Book Reviews
Archigram: Architecture Without
Architecture
SIMON SADLER
The MIT Press, 2005
242 pages, illustrated
$35.00 (paper)
It is not immediately obvious that Archigram’s
architectural legacy, which is in some ways slight,
deserves to be documented in a book. The slight-
ness is hinted at in the paradoxical title of Simon
Sadler’s book Archigram: Architecture Without
Architecture, an allusion to Bernard Rudolfsky’s
Architecture Without Architects of 1964, about
vernacular architecture. However, Sadler’s treat-
ment leaves one in no doubt that the exercise was
worthwhile. He writes beautifully and persuasively.
It sounds as if the Archigram group was hedonistic
and high spirited, with a flair for self-promotion;
but if that were the whole story, then we would not
want to hear about it now. What Sadler shows is
that, whether by luck or judgment, their work
connected with important cultural developments
and was a compelling assertion that the way
forward for architecture would involve dealing with
new technologies and people with newly uninhib-
ited attitudes to the pursuit of pleasure.The book is
carefully researched and properly documented but
never weighed down by extraneous commentary. It
is a real aid to understanding, especially useful for
students who know about the 1960s only as
a remote historical era, but fascinating for those
who already know about the ideas because there is
also material about the connections between people
and other projects that were realized, such as the
Centre Pompidou in Paris. What Archigram did was
to focus attention on a particular range of concerns
that were not seen by all as the legitimate concerns
of architecture. They made technology look cool and
desirable. In doing this, they paved the way for the
British architects of the ‘‘high-tech’’ tendency, who
tended to be less ‘‘cool’’ and more ‘‘nerdy,’’ and who
translated the aspirations into commercially viable
versions, which were less extreme, less exciting, and
less desirable as images—but were built.
The graphic images produced by the
Archigram group during the 1960s seemed to be
more science fiction than architecture. They
represented ideas about aspects of living, especially
ways in which new technology could make life more
pleasurable. Often the technology did not really
exist. For example, there is a design by Michael
Webb from 1967 that shows a ‘‘suitaloon’’ in
action. It is presented as a sequence of images in
which a man and a woman dressed in water-cooled
space suits with antennas meet one another. The
man is modeled on Michelangelo’s David, here
called ‘‘Dave.’’ Their suits coalesce to wrap both of
them together, pressed flesh to flesh. In a modern
science-fiction film using seamless special effects,
we could see this happening without it challenging
our imaginations at all. As a proposition to issue to
a building contractor, it would still—two
generations later—present problems. It still does
not look like architecture, but Archigram’s central
concern was never the way buildings looked, it was
Journal of Architectural Education,
pp. 88–95 ª 2006 ACSA
how people might live. The characteristic graphics
are—unusually for architectural illustrations—
dominated by people, typically cut out of
advertisements and stuck to the page. The original
artwork often looks crude in an engagingly
homemade way, but when reproduced (as was
intended), the image becomes seamless and slick. It
is the images that are the basis of Archigram’s
reputation, which has proved to be surprisingly
durable. The images continue to circulate and still
look fresh, which cannot be said of many of the
buildings produced at the same time. The
Archigram project that came closest to being
actualized was an entertainments center in Monte
Carlo, with places to plug headphones into the
grass lawn to listen to music and periscopes for
people beneath to look through to see what was
happening. Now that we have personal music
systems and web-cams, the machinery looks old-
fashioned; had the project been realized, it would
now look quaint, or else it would have been refitted
and refurbished. The collages still look good.
There is a side of Archigram’s achievement
that was accurately predictive, and their ‘‘pop’’
version of architecture’s culture now looks much
more mainstream than it did in the 1960s, when
aspirant architects’ principal role-models were Mies
and Le Corbusier. If Archigram seemed out of date
in the 1980s, they look less so now that some of the
ideas have been consolidated in the mainstream,
even to the point of being taught in the
universities. The sexual stereotyping in the images
dates them, but the fusion of high and pop culture
now seems normal. The technologies that looked
futuristic then have either been superseded or still
look impossible (the suitaloon). Nevertheless, the
images, produced with stencils, scissors, and rotring
pens, still have some power to provoke in our age
where digital media are routine. Archigram’s
floating world is a place of dreams, which are never
so compelling when they are retold in the cold light
of day; but now that we spend so much time in
book reviews 88
front of computer screens, these dreams seem
substantial enough.
Andrew Ballantyne is professor of Architecture at
the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His most
recent book is Architecture Theory: A Reader in
Philosophy and Culture (Continuum, 2005).
The Sixties: Montréal Thinks Big
ANDRÉ LORTIE
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004
205 pages, illustrated with 10 additional color
plates by Olivo Barbieri
$55.00 CAD (paper)
The Canadian Centre for Architecture mounted the
exhibit The Sixties: Montréal Thinks Big just two
years shy of the 40th anniversary of Expo 67—an
event that, for many, is the apotheosis of Montréal in
the 1960s. Designed and curated by Montréal-born
André Lortie, a professor at the Ecole d’architecture
de Normandie, the show reveals the privileged role
that architecture played in the emergence of the
modern metropolis of Montréal. Against a backdrop
of radical local and global change, Lortie unfolds the
complex story of a defining decade.
Along with selections from the Canadian
Centre for Architecture’s vast archive of models,
drawings, and photographs, the exhibition gathers
material from a vast array of sources. Engineering
drawings, municipal reports, and promotional
material afford a snapshot of the mindset of
planners and architects from this period. The
generous inclusion of popular print, television, and
film media creates a compelling view of the social
and cultural forces that shaped the
contemporary city. The catalogue, edited by Lortie,
includes a collection of remarkable aerial
photographs by Olivo Barbieri, an introduction by
André Lortie, and a chapter each by the editor and
by sociologist Marcel Fournier. The last chapter
89 book reviews
consists of an abridged transcription of a round
table discussion between Michael Sorkin and
Jean-Louis Cohen.
The exhibit opens with a snapshot of Montréal
facing radical transformation from a city addled by
three hundred years of ‘‘ad hoc’’ growth to
a metropolis seduced by the vision of modern,
rational planning. As the dominant Canadian city
during the postwar boom, Montréal anticipated
a growth of 2.5 million inhabitants over the ensuing
two decades. Lortie contrasts the 1958 film Au Bout
de ma Rue (directed by Louis-Géorges Carrier)
about a boy’s sojourn from the poor residential
neighborhood of Le Plateau through the industrial
sector of the city to the docks with Hans
Blumenfeld’s highly abstract, mega-scale plans for
Montréal and vast regions surrounding it. The
juxtaposition of Carrier’s poignant narrative of
quotidian urban life against Blumenfeld’s
star-shaped, galactic-sized diagrams is striking.
The autoroutes that would eventually
1. Hydro-Québec Headquarters Building under construction. (Photo
by Studio Jac-Guy; Gaston Gagnier, Architect; October 1960;
Silver gelatin print, 20.5  25.5 cm. ª Archives Hydro-Québec)
sub-divide the city appear in wildly futuristic
proposal form.
Lortie is careful to chronicle the rise of
Francophone society and new institutions
associated with an emergent political and economic
order. Despite the fact that the overwhelming
majority of Montréalais were French speaking, the
lingua franca of both business and government was
English. La révolution tranquille—‘‘the quiet
revolution’’—that began in the 1940s and
culminated in the sixties, marked an important shift
in the traditional power structure of the city and
larger Québecois society. Its proponents sought to
redress both this linguistic imbalance and the power
held by the Catholic Church. In the accompanying
catalogue, sociologist Marcel Fournier traces the
progress of this campaign in its effort to modernize
Québec by encouraging a shift in power away from
the church to government and institution. The
exhibition demonstrates that this is more than
a mere ‘‘political’’ revolution. Another film, À Saint-
Henri le 5 Séptembre (Hubert Aquin 1962),
narrates this change in a working class
neighborhood in Montréal. The film complements
architectural drawings and models of the
reinvented public institutions of the quiet
revolution such as the Hydro Québec building, the
Maison Radio Canada edifice, and the Complex
Desjardins.
Thinking ‘‘big’’ is indeed the underlying theme
of this exhibition. The newly empowered bureaucrat
sought mega-scale intervention. Montréal became
the testing ground for massive projects intended to
transform (ostensibly) unhealthy and unhygienic
neighborhoods and slums. The city would be
reconfigured with several key blocks or ıˆlots. The
immensity of these ıˆlot projects, such as Place
Bonaventure, Alexis Nihon, and Place Ville Marie,
prompted Reyner Banham to coin the term
Mega-Montréal. Despite the failure and eventual
public critique of many of these mega projects,
Lortie displays the original models and drawings of
these projects in their most optimistic light.
Many contemporaries predicted the disastrous
consequences of such rapid urban change.
Inevitably, the destruction of whole neighborhoods
such as the Faubourg à la Mélasse for projects such
as Maison Radio-Canada or les Habitations
Jeanne-Mance met with serious resistance. For
many, the massive development of that era was the
touchstone for the radical activism of the times. In
his essay, Lortie suggests that the explosives used
by the Front Libération du Québec to bomb
Federalist infrastructure were pilfered from the vast
array of construction sites building these mega
projects. This critique is well documented through
the prose, newspapers, media, and political
cartoonists of the time in both languages.
Especially strong are the photographic essays of
both the destruction of these doomed
neighborhoods and the ensuing counter-cultural
activism such as the Milton Park protests.
Expo 67 plays a surprisingly modest role in the
exhibition, despite the extensive documentation
and cultural memory of this event; Lortie appears to
concur with Sybil Moholy Nagy’s observation that
Expo 67 was but a ‘‘wonderful collection of hats.’’
Only a few of the most avant-guard proposals from
that event are included: familiar projects, such as
Archigram’s Montréal Tower proposal and Safdie’s
Habitat. Lortie highlights a few less well-known
experimental contributions, such as Zvi Heckers’
proposal for a three-dimensional city over the St.
Lawrence river, Roger D’Astous’ Téléphérique, and
Banham’s speculative ‘‘A Home is not a House’’
article for Art in America.
The lack of a broader reading into the
implications of the sixties suggests that Lortie’s
intention was to provide a snapshot of the times
rather than a critical analysis of its impact. An
observer unfamiliar with Montréal’s subsequent
history would glean little indication that within the
first years of the subsequent decade, political
instability and a series of economic blunders, such
as the Olympics of 1976, would send Montréal into
a tail spin from which it is only now recovering. The
long-term consequences of massive inner city
projects would be the legacy of a divided and
partitioned city. The resulting wasteland of the
downtown core of the eighties and nineties,
although alluded to, is not a fully acknowledged
consequence of the sixties. Despite being raised on
the promise of Montréal’s spectacular entry into
modernism, the subsequent generation of
architects has been gradually filling the voids and
recentering the city in a consciously understated
and modest manner. Nevertheless, The Sixties:
Montréal Thinks Big allows us to relive,
unencumbered by the knowledge of its
consequence, the dream of a pivotal epoch.
Patrick Harrop is an assistant professor of
architecture at the University of Manitoba. He was
born and raised in Montréal.
architect and follower of the Prairie School, is best
Case: Hilberseimer/Mies van der Rohe: known in his own discipline. Charles Waldheim—who
Lafayette Park Detroit has written about landscape, terrain, and represen-
CHARLES WALDHEIM, editor tation—has edited a new anthology Hilberseimer/
Mies van der Rohe Lafayette Park Detroit that
Prestel, 2004 illuminates this collaborative relationship and will
144 pages, illustrated make Lafayette Park better known. The book is part
$29.95 (paper) of the Case series from Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design that examines postwar and contemporary
Lafayette Park is an oasis of postwar housing in projects from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Detroit. In a verdant, almost picturesque landscape, The book is part of a larger on-going project
high-rise apartments and row houses stand in involving academics, architects, and preservationists
marked contrast to surrounding desolation. Con- who are recovering postwar architecture and
ceived and built roughly between 1955 and 1963 planning in order to validate a present-day agenda.
by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and This is accomplished through a reexamination and
Alfred Caldwell, it has remained a footnote in the critique of examples of large-scale planning to
Mies literature perhaps because it is a collabora- dispel myths surrounding projects like Pruitt-Igoe,
tive project rather than a singular masterwork. with an aim to move forward with the type of
Hilberseimer’s reputation has not helped either; ambitious public projects that have not been seen
his chillingly rational superblocks and Cold War in this country since the early seventies. In this
planning for atomic Armageddon were seen as the volume, Lafayette Park serves as a foil to the New
nadir of postwar planning. Caldwell, a landscape Urbanism. The book candidly disassembles many
book reviews 90
other myths about postwar architecture and is
operative criticism at its best.
The most remarkable thing about Lafayette
Park is that it worked. Conventional wisdom says it
should not. Paradoxical in so many ways, the project
married seemingly disparate philosophical attitudes.
In her admirable essay, Caroline Constant discusses
how regionalism, decentralized planning, and prairie
terrain helped reconcile Hilberseimer’s objectivity
with Caldwell’s organicism. Hilberseimer’s own ideas
about the evolution of the urban site would have
been an alternative method to the ruthless clearing
of the existing housing that in fact took place.
Still, the planners persisted in pursuing
a utopian social vision of how the citizens of Detroit
could live together in harmony. Janine Debanné
explains that Lafayette Park was a successful
racially mixed community from its inception,
despite race riots and the economic collapse of the
city. Her insights into what it is like to live in
Lafayette Park are accompanied by her own
photographs, which even include a few shots of the
residents. However, sharp differences abound. In
his essay about the project as real estate, resident
Jerry Herron says that for the most part, low-
income African Americans rent in the towers, while
idealistic white professionals own the townhouses.
As board members, they make the decisions about
the communal spaces. Here, an interdisciplinary
approach opens up to subjects—people and real
estate—ignored by most monographic studies.
Mies’s presence hovers over all this. At first
glance, Lafayette Park seems typically ‘‘Miesian.’’
Kent Kleinman shows that the low-rise housing
derives from typical Chicago row houses rather than
Mies’s classic courtyard houses. His dense but
rewarding essay explains how American building
technology had outpaced Mies by the time
Lafayette Park was completed, making the project
somewhat retrograde. Yet, even as the image of
technological efficiency usually associated with
Mies is dispelled, other truisms return. Despite the
emphasis placed upon the collaborative, Robert
91 book reviews
Levit’s eloquent after-foreword returns the focus to
Mies with a discussion of how his Berlin villas and
the picturesque inform Lafayette Park. As usual,
the master gets the final word.
New photographs presented side by side with
original promotional photographs by Hedrich-
Blessing show how Caldwell’s low-budget plantings
have taken the institutional edge off the
architecture. There are photos of interior details,
lobby spaces, and residents; but there are none
depicting living spaces and how they are inhabited.
Such imagery would have helped diffuse the overall
deadpan attitude of much of the representations,
which are beautiful, but too much like
contemporary fine arts photography. Waldheim’s
diagrams of the evolution of the site from ghetto to
model siedlung are meticulous, but the captions are
brief, and the research needs further explication.
Well executed and worth reading, this volume
challenges the myth that public housing and
publicly funded projects failed in the United States.
Scholars should be encouraged by this example to The exhibition Groundswell: Constructing the Con-
investigate other examples of large-scale modernist temporary Landscape took place at the Museum of
housing in this country. Since it pragmatically Modern Art in Spring 2005 and is currently circu-
assesses what worked and what did not, the book lating in the form of a catalogue edited by curator
would be an especially useful primer for a studio on Peter Reed. The exhibition and catalogue present
housing. Most of all, it should serve as an inspiration twenty-three separate projects focused on individ-
for all those who are committed to ambitious ual practitioners and exemplary projects, each
thinking about public housing and urbanism. within a consistent theme of representation.
The idea of a postindustrial landscape or the
Timothy M. Rohan is an assistant professor of
city of removal is the model for Groundswell. It is an
architectural history at the University of
empowering concept for landscape architects as it
Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on
runs contrary to urban theories of radial city growth
postwar architecture and urbanism, particularly the
with decreasing density away from the center. It
work of Paul Rudolph.
asks practitioners to imagine the idea of a city as
a dynamic landscape in which there is growth and
Groundswell: Constructing the decay, to find ways to engage change and allow for
Contemporary Landscape it to be meaningful. Words such as ‘‘remake’’ and
PETER REED, editor ‘‘redefine’’ are often used to describe the work.
Groundswell documents the topics that this
Thames & Hudson, MoMA, 2005 postindustrial city model has produced and, in turn,
168 pages, illustrated the individuals and the offices that have generated
$34.95 (paper) them. The catalogue is organized around four
topics: Designing the Urban Stage, Simulations of
Nature, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Expanding
The Field. Each project is shown in reference to
Humphrey Repton’s ‘‘improvements,’’ in a ‘‘before
and after’’ format. A short text and several full color
images of drawings, models, and on-site photos
illustrate each entry.
But there is another groundswell embedded in
this work. It is based on another city model, urban
ecology. This is a city of multiscaled networks of
symbolic processing, altered everyday practices,
actions and rituals ingrained in material existence,
new forms of civic imagination, and social capital,
which consequently trigger environmental change.
It can be uncovered through an alternate sorting of
the projects using the categories of garden, park,
and open-space system. This parallel groundswell
privileges other processes than individual
practitioners and technologies of representation.
Garden: The Bordeaux Botanical Garden
(France), by Catherine Mosbach, is a research
facility for the study of natural resource
management and biodiversity comprising of
a system of basic modules. Understood as
prototypes or ecological models, they allow an
infinite variety of combinations. Arranged by
growing condition rather than plant family, it is not
the individual plant that is important but the mass
of plants and their density. The circulation system is
extensive and allows the experience of the garden
to thread into its river front in-transition
neighborhood. It is therefore a garden of
biophysical and sociocultural patches that stands
for presence and transparency.
Park: Fresh Kills Lifescape (United States), by
Field Operations, is a 2,220-acre new park,
conceptualized as a layered matrix. The vertical axis
is program, ecology, surfaces, and circulation; the
horizontal axis is time. Embedded in this matrix is
an adaptive layer that allows the project to emerge
according to the networked practice of
multidisciplinary team management, including
community outreach, regulatory reviews, design
development, and detail design of smaller subareas.
The park is phased in four stages over thirty years.
It is therefore a multidimensional complex adaptive
system.
Open-space system: The Bradford City Center
Masterplan (England), by Alsop Ltd., is comprised
of two nested grids. The 8  8 City acts as
a polycentric city multiplier, where each of the
sixty-four, one-kilometer squares contains a newly
defined kernel of experience, event, or activity. The
2  2 Center consists of four public spaces: The
Bowl, which is situated at the convergence of two
valleys and locates three new neighborhood areas
derived from local conditions; The Channel; The
Market; and The Valley. The master plan is being
implemented simultaneously at multiple levels, by
the city, institutions, and individuals. It is an urban
design model that organizes strategic building
demolition as well as a metaphorical, digital, and
material construction of a new citywide open-space
system.
Imagine these three four-dimensional projects
as a city. A nested grid open space system is
constructed as a layered matrix park, and
embedded within this is a modular garden. The
garden orientates urban actors, at intimate
moments, to comprehend emerging ecologies and
place of the city in the global production of space.
The open-space system is seeded over time and
continuously edited and negotiated as individuals
transform neighborhoods incrementally in support
of emergent heterogeneity. The city sponsors
change through building demolition and public
programming. This is the groundswell at work in the
world as well as in the experience of wandering
through the exhibition and reading the catalogue.
The landscape project now works at multiple scales,
using time as the most inspired material. This is not
linear time as in ‘before and after’ but as in a spiral,
with feedback loops from top down and bottom up.
This rereading is important because there have
been innovations in drawing temporal processes
and conceptual modeling as well as a rethinking of
method. The location of boundaries in Groundswell
between individual practitioners using similar
technologies of representation impairs our
recognition of this change. The landscape project
has undergone a significant transition from
a mostly three-dimensional to a fully four-
dimensional imagination. Time now has a figural
presence; temporal processes are privileged in
a clear break from the picturesque. This has
occurred in response to shifting collective ideas of
a city, from a radial city to a city of removal. This
extremely creative drag on or pull of the
imagination of the place of the practitioner in the
world is the groundswell represented in the
exhibition. The parallel groundswell of urban
ecology, a playful sorting and nesting of the work,
is based on my expectations for a less self-
conscious groundswell as well as a more serious
desire for operational ecological monuments.
Victoria Marshall is both a landscape architect and
an urban designer. She teaches at Columbia
University and the University of Toronto and is the
founder of TILL, a Hoboken NJ–based landscape
design and urban design practice.
Form Follows Libido: Architecture and
Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic
Culture
SYLVIA LAVIN
The MIT Press, 2005
150 pages, illustrated
$30.00 (cloth)
In Sylvia Lavin’s new book, Richard Neutra’s writ-
ings and postwar work in southern California are
employed to argue for a new, speculative, inter-
pretation of his architecture, a more personal one
than previous discussions of his work, which were
largely based in historical, aesthetic, or technical
frameworks. Neutra, himself, might have enjoyed
book reviews 92

this approach. In numerous writings, the best
known of which is Survival Through Design (1954),
he advocated a sensory and psychological approach
to the design of the environment that was at odds
with, for example, Le Corbusier’s polemic, Towards
a New Architecture (1927), which touted the
supremacy of engineered forms and the twin
standards of function and structure.
This new approach speculates on themes of
birth, rebirth, and Neutra’s expression of his own
erotic obsessions. The author makes it clear that her
interest in this subject spans a period that includes
the birth of her two children; it also spans a period
in which architectural theorists have been exploring
issues based on gender and sexuality as well as
other cultural and philosophical movements outside
the limits of traditional architectural histories. One
of the legacies of the feminist movement that
flourished in the 1970s, that the personal is
political, clearly influenced studies of architecture
that focused on the relationships between client
93 book reviews
and architect, such as Alice T. Friedman’s Women
and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and
Architectural History (1998), which Lavin draws on
for her discussion of Neutra and his client,
Constance Perkins, for whom he designed a house
in Pasadena (1954). But while Friedman’s work
focuses on the largely unacknowledged influence of
women and gay culture in the design of specific,
often iconic, modern houses, Lavin argues that
Neutra’s approach to design was heavily influenced
by his own interpretation of psychoanalytic
principles.
Lavin gives us a clear understanding of the
history of psychoanalysis, in general, and its
penetration into our larger culture in postwar
America. She makes a convincing case for Neutra’s
strong interest in the subject. Neutra, born in 1892,
frequented Sigmund Freud’s apartment in Vienna
and was a friend of his son Ernst; he also read and
wrote extensively about psychoanalytic theory,
arguing that a house and the broader environment
could—and should—have an influence on
inhabitants and their psychological well-being.
However, as Lavin develops this argument, linking
specific aspects of Neutra’s residential architecture
—the mitered glass corners and extended spider
legs that were ubiquitous in his work of this period
— to Otto Rank’s theory of the birth trauma, she
strains credibility, speculating that Neutra thought
of the space between the glazing and the spider
legs as a realization of Rank’s birth canal, which
would affect a psychological transformation in
a house’s occupants akin to a rebirth. Lavin also
finds a direct connection between Wilhelm Reich’s
theories and Neutra’s intentions, claiming Neutra ’s
houses as orgone boxes, which is similarly
unconvincing. Lavin’s assertion that a seven-page
autobiography by Constance Perkins along with
one of the detailed questionnaires Neutra’s clients
were made to fill out was like a psychoanalysis will
be met with skepticism by anyone who has gone
through the lengthy and demanding psychoanalytic
process.
Part of the problem with these arguments is
that Lavin fails to demonstrate what she refers to as
the erotic charge or libidinous character of the
mitered glass corners and spider legs. She also
ascribes the invention of these and other
architectural features of the postwar houses,
including the large sliding glass walls/doors in the
living spaces, to Neutra; they are not original to his
work, which weakens her assertion that Neutra’s
oft-repeated details were expressions of his
psychoanalytic intent. Lavin often repeats an
argument that Neutra’s postwar glass houses were
radically—and psychologically—different from
pre-war houses by Le Corbusier and Mies van der
Rohe, who, she claims, designed sealed glass boxes
quite separate from exterior space. However, in the
Villa Savoye (1928–1930), the walls of the living
space are sliding glass panels that open to the roof
terrace, emphasizing the continuity between the
two spaces. Closer to home, R.M. Schindler’s own
house on Kings Road (1922), in which Neutra and
his family lived from 1925 to 1930, featured sliding
canvas doors opening to the garden and spider legs
in the sleeping baskets on the roof. Although
Neutra certainly developed his very recognizable
combination of these details, he could not be said
to have invented any of them.
For the readers of Grey Room and
Assemblage, in which earlier versions of parts of
this book appeared, Lavin’s argument will,
undoubtedly, make fascinating reading. For those
looking for Neutra’s architecture, previous texts on
the architects’ work will be more useful. The
illustrations are not well chosen; plans, in particular,
would have helped to illustrate the discussions of
the Perkins house and the Garden Grove
Community Church (1962). The conclusion, citing
the failure of the promise of psychoanalysis in both
the culture in general and in Neutra’s work to
solve the psychological problems of modern house
inhabitants, somewhat refreshingly tells us that
what survives, after all, in Neutra’s work, is design,
in particular, a focus on mood or affective qualities
in his spaces that distinguish them from other
modernist houses. But Schindler wrote about mood
as early as 1912 in ‘‘Modern Architecture: A
Program;’’ his architecture, along with Frank Lloyd
Wright’s and Erich Mendelsohn’s (Neutra worked
for both in the early 1920s) clearly influenced
Neutra’s work at least as much as his interest in
psychoanalysis. Form follows many paths and, in
the end, design does survive precisely because what
form follows most of all is the form that preceded it.
Judith Sheine is chair and professor of the
Architecture Department at Cal Poly Pomona and
the author of R.M. Schindler.
The Architecture of Modern Italy
TERRY KIRK
Volume I: The Challenge of Tradition 1750–1900,
280 pages, illustrated
Volume II: Visions of Utopia, 1900–present, 280
pages, illustrated
Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
$35.00/volume (cloth)
A synthetic, comprehensive overview that estab-
lishes links between Italy’s classical and modern
cultures promises great pedagogical value to those
of us who expose design students to modern Italian
architecture and culture. In The Architecture of
Modern Italy, Terry Kirk concurs with Eco, Tafuri,
Ghirardo, Etlin, Ciucci, and Doordan in recognizing
the dynamic relationship between tradition and
innovation that has for centuries characterized
Italy’s architectural magnificence. He seeks to dis-
tinguish his method for recording history by
defining ‘‘a nonpolemical evaluation of cultural
traditions within the context of the modern Italian
political state’’ (Vols. I & II, p. 11). He aims, it
seems, to provide a balanced evaluation and new
perspective on well-studied works, while challeng-
ing conventional notions of modernity.
The author begins his ambitious 250-year
summary with Piranesi and eighteenth-century
adaptations to the venerable Pantheon to
symbolize the dialectics of old and new
architecture. He states: ‘‘The process of redefining
the interaction of the present to the past, of
contemporary creativity in an historical context, is
the core of the problem of modern architecture in
Italy and the guiding theme of this study’’ (Vol. I, p.
18). In the first volume, he draws attention to
underrecognized architecture in Trieste and Padua,
shopping gallerias, rail stations, theaters, Rome’s
monumental sculpture of late nineteenth-century,
and the works of Giuseppe Japelli, Alessandro
Antonelli, and Guglielmo Calderini. When Kirk’s
formal and experiential descriptions of architecture
and urban design prevail over historic data and
political speculation, his writing is most engaging.
However, his argument for a gradually
emerging modern architecture born slowly of Italian
classical culture gets lost between volumes. The
author rejects periodic benchmarks and opposes
any definition of modernity that relies on ‘‘contrary
terms of rupture and rapid innovation’’ (Vols. I & II,
p. 10). He rebuffs avant-garde and northern
European functionalist tenets as authorities of
Italian modernity and insists that progressive design
has not been successfully theorized by Italians, who
are too often fraught with political biases. Yet, he
stops short of offering an alternative to assess form
and meaning in modern Italy or to establish viable
connections to its classical roots. One could more
easily accept his lack of discussion of the Casa
Elettrica at Monza, prewar Milan Triennale
installations, Gardella’s Tuberculosis clinic in
Alessandria, Terragni’s Danteum, Carlo Scarpa’s
Querini Stampalia, Figini and Pollini’s residences or
any examples of minor experimental architecture
and interiors if he had developed a convincing
thesis to connect modern Italian architecture with
the classical and eclectic past. Analysis in Volume II
of the Futurist legacy and the Rationalist’s prolific
output is bogged down by the author’s revisionist
disputes and his oversimplification of Fascist
politics. He credits only Ernesto Nathan Rogers for
promoting Italian tradition and vernacular models
during the postwar crisis, notions previously
fostered by Pagano, while ignoring their critical
development by northern Rationalists in the MSA
(Il Movimento di Studi per l’Architettura). He notes
the influential writings of Aldo Rossi but overlooks
the contributions of Manfredo Tafuri. Several
paragraphs are dedicated to the design works of
Paolo Portoghesi, Gino Valle, Mario Botta, and
Manfredi Nicoletti, while no mention is made of
Giancarlo De Carlo, whose postwar neo-realist
housing, urban design, and university structures in
Urbino, the journal Spazio & Societa, and extensive
teaching are fundamental to Italian postwar
architecture. Archizoom and Superstudio are cited
for ‘‘their absurd objects and vacuous vistas of
book reviews 94
‘negative utopias’ in cynical intellectual
provocation against a society that no longer cared
for architects’’ (Vol. II, p. 207); yet, the prolific
careers of founders Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano
Toraldo di Francia go unmentioned. Any informed
reader is left to wonder about the contributions of
Alessandro Anselmi, Francesco Cellini, Francesco
Venezia, and GRAU, while the author instead
writes: ‘‘the 1960s littered the landscape with
mediocrity, the 1980s added pretension. . .. Growth
in most Italian cities from the 1960s to the 1980s
was so myopic as to have obliterated any trace of
good collective space’’ (Vol. II, p. 229).
Too often generalizations and unsubstantiated
conclusions detract from otherwise solid
scholarship. For example, recording the
development of Via Nazionale in Rome, the author
states: ‘‘much of this second-rate architecture
made first-rate urbanism’’ (Vol. I, p. 227). In
Volume II, he lauds the work of Ernesto Basile, the
architect for the Rome Parliament, whose
intervention attached to Bernini’s Montecitorio
ignored surrounding site geometries and is
detached from the malformed space it forced into
being. The reader then is not convinced that Basile
‘‘understood, unlike his more strident modern
colleagues, that he did not have to destroy
historical heritage in order to renew’’ (Vol. II, p. 21).
A section devoted to ‘‘Socialized Public Housing’’
during the first two decades of the twentieth
95 book reviews
century begins by claiming: ‘‘The social program
inherent in European modernism was most fruitfully
expressed in Italy in low-income housing’’ (Vol. II,
p. 26), while the subsequent argument denies that
assertion. Nicoletti’s 1958 judicial administration
building and reuse of Moretti’s sublime early
modern Fencing Academy to accommodate high-
security mafia trials, both located at Foro Italico
outside the historic center, are used to symbolize an
alleged impenetrability of late-twentieth century
Italian society.
The absence of illustrations challenges
readers’ comprehension of chosen examples, and
the few plans that are included are too small to
read. (Four building plans appear in Volume I, three
in Volume II.) The urban plans are illegible. Several
factual and editing errors weaken credibility and
create confusion, while the lack of footnotes
suggests that Kirk intended to produce a textbook
rather than an original scholarly study. Correction is
certainly necessary regarding Franca Helg, who was
Franco Albini’s long time professional partner, but
not his wife, as the author states.
In Volume II, ‘‘Visions of Utopia, 1900-
present,’’ the international significance of modern
Italian architecture receives consideration; yet the
Venice Biennale is not discussed, nor does the
author assess the contributions of numerous
important Italians who have built outside of Italy,
such as Piccinato, Bo Bardi, Gregotti, Grassi, Rossi,
or Aulenti. Instead, recent monumental works in
progress in Rome by outsiders Meier, Hadid, and
Fuksas (whose EUR Centro Congressi proposal is
more Dutch than Roman) are the figures that
constitute for the author ‘‘a renewed cosmopolitan
outlook on architecture’’ (Vol. II, p. 243). He
identifies a politician, the previous mayor of Rome
who commissioned Meier’s Museo dell’ Ara Pacis,
rather than a scholar or designer as the foremost
figure in contemporary Italian architecture and
urbanism.
Kirk’s informed discussion of rarely cited
nineteenth-century architecture, especially that
which characterized Italy as a nation state
beginning in 1870, invites interest in monumental
expressions leading to the dawn of a new age. He
might have found more support for his argument
for a fluid modernity by considering the built work
of Italian architects at the end of the twentieth
century. In identifying modern Italy with foreign
architects and a former mayor he has ignored the
works of a new generation, those most influenced
by the very history he sought to trace, who have
already left their mark on the Italian landscape.
Kay Bea Jones is an associate professor at the
Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State
University. Her upcoming book on the architecture
of Franco Albini is titled Suspending Modernity.