even though he was emotionally shattered and very ill following his return to New York after the death in Switzerland of his beloved companion of four decades, Grace Dudley. This devoted couple now lie in Lausanne’s verdant Cimetière du Bois-de-Vaux. A large part of Bob’s genius stemmed from his ability to personalize the editorial process to a degree I have never experienced with anyone else. Employing a technique that I and others have likened to the patient/therapist transference in psychoanalysis—an odd analogy, perhaps, given the amount of editorial space he gave over the years to one famously outspoken critic of Freud —Bob would patiently, expansively, and insightfully talk his contributors through the topic at hand (he knew a very great deal about everything) and draw from us thoughts we were not yet fully conscious that we held. Those exhilarating consultations on a Sunday afternoon—when I usually would hear from him—rank among the peak experiences of my life. (My wife has said that she always knew when I was talking to Bob on the telephone because my voice went up one octave and I spoke very loudly.) But far from trying to impose his own point of view, Bob was intent on motivating us to think at our sharpest, write at our clearest, and produce what he knew could be our best, even if we were not so sure. In time Bob became so synonymous with the Review that it was increasingly difficult to imagine its existence without him. The extent to which my colleagues shared this apprehension became clear to me at a gathering after his memorial at the New York Public Library, when a fellow contributor forlornly said to me, “I don’t know who to write for now.” To my surprise I found myself instantly replying, “Well, I do, because even though he’s not going to be reading it, I will always write for Bob.” This was the first realization I’d had that what I call my Inner Bob did not depend on his being alive, and that I would be able to go on without him, wrenching though his death has been. Rather than encouraging a personality cult—despite the intense devotion of his writers—what now seems evident to me is that Bob methodically built an institution that would not only survive him but could thrive after he was gone if the high standards he set were maintained. Here principal credit must go to the Review’s publisher since 1984, Rea Hederman, whom Bob designated the executor of his estate, which added further to his burden as he steered the paper through an unprecedentedly difficult period, to say nothing of an even darker phase in our nation’s history. However, the steadfastness Rea demonstrated throughout this dreaded transition came as no surprise to me, given the calm resolve he manifested in the five months following August 2014, when the Review and I were sued for libel by Zaha Hadid over an article in which I mistakenly claimed, because of a fact- checking lapse, that a large number of workers had died on the construction site of a project of hers that had not yet begun to be built, for which we quickly issued a retraction and an apology. Throughout this difficult episode and the tsunami of unwelcome publicity it unleashed, Rea extended to me without hesitation the full legal representation of the Review’s law firm, Satterlee Stephens Burke & Burke. The partner in charge of our case, Mark A. Fowler, Esq., was a wise and judicious presence throughout, and a source of sound advice on matters large and small. (My friend and fellow writer Michael Z. Wise had gallantly offered to organize a legal defense fund on my behalf, but under the circumstances it was not needed.) To Rea’s wife, Angela Hederman, I owe a debt of gratitude for her having suggested, in 2006, that a compendium of my essays from the preceding two decades would make a worthwhile addition to the New York Review Collections, published by New York Review Books. That imprint’s editor and the Review’s deputy editor, Michael Shae, has once again been an ideal partner in reshaping these essays, most of which he helped edit in their original format. Michael’s importance to the Review since he arrived there in 1994 cannot be overstated. Apart from his highly developed editorial skills, superb taste, and tact comparable to Bob’s in dealing with authors, his temperamental equanimity is exceptional, as is his characteristic self-effacement. Not long ago he excised, without comment, a phrase in one of the pieces included here that would have been an enormous gaffe had it gone into print. But when I thanked him profusely for saving me, he replied, “This is what we do.” Also repeating her much-valued contributions to the earlier volumes is Louise Fili, whose original dust jacket design has proven remarkably adaptable to later installments in this series, just as Borden Elniff’s classic typographic design pleases me whenever I open one of these books. I have again been lucky to have Alaina Taylor conduct the photographic research. Working with a relatively small budget, she has wrought small miracles of resourcefulness in finding the perfect image for each building I wanted to illustrate. And I am honored to have had my author’s photo taken by Brigitte Lacombe, one of today’s foremost portrait artists, whose work I have greatly admired. Parts of four chapters (on Jan Duiker, Frei Otto, Renzo Piano, and Alexander Gorlin) were originally written for the NYR Daily and edited by Hugh Eakin, who began overseeing that online feature of the Review in 2009. His colleague and fellow senior editor, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, was a frequent participant in bringing those pieces to publication. To them and to the Review’s digital editorial director, Matthew Howard, I am immensely grateful for helping to present my writing to the larger readership afforded by electronic and social media. A source of understandable anxiety among the Review’s contributors was how their offerings would be received by its new editor, Ian Buruma, who, with commendable bravery, in 2017 accepted Rea Hederman’s offer to succeed such a formidable predecessor. I was therefore pleased and relieved by Ian’s positive response to the first of my pieces to be edited under his tenure (chapter 12, on the Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki), especially because of his expertise in East Asian culture. I am not alone among the Review’s contributors in feeling that the paper again resides in eminently qualified hands. Two chapters of this book—on Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano—resulted from an unforgettable trip that my wife and I made to Paris in the fall of 2014 as the guests of our close friends Robert and Meryl Meltzer. Bob’s sudden death in April 2017 was a huge loss to all who knew him as well as to the world of art