GIFT BOOKS 1985 : Architecture

Just as there is a wide variety of styles of buildings and landscapes, so is there this holiday season a wide variety of books about architecture and design, from scholarly studies dutifully footnoted to popular surveys sumptuously illustrated. All offer insights into how man has shaped and misshaped the world about him.

Most ambitious and engrossing in its sweep through time and urban settings is Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History by Mark Girouard (Yale University: $30; 397 pp.). In a breezy style, Girouard examines select cities at critical times in their development, beginning with an opulent Constantinople in the Middle Ages and concluding 10 centuries later with a frenetic Los Angeles. Included is an upstart Venice, an ambitious Florence, an avaricious Amsterdam, a proud Paris, a burgeoning New York, all at their apogee. Though the emphasis is more on economic development than on its architectural consequences, the tour, aided by some 300 illustrations, offers fascinating glimpses of the emergence through history of that ultimate of designs, the city.

Design on a smaller scale and for a particular purpose is examined in Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day by Michael Forsyth, (MIT: $30; 371 pp.). In an attractively designed and illustrated text and displaying a critical ear as well as eye, Forsyth explores how space in which music is played has been shaped over the years to accommodate changing tastes, styles, instruments, voices, compositions, social mores and sound itself. An interesting and attractive study that should engage both the music lover and architect.

Also focused on the history of buildings for a particular purpose is Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning by Carol Lerselle Krinsky, (MIT: $50; 457 pp.). Examined in exacting detail and aided by a wealth of illustrations are a wide variety of synagogues, and how, because of shifting political and religious prejudices against the Jews through the centuries, they differ from churches and mosques, and each other, and how they fared. Most of the accounts of significant individual synagogues end sadly with their destruction by the Nazis or their closing by the Soviets. A solid piece of sympathetic scholarship.

Rigorous detailing marks Leonardo, Architect by Carlo Pedretti (Rizzoli: $75; 363 pp.), which explores the genius Da Vinci applied to such projects as town planning, building designs, construction methods, engineering problems, military fortifications, interior decorating and landscaping. Unfortunately, the text as translated from the Italian by Sue Brill is somewhat dense--this is no popular history, but a thoroughly documented scholarly review interpreting Leonardo’s classic “Codex Atlanticus,” replete with drawings and marginal sketches. But those drawings and sketches are absorbing and Pedretti’s comments helpful in revealing an immortal genius.

Not geniuses but certainly talented and influential were the brothers Robert and James Adam, who in the late 18th Century dominated architecture in England to the point where the delicate, decorative style they championed became known as the Adams style. Their development is reviewed with insight and illustrations in Robert and James Adam: The Men and the Style by Joseph and Anne Rykwert (Rizzoli: $25; 222 pp., paperback). Complementing the effort is a well detailed and modestly noted Designs for Castles and Country Villas by Robert & James Adam, compiled by Alistair Rowan (Rizzoli: $65; 160 pp.).

Eighteenth-Century England also was marked by innovations in landscape design, with formal gardens giving way to a more natural and pastoral style. Leading this shift was Lancelot (Capability) Brown. His life, times and significant projects are sympathetically explored and illustrated in Capability Brown and the Eighteenth Century English Landscape by Roger Turner (Rizzoli: $19.95; 184 pp.). One formal garden that perseveres in all its glory is Versailles. Versailles Gardens: Sculpture and Mythology, text and photographs by Jacques Girard (Vendome: $50; 299 pp.) is a sensuous view in 264 color photographs of the statues and fountains that grace the chateau’s manicured landscape.

Because of the benign climate, some of the world’s more notable gardens have taken shape in Southern California, particularly during the flush 1920s. One of the more prominent landscapers during those times was A. E. Hanson, who tells his own story in An Arcadian Landscape: The California Gardens of A.E. Hanson, 1920-1932, edited by David Gebhard and Sheila Lynds (Hennessey + Ingalls, Santa Monica: $22.50; 102 pp., paperback).

High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design, compiled and introduced by Lisa Phillips (Summit: $35; 212 pp.) serves as the catalogue for an ambitious exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York City surveying a range of notably crafted objects, from chairs to Cuisinarts, in a range of styles, from Art Nouveau to High Tech and beyond. The exhibit closes in February of next year, but the richly illustrated catalogue composed of a series of individualistic essays examining with a critical eye the evolution of style from 1900 to the present should become a valued, selective history.

Style is very much the substance of The Architecture of Mario Botta (Rizzoli: $45, hardcover; $29.95, paperback; 232 pp.) and Ricardo Bofill, Taller De Arquitectura (Rizzoli: $50, hardcover; $35, paperback; 232 pp.), two sparkling, if uncritical, monographs. Both have strained introductions by Christian Norberg-Schulz and are exquisitely illustrated by the photography of Yukio Futagawa, who also served as editor. Both architects produce designs that sit upon the landscape like set pieces. Botta’s style is sturdy and singular, while Bofill’s is monumental, with his larger projects containing an overwhelming kitsch classicism. Futagawa’s photographs display well the raw power of the completed projects of these two leading European architects.

But photographs can be misleading when studying architecture. Next to actually visiting the projects, the best way to understand them is through their plans. That is exactly what is offered in a modest, straightforward manner in Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: Houses 1900-1945, edited by David Dunster, (Rizzoli: $14.95; 103 pp., paperback). In contrast, quite slapdash and disappointing is Cross Currents of American Architecture, edited by Andreas Papadakis (St. Martin’s: $14.95; 88 pp., paperback), which is adapted from presentations made at a gathering of the Royal Institute of British Architects. With a few exceptions, the presentations by the architects as compiled within the book are quite flimsy. Helping to salvage the effort somewhat is an insightful introductory essay by Charles Jencks.

Jencks’ own efforts at design are on view in his Toward a Symbolic Architecture: The Thematic House (Rizzoli: $50; 224 pp.). Aided by photographs by Richard Bryant, Jencks extols the need for an expressive, personal architectural language, using in particular his own homes in Los Angeles and London as vivid illustrations. The result is entertaining and provocative, a rare and welcome mix in architectural expositions these days.

What marks modern architecture has made on Europe is lightly surveyed in The Faber Guide to Twentieth Century Architecture; Britain and Northern Europe by Lance Knobel (Faber & Faber: $29.95; 198 pp., paperback). Good for quick references, but little else.

Architects usually have difficulty explaining their own work and design philosophy. That is why most welcome is American Architecture Now II by Barbaralee Diamonstein (Rizzoli: $25; 300 pp., paperback, illustrated). An expert interviewer, Diamonstein manages to prompt some of the more accomplished and controversial design personalities to talk about their work and the drift of architecture today. The discussions are revealing, if self-serving, and should engage those concerned with the shaping of our land and city scapes.

How one city was shaped is explored, indeed exalted, in Frozen Music: A History of Portland Architecture by Gideon Bosker and Lena Lencek (Oregon Historical Society: $39.95; 348 pp.). As noted in the introduction, Portland, a city that prides itself in its individualism, has been the testing ground over the years for a number of singular designs by a host of imaginative architects. The result is a city with an inviting sense of place and pride and a book that explains and celebrates it.